NIGEL PAUL FARAGE was a member of the Conservative Party when Margaret Thatcher was its leader. Today, he still looks and sounds a lot like an old-fashioned British Conservative. He wears pin-striped suits during the working week and bright red or yellow trousers on weekends—as many upper-class fashion criminals inexplicably do. He was educated at Dulwich College, a fee-paying private school where he enjoyed cricket and rugby and joined the army cadets.

The son of a stockbroker named Guy Oscar Justus Farage, Nigel (incidentally, a very Tory name) skipped university and went directly into the City of London, where he made his mark as a commodities trader. Since 1999, he has been a member of the European Parliament. He is married to a German, Kirsten Mehr, whom he employs as his secretary, quite legally, with taxpayers’ money. And he is the leader of Britain’s fastest-growing political party, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). His larger-than-life, straight-talking personality is central to UKIP’s success, but, perversely, he is succeeding by attacking nearly everything he once embodied.

He laments Thatcherism’s impact on Britain’s working classes, for example. He criticizes the Tories and the nation’s main newspapers for being dominated by privately educated “toffs.” He grumbles that Britain is led by career politicians, even though he is now a fourth-term member of the European Parliament. He complains about how British industry employs so many foreigners, even though he employs one—his wife—as his personal aide. His party succeeds by pitting itself against London—the city where Nigel Farage made his money and where he was educated. And London is where the explanation of Britain’s complicated UKIP phenomenon must begin.

LONDON IS the British economy’s greatest success story. It is currently living through its second great age. It dominates the United Kingdom in a way that no American city comes close to doing in the United States. It is not just Britain’s political capital like Washington. Or its financial capital like New York. Or its cultural capital like Los Angeles. It is all of these things and more.

Roughly ten million people live in the Greater London Urban Area. People commute from all over Britain and from many parts of Europe to what is now the world’s third most productive city. Some dub London the sixth-biggest city in France due to the number of French expatriates living in Britain’s capital, many of who are fleeing François Hollande’s confiscatory taxes. London accounts for less than one-sixth of Britain’s population, but it contributes a quarter of its tax revenues. The properties found in Elmbridge—a London suburb home to 130,000 people—are worth an estimated £31 billion. That’s more than the value of all of the houses in Greater Glasgow—home to over one million Scots.

The strength of London’s economy is all the more remarkable because just seven years ago it was hit by the financial equivalent of a tsunami. London’s banks were at the center of the global crash. Today, the financial companies headquartered in the Square Mile and in the Docklands are powering the city’s resurgence, contributing to a $71 billion surplus in financial services for the whole UK economy. London is an outstanding example of a wider global trend where great cities such as Istanbul, Shanghai and Mumbai enjoy supercharged growth as they act as magnets for talented, inventive people—from their own countries and from abroad.

But guess what? London is the one part of Britain that UKIP cannot reach. In the May elections to the European Parliament, UKIP topped the poll. It beat Labour, Her Majesty’s official party of opposition, into second place and the ruling Conservatives into third. UKIP did very well in most parts of England, winning 35 percent of electors in the East, for example, and 32 percent in the South West. But in London it could only muster 17 percent of the vote.

Asked to explain why UKIP had done so well across most of the country but relatively poorly in the nation’s capital, Suzanne Evans, one of the party’s principal spokespeople, may have revealed more than she intended. Londoners, she explained, are more “educated, cultured and young” than the rest of Britain. Twitter and social media seized on her candor and quickly presented the average UKIP supporter as stupid, backwards and, well, a little past it. Nigel Farage will not have minded. He feeds on the metropolitan establishment’s contempt for his party. He deploys the victimhood tactics long used by the Left. Where the Left augmented its support by championing victims of sexism, racism and homophobia, Farage builds his base by suggesting that native, patriotic Britons are victims of an establishment that has surrendered the nation to immigrants, rule by Brussels and self-serving political elites.

Although the British media sometimes present UKIP as the party that hates London—its immigration, cultural diversity and youth—it would be more accurate to say that UKIP is the antiglobalization party and London encapsulates the open, free-trading nature of the twenty-first-century economy. Farage is the champion of those people and communities who feel ill served by globalization. People who don’t like immigration. Who don’t like “wars for oil,” as the argument goes, or other overseas interventions. And, just as importantly, people who feel that their traditional views on family life and national identity are under attack from the liberal values that politicians like David Cameron, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Tony Blair all seem to share. Many traditionalist Tories were shocked, for example, when Cameron, the Conservative leader, introduced legislation that ultimately succeeded in legalizing same-sex marriage. While UKIP is definitely an economic phenomenon, it also has important cultural ingredients.

IN DIFFERENT times, a political gap may not have existed for Britain’s equivalent of the Tea Party to emerge, but a constellation of political events has come together to give UKIP its great opportunity. The Conservative Party has been led by David Cameron, a man who does not know the price of milk, to quote one of his own rather disloyal MPs. While the charge may be unfair to Cameron, Britain’s prime minister since 2010, there can be no doubting that he has struggled to connect with poorer Britons. Meanwhile, Labour’s leader, Ed Miliband, also has difficulty reaching the victims of globalization.

This is, perhaps, more surprising, as the working classes have historically been his party’s backbone. But Miliband struggles to close the growing gap between the green, socially liberal elites that lead left-wing parties across the world and the more patriotic, socially conservative voters that politicians such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Australia’s John Howard successfully cultivated. And providing the third ingredient of UKIP’s happy constellation is Britain’s third party, the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems traditionally have been the nation’s party of protest, but under Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s leadership they entered into a coalition government with David Cameron. They can no longer be the party of protest. Even more than the Tories, they are the object of protest.

UKIP, which received just 3 percent of the vote in Britain’s last general election, now picks up anything between 10 and 20 percent in wildly fluctuating opinion polls. In the most recent European Parliament elections, which use proportional representation, it won 28 percent. At the next UK general election, fought under the first-past-the-post system, most experts think it will struggle to win many—if any—seats, but that does not mean it won’t influence the result. Although it is siphoning off votes from all parties, it is winning the lion’s share of its support from the Conservative Party. It is also winning Labour voters whom the Tories need to win a majority and who might have been attracted to a Conservative leader who was more earthy than Cameron. For the first time since the Second World War, the Right in British politics is divided. A strong UKIP result could put Labour and Ed Miliband into 10 Downing Street.

If Labour is elected, Britain will not get the referendum on membership in the European Union that David Cameron has promised for 2017 if he is reelected. A strong UKIP performance, dividing the Right, might therefore delay or even prevent the goal for which Nigel Farage’s party was first formed: An independent Britain. Sovereign. Free. And outside the European Union. Let us travel back to 1993, the year in which UKIP was founded.

UKIP EMERGED emerged at a time when Euroskepticism was beginning to march in British politics. Margaret Thatcher had been ousted as Tory leader and prime minister just three years earlier. She had won three general elections for her party and is still widely regarded as one of the country’s greatest leaders. But she had become unpopular with many big beasts inside her own party because of her growing antipathy toward the European project.

Once an enthusiast for Britain’s membership in what was originally called the European Economic Community, Thatcher had turned against what she had come to see as an emerging superstate. She had wanted to be part of a free-trade area with other European nations. That was what the British people had signed up for when they had been asked to vote to either ratify or reject membership in a 1975 referendum. But Europe had become something very different by the end of the 1980s. It had a parliament, a court and a bureaucracy in Brussels that was always greedy for new powers. Although there was a common market across Europe, it was not a particularly free market. Brussels had become a super-regulator, wrapping industry after industry in red tape. That red tape suited big businesses with big compliance departments, but it was damaging to small, upstart businesses. Thatcher was particularly suspicious of the single-currency project—and rightly so. If some of Europe’s utopian politicians had heeded her warnings, the euro zone’s southern nations might not be enduring youth unemployment rates of 50 percent today.

The facts in the European debate are hotly disputed, but some estimates suggest that three-quarters of all laws affecting the United Kingdom originate from within the European Union, as this deeply political enterprise is now called. 40 percent is probably a more accurate estimate. Whatever the true number, it is still a huge proportion and a proportion that the British people never envisaged when they were asked for their consent in 1975.

Thatcher made her political mission clear in a landmark speech in 1988, delivered in the Belgian city of Bruges. “We have not,” she thundered, “successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level.” She did not just object to Europe taking a socialist turn. She hated the very idea of what she called “a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.” The leader who had fought the unions and the Soviet Union during her early years in power had new enemies in her sights: the big state and a big, antidemocratic European project.

When Europhiles ousted her in November 1990, exploiting unpopularity caused by an economic recession and a controversial tax reform, they hoped to end her attempts to lead the Conservative Party in a Euroskeptic direction. But the successful “regicide” against Thatcher was far from the end of the matter. It was only the beginning. For all of the last twenty-five years, a battle has raged inside the Conservative Party as to what kind of relationship Britain should have with the rest of Europe. In opposing further European integration or even supporting exit from the EU, many Conservatives believe that they are following the orders that Thatcher issued in 1988. Many other skeptics decided, however, that the establishment factions within the Conservative Party that toppled Margaret Thatcher would never allow the Tories to lead Britain out of Europe. Many of those skeptics joined UKIP and to this day believe that the Conservative Party can never be trusted to ensure that Britain becomes an independent, self-governing nation again.

ALTHOUGH EUROPE may be the issue that motivated its earliest supporters, it does not directly explain why UKIP finished first in this May’s European Parliament elections. The secret of UKIP’s growing success is that Nigel Farage has broadened his party’s message. It no longer talks just about Europe. At the end of a TV debate with Nick Clegg, Farage invited viewers to “come and join the people’s army.” He continued: “Let’s topple the establishment who led us to this mess.” By “this mess” he means the global recession, foreign interventions, political corruption and, most of all, large-scale immigration.

The British electorate never endorsed large-scale immigration at any general election, but during Tony Blair’s time at 10 Downing Street a net three million people—equivalent to 5 percent of the population—entered Britain. And despite the current Conservative-led government’s promises to bring numbers under control, net immigration into Britain is still proceeding at a historically unprecedented level of two hundred thousand people per year. Immigration experts predict seventy million people will be living and building upon Britain’s green and pleasant lands by 2030.

Many argue that immigration has brought significant benefits to Britain. London is enjoying its second great age, for example, because of the energetic and highly skilled people from many parts of the world who are working in its creative sector and its financial and information-technology industries. Many of the great brains working in Britain’s universities and teaching hospitals are also immigrants. But there have been significant downsides to immigration as well. Housing prices are rising to record levels, especially in the southeastern parts of England—making ownership unaffordable for many local and young people. Immigration may also partly explain the depressed nature of the wages of lower-skilled people. British employers have little incentive to cooperate with the government’s welfare-to-work programs so long as foreign workers, motivated to cross continents in search for work and therefore certainly motivated to turn up for work at 5 a.m., are ready and available to take the jobs they create.

But whatever the arguments for and against immigration there is one stubborn fact that immigration advocates cannot escape: the British people have never voted for large-scale immigration of the kind that has occurred. Any political party that promised immigration of two or three hundred thousand people per year would not do well at elections. Three-quarters of British voters want net immigration reduced to lower levels. Immigration control was what the Conservative Party vowed to deliver before the last election. While David Cameron and his home secretary, Theresa May, have succeeded in reducing immigration, they have not come close to meeting their promised target. This failure is the number-one policy factor driving UKIP’s progress.

Immigration is in fact the perfect issue for UKIP. First, there is the policy substance: voters disapprove of large numbers of people entering Britain, pushing up housing prices and “stealing our jobs.” Second, there is the antiestablishment dimension: all of the three major political parties have promised to control immigration but once in power were proven to have “lied,” claims Farage. And third, there is the European dimension. So long as Britain is a member of the EU, it does not have control of its borders. Free movement of labor is an integral component of the European single market—negotiated, ironically, by Thatcher herself. Just as any Briton is free to live and work in any other part of the EU, so any Bulgarian, Romanian or Pole is free to come to live and work in the United Kingdom. Any potential limits on immigration into Britain from outside of the EU can be overwhelmed by immigration from inside the EU—especially from its poorer, recession-struck member states. As the only party promising to take Britain out of the EU, UKIP is therefore the only party with a credible policy to control immigration.

OVER TIME, UKIP has devoted more and more of its campaigning efforts to opposing immigration. Sometimes, however, this has led UKIP to appear as anti-immigrant as much as anti-immigration. Although a majority of ethnic-minority Britons as well as white Britons oppose large-scale immigration, UKIP’s sometimes strident emphasis on the issue helps to explain why it is such a white party. 14 percent of Britons come from ethnic minorities, yet a recent collage of hundreds of UKIP members, produced by the party itself, contained not one nonwhite face.

UKIP also opposes gay marriage, wants the foreign-aid budget slashed and takes an even tougher line on welfare payments to the poor than the governing Conservatives. The overall impression that has been created is that UKIP supporters don’t much like modern Britain or people that they do not know. It is in danger of becoming a very traditionalist, even reactionary party. That was not its original intention. UKIP still describes itself as a libertarian party, and in supporting smokers’ rights and opposing state surveillance, for example, it retains some freedom-loving beliefs.

If UKIP is to become a permanent force in British politics, it will need to decide how to resolve this conflict between its libertarian and traditionalist tendencies. If it moves in a libertarian direction, it might alienate the older, more conservative voters that form its current bedrock of support. If it does not become a little more open-minded and reach some of Britain’s “educated, cultured and young” voters, it will struggle to make the parliamentary breakthroughs necessary to really change British politics and secure its founding goal: exit from the European Union.

WHATEVER FUTURE UKIP might carve out for itself, it has already posed huge questions for the mainstream parties. For twenty or more years, much of British politics has become far removed from the concerns of large numbers of voters. Often using campaigning techniques imported from America, the established parties have become adept at targeting swing voters in swing parliamentary seats. As a result, only a few million, largely middle-income voters decide Britain’s government. Half of British parliamentary seats haven’t changed hands since 1970. Nearly one-third have remained in the same party’s control since 1945. Without America’s system of primary elections, most British MPs think they have a seat for life. This has led many of them to become indifferent to their constituents’ concerns. It is a recipe for political stultification. It is certainly a breeding ground for disenfranchisement. The people who need politics most—the people struggling to make ends meet, who run out of money at the start rather than the end of months—are most shut out from the electoral system. UKIP has given them a voice.

Establishment politicians on both sides of the Atlantic can choose to see Britain’s UKIP—or America’s Tea Party, for that matter—as irritants. They can paint them as extremists. They can attempt to defeat them. And it is certainly true that both movements have weaknesses. But the establishments also have their weaknesses. Too many influential Republican politicians grew too close to special interests on Wall Street and to the big-business lobbyists of Washington’s K Street. They came to embody a crony rather than a competitive form of capitalism—let alone a Main Street capitalism rooted in local communities. The result was the Mitt Romney candidacy and the devastating finding that among those who said that whether a candidate “cares about people like me” was a top concern for them, a full 81 percent voted for Barack Obama rather than the Republican nominee.

The British Tories have a similar problem. All of the influential Tories live in London. They imbibe its prosperity, its multiculturalism, its skyline full of cranes, its sexual liberalism and its internationalism. But London—for all of its qualities—is only part of Britain. There is another Britain, one that lacks the capital city’s cultural spring and where wages are depressed, where working hours are long and where globalization can be more of a problem than a blessing. Too many Conservatives give the impression that they do not really understand this Britain. Senior Tories talk about “middle-class families” who can no longer afford private education or who face extra taxation on their £2 million homes. They are out of touch. They do not seem to realize that only about one in twenty Britons send their children to fee-paying schools or that a £2 million home is far beyond the earning potential of most Britons.

Every Conservative MP should be given a business card with just one thing written upon it: £28,600. £28,600 is the average UK salary. Many earn much less, of course. Until every Tory MP understands what it is like to try to pay for a home, a holiday, a petrol tank and a supermarket trolley full of groceries for the family with that kind of money, they should not be in politics. They certainly won’t beat UKIP. Because for everything UKIP says about immigration, gay marriage and Europe, it is the ale-drinking, cigarette-smoking Nigel Farage’s attack on the remoteness of the political class that has made UKIP the most talked-about party in British politics today.

Tim Montgomerie is a columnist for the London Times and founder of the website ConservativeHome.com.

Image: Flickr/Euro Realist Newsletter. CC BY 2.0.