Alan Sked (Screen shot via)
As political parties go, the Anti-Federalist League was phenomenally unsuccessful. In just under two years, it failed to secure the election of a single candidate. But the party was never really about winning seats; it was about putting pressure on the Tories over Europe. In that sense, it could hardly have been more effective.
On the 23rd of June, Britain will go to the polls to decide on its future membership of the EU. One of the biggest political events in Britain for decades was brought about in large part by UKIP and its insurgent campaign against the Conservatives, which forced David Cameron to take action. But before UKIP, there was the Anti-Federalist League (AFL). And while UKIP has become almost synonymous with its rambunctious leader Nigel Farage, the AFL and its strategy – and, eventually, UKIP itself – was created by Alan Sked, a professor of international history at the London School of Economics.
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It’s fair to say that Sked is no admirer of the current UKIP leader. He has referred to Farage’s UKIP as “Frankenstein’s monster” and describes it as “a nasty little racist populist party appealing to the lowest common denominator”. Nevertheless, he has no regrets about the part he played in its inception: “If I hadn’t founded the party we wouldn’t be having the referendum,” he says over the phone.
Sked founded the AFL in November of 1991, driven by his belief that the EU was both undemocratic and corrupt – a view he still staunchly espouses today. Sked’s inspiration for the name provides an insight into both his historical insight and high-minded ideals. The Anti-Corn-Law League was a movement which began in the 1800s and successfully campaigned against heavy taxes on imported grain.
The AFL had little interest in immigration. As an academic in London, it had never given Sked much cause for concern. “My environment was always highly cosmopolitan,” he says. “I had no prejudices against people of any background.” Today he believes there are valid criticisms of unchecked immigration, but back then: “We produced about ten policy documents – housing, agriculture, financial policies. We didn’t have one on immigration at all, because in the 1990s it simply wasn’t an issue.”
Even in its early days, the party attracted its fair share of eccentrics. Tim Hedges was a prospective Conservative candidate who grew disillusioned with the party’s stance on Europe and joined the AFL, where he worked to recruit other members. “We had a series of questions trying to decide if anyone was racist or mad,” he says. “We had quite a lot of lunatics applying at the time – people in Gloucestershire saying they thought they could raise a private army, that sort of thing.”
Hedges was one of a handful of candidates to stand in the 1992 elections. He attracted 42 votes in Bristol West, finishing in last place, behind the Natural Law party, the Revolutionary Communists and the Struck Off & Die Doctor’s Alliance. Other candidates fared little better. Despite this lacklustre performance, the party attracted the attention of a number of Eurosceptics whose views were unrepresented among the main Westminster parties.
Among them was Craig Mackinlay, now Conservative MP for South Thanet, a seat contested by Nigel Farage at the last election. Back then, Mackinlay was an accountant with growing concerns about Britain’s membership of the European exchange rate mechanism. In 1992, he saw Sked appear on the BBC’s Sunday Politics show: “I thought, ‘Good god, this is exactly what I’ve been thinking for the last few months.’” He joined the party that year, followed shortly afterwards by Nigel Farage, and remained a member for 13 years before defecting to the Tories in 2005.
In September of 1993, the AFL relaunched as the UK Independence Party with Sked at the helm. Under this new banner, the party enjoyed some success. Mackinlay stood in Kent West in the 1994 European elections, securing more than 5 percent of the vote, a noticeable improvement on the results of just two years before. He recalls those early days with fondness. “To me, it was a group of disgruntled Conservatives who felt the Conservative party was not going in the direction expected,” he says. “It was a group of like minded people; it was very positive. They were very good years.”
Sked was not a Conservative. But he understood that the only way to secure Britain’s exit from the EU was by posing a threat to the Tories. His own background was in the Liberal party, which he joined as a teenager after becoming obsessed with politics and history at the age of nine or ten. He became a Liberal candidate in Paisley while a postgraduate at Oxford University. In 1980, he became convener of European Studies at LSE. UKIP was an opportunity to apply his intellectual approach to Euroscepticism in the political world.
It would not be long before differences in opinion emerged over the future of the party. Asked to describe Sked, Hedges says: “Dynamic. Absolutely, utterly determined. And completely, completely sincere. The problem was, he couldn’t see any kind of a compromise. He was one of the worst politicians I’d ever seen, because political parties are a compromise. You have some people who are a little to the left, a little to the right, and you get along in a broad church. Alan could not understand the concept of a broad church if you hammered it into his head.”
According to Hedges, Sked’s response to disunity was to shut dissenters down: “He wouldn’t tolerate people arguing with him, particularly if they weren’t as clever as him, and most people aren’t.”
By the 1997 election, Sked was struggling to maintain control in the face of discontent among the party’s right-wing elements. UKIP performed poorly in the polls, overshadowed by Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum party. After the election, Sked tried to quell dissent by expelling Farage and two other members. The trio launched legal action, which threatened UKIP with bankruptcy. “We just had to cave in and allow them to return,” says Sked. “I’m afraid Farage slithered in.”
Shortly afterwards, Sked resigned. His battle for the soul of UKIP had taken its toll, but he was also exhausted, physically and financially, after nearly a decade of political activism. “Between 1988 and 1997 I had been on the front line of Eurosceptic policy, entirely at my own expense,” he says. “My only income was the income I got lecturing at LSE. It was costing me an arm and a leg. By the 1997 election I had done that non-stop for about 10 years. I was just completely buggered after that.”
UKIP has since gone from strength to strength as it has moved further and further away from Sked’s original vision. The Referendum party disbanded when Goldsmith passed away in July of 1997, paving the way for UKIP’s first electoral victory when three candidates won seats in the European elections two years later. Among them was Farage, who went on to become leader of the party in 2006 and has taken UKIP to its greatest ever electoral success. At the last general election, the party contested 617 seats and won close to 13 percent of the popular vote.
Sked has made other attempts to shape politics, but has also had to deal with challenges in his personal life. In 2013, he announced he was launching a centre-left Eurosceptic party named New Deal. However, a devastating period in which his twin brother passed away and his mother became ill meant the party never got off the ground. In October of last year, Sked retired from LSE and moved to the Scottish Highlands to care for his mother.
From Sked’s vantage point, the quality of the referendum debate has not been good: “The Remain campaign has been incredible in the number of scares they have been putting forward – everything from world war to the collapse of the British economy,” he says. “Twenty years ago, if you went around saying the end of the world is nigh you would have been locked up in a lunatic asylum. Now, you get a place in 10 Downing Street.”
In recent weeks he has written newspaper articles arguing for Brexit, but has not been as involved as he would have liked. “I’m rather marooned up here in the Highlands,” he says. “I have just got to accept that.”
On the 8th of June, Sked gave a speech at LSE entitled “The Case for Brexit: Why Britain Should Quit the EU”. Arriving in the university’s lecture hall dressed in a black suit and a blue tie, he looked much like a politician as he waved to a familiar face in the crowd, then stepped forward to shake hands with those in the front row.
Sked spoke for an hour, then sat and took questions. One audience member took issue with perceived inconsistencies in his argument, prompting Sked to respond with a lengthy rebuttal. “So you’re wrong. I’m right,” he concluded, to laughs from the crowd, before moving on to the next question.
When the session ended shortly afterwards, the auditorium broke out into applause.
