Nick Mutch argues that the party needs to be recognised as an increasingly powerful political force.

It is still considered slightly unacceptable to admit any sympathy for UKIP among polite company. However much we may wish to dismiss them as a fringe right wing party, it is time to give up childish gestures such as the NUS’s vacuous “opposition to UKIP” and treat them as a serious and respectable political force, however much you may disagree with their views.

The recent debates between Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg were a watershed in UKIP’s history. The public could see that its leader was someone capable of eloquence, intellectual rigor and who could hold his own with the most experienced of Westminster career politicians. At the very least, it showed him as unafriad of publicly defending his views. The party is also making a concerted effort to clear itself of its peripheries. Fringe parties are often forced to recruit from the fringes, and it is to their credit that they have attempted to cleanse the party of its ugliest elements. The embarrassment of Godfrey Bloom was gotten rid of and the UKIP councillor who blamed Britain’s floods on gay marriage was expelled. We must admit that UKIP’s consistent and principled opposition to the EU has struck a nerve in a section of the UK public concerned not just with immigration, but also with the European Union’s jeapordization of British autonomy. UKIP’s point is not a simplistic platform of “anti-immigration”, although it must be admitted they do pander to the belief that immigration is a job stealing racket. It is that Britain should determine its own immigration policy rather than merely accept European dictates.

Farage has frequently been accused of xenophobic motivation for his opposition to unlimited immigration from the EU. But we should remember if a country is a member of the EU, their immigration rules must explicitly prejudice people based on their nationality. As Farage has said, why should the UK give automatic residency to those from Europe (an overwhelmingly white continent), but not to potentially far more skilled people from India, China, New Zealand or the rest of the world, which is much more culturally diverse? Illustrating this is the fact that Farage was the first major party leader to advocate allowing refugees fleeing the violence in Syria, making the sensible distinction between economic migrants and genuine refugees.

There is so much in UKIP to find issue with. Its record on support for Equal Marriage is very poor. Its economic policy is pure Thatcherite neoliberalism, much to the dismay of anyone who would vote UKIP as a “protest vote” against the “mainstream status quo.” Little discussed but also ominous is the prevalence of climate deniers in its ranks. But the only way to defeat UKIP is to acknowledge their strength, rather than dismiss them outright, lest we find ourselves on the same side-lines they once inhabited. The Left forgets this lesson at its peril.

Alice King argues that UKIP remains on the political fringe and cannot be taken seriously.

A recent poll has indicated that UKIP may receive as much as 20% of the UK’s votes in the European elections, and has, in turn, been sensationalised by gleeful right wing tabloids. The alleged step up in support comes in the wake of Maria Miller’s expenses scandal and the “week of sleaze” in Westminster, entailing multiple allegations of sexual assault in parliament. Both of these saw the Lib Dems and the Conservatives take a hit in the poll, with UKIP gaining considerable support.

Some publications have decreed that British citizens are coming round to the party’s far right views, as if it is some kind of revelation, as opposed to a simple reaction to losing a little faith in their government in the wake of two big scandals. In fact, the truth of the matter is that any scandal immediately damages the popularity of the government in power, and that some of their votes  must go elsewhere. Both Miller’s expenses and the Westminster scandal can only reflect badly upon the Tories and Lib Dems, meaning that Labour and UKIP are unlikely to suffer. With one third of Conservative voters in 2010 currently claiming they will now vote UKIP, it’s easy to predict where disgruntled Tory votes will defect to – so while this poll may have shown an increase in support for UKIP, it doesn’t mean that the party has gained said support on its own merit.

I would go as far as to say that UKIP havw given us no reason to take them seriously. Godfrey Bloom last year referred to countries receiving aid from the UK as “Bongo Bongo Land”, slating the “Ray Bans” and “luxury apartments” that he was so sure the money was being spent on. The new year harboured little improvement for the reputation of the party when councillor David Silvester claimed the onslaught of floods was caused by the legalisation of gay marriage. While the majority of the country welcomed in the equal marriage bill in March, yet another UKIP councillor, Donna Edmunds, denounced “iron fist” equality laws that were being put into place. With all the issues that the country faces, surely UKIP can find something more important to worry about than “iron fist” equality.

As one Daily Mail commenter said, “I don’t care if they’re nutters – at least they’re our nutters…” If this is the best reasoning to vote UKIP, as it is the most comprehensive argument amongst the other comments on the website, then there’s no reason to consider them a veritable force in British politics. I personally would be more inclined to vote for them on the grounds that the backlash to Silvester’s weather blunders brought the ever-catchy “It’s Raining Men” back into UK charts after a 30 year absence. However, other recent polls have given no indication of similar support and show UKIP remaining firmly behind the Tories and Labour. Considering UKIP have some of the worst attendance rates for their current MEPs, it’s almost as if they’re not even taking themselves seriously. So ultimately, it’s hard to consider Nigel Farage’s party a respectable force within UK politics.

While many UK economists recently focused on Osborne’s unprecedented reform of beer and bingo duty, something even more radical has been happening on the global stage: Bitcoin is back. After the recent collapse of MtGox, the world’s biggest exchange of the virtual currency, apocalyptic prophecies of the end of Bitcoin abounded. And yet, to the dismay of detractors who saw these events as a validation of their view of a wildly idealistic and untenable means of exchange, as of late there has been a kind of resurgence. MtGox, which formerly handled 70% of global Bitcoin exchanges, has rediscovered 200,000 Bitcoins in a wallet presumed lost. The International Business Times published evidence to suggest that ‘the crypto currency market [is] as stable as it has been in a long time’, and valued the current investment in Bitcoin at $117m. In one interesting development, the Aite Group produced a comprehensive 18-page report: ‘Bitcoin: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’, which demonstrates how seriously its model is being considered, either as threat or opportunity, by global financial institutions.

It would perhaps be helpful at this point to recap the basic economic premises of Bitcoin. It is a peer-to-peer payment system whose most fundamental innovation is its circumvention of centralized, third-party regulation and transaction fees. Bitcoins are created by ‘mining’, in which computing power is used to discover the coins by a series of complex algorithms. However, there is a finite amount of the virtual currency, meaning that Bitcoins become increasingly difficult to mine. This move intends to keep inflation at a steady rate, because supply cannot be increased beyond certain amount. Its dollar value, of course, is allowed to float and is highly variable.

There are currently 11 million Bitcoins in existence, and the number of those able to be discovered has been capped at 21 million by 2040. As Bitcoin has erupted from a highly niche experiment into the mainstream economy, its political implications have become increasingly contentious. Its potential to undermine the monopoly of global important factor in the 2008 globingly contentious. Its potential to undermine the monopoly of global banks and governmental regulation means that, depending banks and governmental regulation means that, depending on your point of view, it is simply aggressively libertarian venture capitalism or a revolutionary affront to the hegemony of traditional economic models. Those who hold the former view would point out that Bitcoin’s deregulation is a highly dangerous way of shoring up power for a minority akin to the deregulation of our banking systems, now widely held to be the most important factor in the 2008 global crash.

Does Bitcoin therefore merely transfer financial power from the hands of one economically empowered elite to another, technocratic elite? It is telling that, while some in the banking sector are determined to eradicate the threat of the crypto-currency, many of their more forward-thinking colleagues have invested heavily. Bitcoin’s process of ‘mining’ is demonstrably undemocratic, in that increasingly complex systems involving multiple computers are now needed to operate it. However, the critiques which condemn Bitcoin’s attempt to circumvent regulation assume that governmental financial regulation is objective, and distinct from the banks themselves; an assertion which would be extremely difficult to prove in any of our large Western economies.

Bitcoin was released in 2009, developed in order to address the void of trust in governments and financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 crash. In a statement accompanying the release, the elusive ‘Sashi Nakamoto’ asserts that “The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.” While the users of Bitcoin are notoriously anonymous, every transaction in the currency’s history is verifiable and accessible, recorded in its public ledger, ‘the blockchain’. There is evidence that Bitcoin is being used to bypass traditional economic middlemen and help emancipate the worlds poorest. A good example is a BitPesa, a digital currency platform based in Kenya which will reduce by two-thirds the transaction fees taken from overseas transfers to Africa – such fees provide companies like Western Union with an income of around 110 million dollars a year.

The Kreuzberg neighbourhood in Berlin, renowned as a centre of counter-culture and vehement resistance to large corporations, currently boasts the world’s highest density of companies which accept Bitcoin: in the words of Lui, a blogger at Simulacrum, “To understand the sometimes slippery ethics of Bitcoin… We have to account for its perceived dialectical opponent, an entrenched and indifferent economic elite. [It is] a transnational community with no intentional barriers to entry, built on collaboration, relative transparency, and a surprisingly resilient idealism.” For a people that saw first-hand the results of strict control over the economy, Bitcoin and its associated Cryptography seem to offer a permanent respite from the censorship and control that has plagued so much of recent German history.

Bitcoin is primarily an ideological move, a thought experiment which has spawned over 100 other crypto currencies, described by enthusiasts in evangelical terms. As Paul Singer said, “When kids wake up to the fact that they don’t need their parents’ help to create a Bitcoin wallet…when they can use Bitcoins for free international transactions, at any hour, in every major city on the planet, then you’ll know that something has changed.”

But many remain unconvinced that Bitcoin is any more than a particularly alluring bubble. The former President of the Dutch central bank called the hype around Bitcoin worse than the Netherlands’ infamous tulip mania of the 17th century. Bitcoin is still in an embryonic stage; no-one could confidently predict its future. However, in spite of all its uncertainty, Bitcoin provides the potential for an economic battle-ground by interrogating the idea of the ï¬at currency itself, and that is what makes it endlessly exciting and corruptible in equal measure. Bitcoin is revolutionary, but only in the hands of revolutionaries.