Ukip may have collapsed, but where it led others will follow

A walking ghost will be contesting next week’s local elections in England. Or rather, some of them. The party in question will be on the ballot paper in only one in eight seats: 75% fewer than it managed on the last comparable occasion, in places where the vast majority of its candidates now stand no chance of winning. Its most visible recent activity was a fundraising drive to stave off bankruptcy, after a grim mini-scandal centred on racist Facebook posts and texts sent by the girlfriend of a leader who managed five months in the job.

Such is the fate of what remains of Ukip: a force that, let’s not forget, attracted nearly 4 million votes in the 2015 general election, and spread no end of fear among Tory and Labour politicians. Along the way – and this may seem obvious, but is worth reprising – it laid the ground for Britain’s departure from the EU, and was a huge part of why David Cameron was panicked enough to call the 2016 referendum. Any schadenfreude, then, should be a kept to a minimum: for all that Ukip’s affairs now suggest closing time at a pub that has run out of beer, the people involved presumably take heart from the fact that they have achieved just about everything they ever wanted.

Rather than the “red, white and blue Brexit” promised by Theresa May, and whatever Nigel Farage’s squeals of betrayal, the one we are heading for is surely Ukip’s purple: give or take a transition period, as “hard” as anyone in the referendum’s immediate aftermath could have imagined, set to cause the country dire economic damage – and likely to reveal the extent to which people believe in Farage’s old claim that “there are some things that matter more than money”. Meanwhile, the Windrush scandal has highlighted the awful effects of social policy that was designed not on the basis of any decency or practicality, but in a desperate attempt to somehow push Ukip to the political margins, not by contesting its strain of politics, but by attempting to lock it into legislation.

It was no coincidence that the Immigration Act – which enacted many of the “hostile environment” measures now back in the news – was passed into law in 2014. This was the year of Ukip insurgent and triumphant, when it topped the poll in European elections, recruited two Tory MPs who won their subsequent byelections, and finished only 600 votes behind Labour in Heywood and Middleton, in Greater Manchester. Meanwhile, Cameron carried on making the absurd promise that he could somehow reduce net immigration to the tens of thousands. The futile stupidity of that pledge fed into policy that was less about practical outcomes than ministers being seen to take hardline positions, so that the threat led by Farage would somehow recede.

So terrified were senior Labour people of their own voters switching to Ukip that they lost their moral bearings. The then shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, said that such “hostile environment” proposals as making access to bank accounts and driving licences dependent on proof of an individual’s immigration status seemed “sensible”, and bemoaned the fact that recent deportation figures for people deemed to be in the UK illegally had shown a fall. Aside from a tiny number of MPs who voted against the measures – including David Lammy, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott – Labour abstained.

It is one of the stranger paradoxes of this story that Farage himself had cast some doubt on the initial “hostile environment” plan. “This legislation would lead to a society where scrutiny in daily life would threaten individual freedoms and liberties,” he said, suggesting that one of the perils of trying to imitate Ukip was the danger of coming up with measures even its leader found a bit distasteful, which is saying something.

One part of this story too often overlooked is that Ukip was a very modern phenomenon. Once it got going, the party proved to be adept at what the online world knows as “scaling”: in October 2014, the Guardian reported that Ukip had “disproportionately high levels of social media engagement for the size of its membership”, and more likes on Facebook than Labour or the Liberal Democrats. Ukip members and supporters were an often inescapable presence on Twitter; indeed, by early 2015 it was the most talked-about British political party on that platform.

And small wonder: although social media created the ritual of Ukip members being exposed for online racism, the party’s pronouncements were ideally suited to online spaces whose basic workings would always privilege extreme rhetoric over anything halfway nuanced. In the European referendum, the mixture of vast financial assistance from the Ukip donor Arron Banks, online voter targeting and exactly this kind of messaging was a big part of the leave side’s victory. As investigations continue, we may yet find out more about the possibly illicit aspects of all this; for now, it’s worth reflecting on the words of Banks associate Andy Wigmore, published last week by the culture, media and sport committee as part of its inquiry into fake news: “The propaganda machine of the Nazis, for instance – you take away all the hideous horror and that kind of stuff, it was very clever … you think, crikey, this is not new, and it’s just … using the tools that you have at the time.”

There was an even deeper sense in which Ukip’s rise was rooted online, bound up with the way that many people now understand the nitty-gritty of where they live in terms of what they read on Facebook, and the fact that Mark Zuckerberg’s platform has proved to be a perfect place in which nastiness about immigration could start to shape the wider debate. In June 2014 I went to Wisbech, the Ukip stronghold in Cambridgeshire where people who had come from central and eastern Europe to work in agriculture and food processing had created tensions because there was a housing shortage and public services were overstretched. A fair share of the local discussion was framed by a popular Facebook group that would routinely play up any local news involving people from abroad, and was overseen by at least one person with a history of posting racist material. The group’s audience was highlighted by how much its content was talked about locally, and the lunchtimes I spent at the local Costa Coffee, where everyone had their phone out and was staring at their screens. What, I could only wonder, were some people reading? In retrospect, I think we all know: the kind of borderline hysterical, often specious, entirely unconstructive stuff that the naivety of northern Californian billionaires has allowed to run riot.

So, watch out: with Brexit looking likely to further deepen the economic problems that fed into Ukip’s time in the political sun, even if it has at last collapsed, its mixture of opportunism, nastiness and resentment may yet take new forms, and return. If that happens, an iron rule of 21st-century politics will once again be proven: that nothing suits the merchants of very old hatreds and resentments like the new platforms that are reshaping politics in ways we have only just started to understand.

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist