Below are the final five paragraphs of a paper I wrote in the Spring of 2015. I wrote this for an English class while interning at a social justice nonprofit in London in the midst of the UK's parliamentary election. A party called the UK Independence Party had formed with a platform very similar to that of our President-Elect; what I discovered by researching and writing this paper haunts me even more chillingly after the results of our election. 

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            According to polls cited by Robert Ford at an October 2014 British Academy conference titled “Immigration and Politics of Britishness,” 86% of Britons born before 1945 define “British” identity by accent alone, while just 63% of those born between 1945 and 1964 agree. However, those born after 1964 are split down the middle on the importance of accent with 40% emphasizing civic loyalty as “British,” up from the pre-1945 poll participants’ 13% and 1945-1964 born participants’ 35% opinion on the importance of civic loyalty (Ford, 2014).

            Crucially, those born after 1964 are five times more likely to express a completely different idea of British identity than pre-1945 and twice as likely as those in the middle demographic born between 1945-1964 (Ford, 2014). Taken together, these statistics suggest that the oldest, whitest members of British society (those most likely to support UKIP) also have the least flexible ideas about what makes a person “British,” regardless of country of origin. It can also be inferred that younger Britons approach British identity from a more open and rational perspective. Rationally, an accent can be acquired in fewer years than UKIP would deny an immigrant worker rights to public benefits, and civic loyalty is most likely a reciprocal for respect and protection offered by a reasonable civic authority.

            All these factors combined, from the nostalgic appeal of imperial Victorian England to the unsound rationale of UKIP’s platform and even less sound rationale of its supporters, indicate that this blight on the UK’s political landscape is a new sort of phenomenon. UKIP and its supporters discriminate indiscriminately; their irrational repulsion and ethnocentrism are symptomatic of system-wide distress manifesting in the behaviour of people least aware of the economic and geopolitical dynamics of the modern world.

          Globalisation, the grandchild of empire and spitting image spawn of capitalism, determines the current flow of peoples across borders. Frances Webber, another speaker at the 2014 “Immigration and Politics of Britishness” conference, identifies a distinct pattern: Global capitalism and free trade deals stop countries from protecting interests of their people in favor of business. As a result, food prices rise in developing countries, people revolt, governments suppress, impoverishing and uprooting millions. Those millions are forced to migrate from underdeveloped to developed countries such as Britain (Webber, 2014) where they are consequently blamed for economic woes that, in fact, began with the global capitalistic policy-making of governments and/or large corporations. 

            Given the pattern described above, the UK’s celebrated imperial history, and the desperation of ignorant and prejudiced citizens in capitalist Britain, the emergence of an ideology such as UKIP’s was inevitable.. Even if its policies are never realized, UKIP’s DNA requires careful analysis for the sake of all developed nations. Human bodies are designed to combat malignant foreign and internal threats, but certain maladies and genetic coding can induce the body to attack its own healthy cells.
As a descendant of archaic, racist Victorian ethnocentrism, UKIP’s indiscriminate discrimination emerges as a new strain of an old disease. This malady ails Britain and other developed national organisms that indignantly suffer economic and civic woes which are actually traceable to their own policies. Proper treatment will require accurate and humble analysis of the new strain, unrestricted by prejudices or nostalgia. Any inoculation must be devised for the longevity of humanity as a living, breathing, beautifully imperfect, wildly diverse organism.