Young Independence: What drives Ukip's youth wing?

Earlier this year, a counterintuitive political story caught my eye. The Labour Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna had made an off-the-cuff remark about people who voted for Ukip. Many of their voters, Umunna said, felt disconnected from the wider community because they were unable to perform certain basic tasks on a computer, such as sending an email. Almost instantly, a group of young Ukip activists took it upon themselves to prove him wrong.

The activists used social media to organise a bombardment of electronic missives to the unfortunate Shadow Minister, eventually reaching the point where emails to his address were met only with a notice informing the sender that Umunna's inbox was full. The story was gleefully covered by the Telegraph and the political gossip blog Guido Fawkes. It marked, if not quite a first scalp, then a direct hit for Dan Jukes, an 18 year old political campaigner and Elections Officer for Young Independence (YI)—Ukip's official youth wing—who played a significant role in organising the campaign.

The story was striking not so much for its substance as for the existence of such an organised body of young firebrands in a party more known for its contingent of angry older voters. Shortly after this it emerged that YI's membership had swelled by almost 36 per cent to more than 2,500 between the beginning of March and the middle of June this year. It's an anomalous increase, most likely driven by the burst of attention Ukip garnered during their European election campaign, but membership growth has been strong for the past three years. When YI announced that it would be holding an annual conference in Birmingham, I decided to go along and see what drove people to the organisation, and how its members saw their role within the party.

I get my invite to the conference from Jukes himself, who I meet for a pint of Peroni in a bland Mayfair bar a few weeks beforehand. He is dressed in a starched shirt and a slim green tie with gold spots; his style might be called “clubbable.” His hair is slicked back, shaved short at the sides, and he carries himself rigidly. His expression rarely changes, his eyes fixed on you as you ask him a question or make an observation. He talks with the broad accent of his native Birmingham.

Jukes turned to the party because they reached out to him; Ukip MEPs Roger Helmer and Stuart Agnew came to his college, and he was gripped. "Ukip... was a different way of doing politics,” he says, “actually giving people the power, as opposed to just trying to get back into office.” You can see the appeal for someone who once got so angry in the back of an A Level politics class that he scribbled out a poem—which he later read out in a widely-shared performance at Ukip's 2013 party conference—which asks questions of the leaders of the three main parties like “why do families work damn hard to get paid/While you splash millions on legal aid?” When I ask if he's Ukip's answer to William Hague, he rejects the label: “put it like this; William Hague was a lot better before he actually got a proper role within the mainstream.” He won't be writing any more poems—this work expressed everything he felt it necessary to say.

Unlike some of the party's older voters Jukes didn't turn to Ukip out of a generalised sense of discontent. He's well versed in party policy and cites particular examples among the factors that drew him in to becoming involved. He feels strongly that EU migrants should not have unrestricted access to Britain and its benefits system, for example, and his desire for a “different way of doing politics” is driven in part by his conviction that the Eurosceptic perspective doesn't get a fair hearing in British public life. If these are fairly predictable reasons to support the party, other YI members I speak to cite a variety of topics from a passion for grammar schools to discontent with the EU Common Fisheries Policy (from an animal rights perspective) as the catalyst for their relationship with Ukip. Nobody I speak to for this piece champions Ukip out of nonspecific rage or just to be rebellious. At their most idealistic, many mention a desire to “bring back democracy,” a message the party reinforces. Ukip economic spokesman Steven Woolfe casts the party in the same tradition as the Diggers and the Tolpuddle martyrs in his conference speech.

When I make the trip up to Birmingham for the conference (gloriously, the guard on my train mis-speaks and welcomes us aboard the “oh-eight-twenty-three service to Belgium”) the atmosphere at the event is much like that of my meeting with Jukes. A supporter would say reasonable, a cynic would say clinical. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but it's definitely a world away from the last time I went to a party rally, when leader Nigel Farage gave a tubthumping speech in Portsmouth to a crowd which roared its approval at every turn. Notably, Farage himself is absent here, which may have something to do with Ukip's recent drive to expand its roster of spokespeople outside of the ever-quotable former City trader.

At the YI conference, applause comes regularly but is mostly limited to identical three to five second bursts, which arise simultaneously around the room and stop just as suddenly. The youthful crowd (those I speak to are between 17 and 25, and nobody looks far outside that age bracket apart from visiting party dignitaries and their teams) mostly sits still, silent and observant through all twenty speeches. The boys wear suits, their hair slicked back or brushed down. The girls (who make up about 20 per cent of the crowd) mostly wear sober blouses or pattern dresses. Deputy Chairman Thomas Hoof, 24, speaks proudly of how professional YI has become in the last year or so. He says that prior to this there was a powerful right-libertarian wing of the organisation, mavericks out of line with party policy on issues like gay marriage. They're not around any more, Hoof assures me: “we have no problem with you going and talking to anyone because we know we're a very rounded and balanced bunch.”

And so it proves: the language which members use to describe YI and its purpose is drawn from a party strategist's lexicon. They talk of “engagement” with voters and party members. Several of them mention the effectiveness of sending young people out to canvass for votes: they “play well on the doorstep.” Dan Jukes's speech at the conference focuses specifically on which target seats for the general election YI will be enlisted to help win—Gosport in Hampshire and Thurrock in Essex will both be hit by YI action days in the coming months. I see no evidence, either, of the racism and homophobia of which the wider party is often accused. Jake Painter, 17, a half-Jamaican YI activist from ultra-lefty Islington, says the only racism he's suffered in a political context is from people on the hard left who call him “Uncle Tom” and “Oreo.” A representative from Ukip's Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Questioning (LGBTQ*) wing (yes, that's a thing) gives a speech announcing policies his group will propose for the party's next manifesto, among them revoking the ban on giving blood for men who have had sex with men in the past 12 months.

The day's one moment of high ideology is a speech by Peter Whittle, a writer and broadcaster appointed this March as the party's Culture Spokesman, titled “being British—what's wrong with it?” A fine-boned man wearing electrified hair, thick black glasses and slim-fitting trousers, Whittle outlines a sprawling theory of patriotism. He rails against the elites of his generation, “slaves to guilt about Britain's imperial past,” champions of multiculturalism “whose ideas were shaped in the 60s and 70s.” His young crowd, he says, must not be afraid to carve a new path: “a multi-ethnic society that is unified by pride to be British.” It is difficult to tell what the crowd think of his theorising—they give him only the same standard-issue applause they give everyone else.

There is humour here, too—chatter between speeches involves banter about the previous night's activities, and excited speculation about that evening's planned “Young Independence boat party.” There is a familial atmosphere about YI. When I bring up Sanya-Jeet Thandi, the British Asian former YI activist who announced her departure from a party she came to consider racist with an article in the Guardian, Jukes's last word on the subject is indignation at her betrayal of “a party that looked after her and tried their best.” Perhaps out of a similar sense of loyalty, Thandi declines to be interviewed for this piece, saying she doesn't “want to come across as twisting the knife.”

YI is a group, then, not for loonies, or thugs, but for earnest, rather intense young people with a unilateral view of the world—like much youth politics. There is a slight strangeness about the atmosphere of the conference, but it has nothing to do with any of the individual predilections or views of the attendees. Rather, it is odd, nowadays, to talk to young people whose views fit neatly and apparently comfortably within the confines of a party's—any party's—manifesto. The only moments during the day when I feel uneasy are when I see older Ukip figures grinning at the sight of a packed room of compelling, well-drilled young activists.

Elizabeth Robbins, 18, says she finds talking politics with schoolmates frustrating. Her beliefs have not radically changed, but ever since she attached a Ukip logo to them her compatriots have been much more hostile. “It's so strange to be seen as being radical,” she says, “when what we're asking for... are just standard British values, that have been fought for time and time again.”