It is tempting, in the wake of the local and European elections last week, to turn to economics for explanations. After all, experience suggests that when the electorate swings in vast numbers away from established political parties and towards untested alternatives, the root cause is often economic disenchantment.
However, trying to divine a statistical pattern behind Ukip’s success last week is fiendishly difficult. In the run-up to the elections, my Sky News colleagues and I put together a database that included some key economic and social data about all of England’s local authorities — everything from unemployment rates and wages to crime rates and proportions of foreign-born residents. A glance at this, we assumed, and correlations would emerge about who was voting for Ukip and