Labour or UKIP: Which Party Is Having the Best Existential Crisis?

(Top photos: Andrew Milligan PA Wire/PA Images and Victoria Jones PA Wire/PA Images)

For both Labour and UKIP, things haven't really been going as planned for some time. For different reasons, since the Brexit referendum the two parties have faced divisive leadership contests; embarrassing by-election defeats; and even – in UKIP's case – a fucking fist-fight in the European Parliament.

This week, in the wake of the results from Copeland and Stoke Central, leading figures from both parties dropped fuming, squabbling missives in which they stepped the conflict up a notch by calling out their enemies directly. On Monday, in a post for a website called "Labour Briefing", which I'd probably have heard of if I was the sort of person who went to Momentum meetings, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell accused Corbyn's foes of staging a "soft coup" against Labour's socialist leadership, undermining him at all turns through their allies in the right-wing press. Meanwhile, yesterday, former UKIP leader Nigel Farage wrote a piece for the Daily Telegraph, calling on the party's only elected MP, wonky-faced Clacton libertarian Douglas Carswell, to be expelled from the party, largely on the basis that he 1) doesn't hate immigrants enough. and 2) is persistently rude to Farage.

But which internecine conflict is proving most damaging? I decided to investigate, using as scientific a system as I could improvise.

UKIP:
I know Nigel Farage is technically "the former leader of UKIP", but really this is a bit like if Mark E Smith was suddenly "the former lead singer of The Fall" – Farage is so personally identified with the party, and vice versa, that it's not even clear it can exist without him. It's no normal former leader who can have realistic expectations of his party expelling their only elected MP because said MP chuckled at the idea of him getting a knighthood. In short: at least a good proportion of UKIP's problems can be traced to the fact that Farage has the emotional range of a four-year-old child. Having said that: it has long been UKIP's biggest strength that Farage has the emotional range of a four-year-old child. So, swings and roundabouts (which, on the present analysis, Farage would almost certainly enjoy).

Toxicity: 4/5

Labour:
Remember when Jeremy Corbyn got elected leader and the Labour party were finally going to offer a robust left-wing alternative to the grim, petty injustices of Tory anti-immigrant politics and austerity? Well, for various reasons, that dream's now basically been hollowed out, the imperative of the Labour left no longer being: fight for a better world, but rather: defend Jeremy Corbyn at all costs.

McDonnell's talk of a "soft coup" has already got Corbyn's social media fanbase sharing deranged videos about how his leadership is being undermined by sock puppet Twitter eggs, apparently in the sincere belief that even if this was happening these accounts would have any influence whatsoever. Clearly, something is deeply broken here. That said, the main reason why it has become so broken is that Corbyn's leadership has, since day one, been so embattled that it's hard for his supporters to interpret even the most friendly, constructive criticism as anything other than an attack. The Corbyn personality cult is far from the most toxic thing about Labour.

Toxicity: 3/5

UKIP:
UKIP were hoping that Stoke Central could give them their first "real" MP, i.e. their first MP who didn't start off as an already-sitting Tory defector. This didn't happen, even in the Brexit heartland of the Potteries, and now it's far from clear if UKIP can ever seriously hope to win another parliamentary seat in a FPTP election. Having said that, UKIP has tended to do better in other, let's say, "non-traditional" elections – for instance, they triumphed in what was arguably the party's most significant electoral test with the Brexit result last June. Plus, they still have plenty of MEPs to fall back on, at least until… ah. Yeah, UKIP are probably fucked.

Dimness: 4/5

Labour:
Labour beat UKIP in Stoke – which was good! But they lost in Copeland – which was very bad, since the Tories became the first ruling party to gain a new seat at a normal by-election without loads of weird exceptional circumstances since most MPs had gout. Ever since the Brexit referendum, May's inauguration as Prime Minister, and Labour's botched "hard" coup, the Tories have been completely trouncing Labour in the polls and things are only getting worse. What was perhaps most worrying about the Copeland result is how many former UKIP voters seemed to be switching to the Tories, with pro-Remain Labour voters defecting to the Lib Dems. If UKIP really do cease to be a force in parliamentary elections in the future, and Labour don't get their act together over Europe, they could be facing electoral wipeout.

Dimness: 4/5

UKIP:
Last year during one of their leadership contests, it was reported that the UKIP frontrunner Stephen Woolfe was hospitalised in the European Parliament during an impromptu fistfight with another of the party's MEPs, the appropriately named "Mike Hookem" (although Hookem was later cleared of punching Woolfe). There are crowds of howling, diseased monkeys more disciplined than UKIP are.

Raucousness: 5/5

Labour:
Everyone knows that, barring a few close allies, the Parliamentary Labour Party hates Jeremy Corbyn. But to be honest, they've been kind of quiet recently. That botched summer coup has left them fearful, knowing that most of their own voters hate them, and in response to McDonnell's article the closest thing to actual, public dissent has been a sassy tweet from everyone's favourite normal human sex-haver, Owen Smith. I dunno, maybe they're working up to something, but Labour moderates are all centrists, and centrists are fundamentally cowards.

Raucousness: 2/5

UKIP:
Total chaos and almost complete lack of electoral success notwithstanding, UKIP have basically been de facto running the country for years now, as both the Tories and Labour have cack-handedly attempted to tailor their policies to fit their fear of their voters. UKIP have achieved everything they set out to and more, and no amount of squabbling seems likely to threaten their legacy.

Likelihood: 5/5

Labour:
Since Labour are so ideologically divided, it's hard to really say what would count as "the party" achieving its aims, except perhaps "everyone getting elected and starting to like each other again". In that case, the likelihood of Labour achieving its aims are… basically non-existent. I'm not sure what Labour can really hope for at the moment, to be honest. Everyone getting hit over the head and forgetting that the Brexit referendum ever happened? Clive Lewis suddenly becoming the leader by magic? It's bad, guys.

Likelihood: 1/5

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