Let us for a moment put aside the accusations of bigotry, xenophobia and racism, though undoubtedly they lurk in the background, the closet door unable to be shut for the mounting number of skeletons. 

Let us instead take a closer look at Ukip, its policies, its leadership, the conditions which have allowed it to flourish and how we as part of the labour and trade union movement take them on.

Ukip is a strange beast indeed. A party opposed to others making the laws that govern our nation, yet happy for unelected global corporations rule through “trade deals.” 

A party whose leader masquerades as the anti-politics, ordinary “bloke down the pub,” yet the privately educated, former investment banker is certainly not the kind of person you’d be likely to meet in the pubs and clubs of most constituencies.

Ukip is unquestionably arch-Thatcherite in its policy position. Nigel Farage said last year that, had Margaret Thatcher just left Oxford, “She’d come and get involved in Ukip and no doubt topple me within 12 months or so.” 

It seems ludicrous that a party claiming to be the natural home for a modern-day Thatcher is gaining so much ground in the constituencies that her extremist ideology, put into practice as prime minister, destroyed.

It seems absurd to see a party whose deputy leader Paul Nuttall praised the coalition government “for bringing a whiff of privatisation into the beleaguered National Health Service” is picking up votes in a country which cherishes the NHS. While Farage and his cronies seek to con the electorate into thinking that they too love the NHS, Ukip’s MEPs further underline their duplicitous nature by failing to ask for any safeguards for public services, including the health service and actively supporting TTIP in Brussels, of all places.

We live in strange times. Absurdity apart, the situation we face is that an openly Thatcherite party of the hard-right has emerged, is preying on discontent and is picking up votes. 

It seems that much of the Ukip rhetoric simply goes unchallenged by the right-wing press. 

While Ed Miliband is pilloried for failing to eat a bacon sandwich in the “correct” way, Farage gets away with blue murder, regurgitating misleading statistics and peddling fanciful myths. 

Farage is simply not subjected to the same rigorous scrutiny as any other political leader. 

Whether a concerted conspiracy by the press, careful selection of interviews or his own savvy, I’ll let others discuss. His one-man band though, rolls on, seemingly unabated.

And what of the rise of Ukip as an electoral force? There is simply no doubt that it has been aided in its rise in popularity by the catastrophic failure of the very neoliberal policies that the party itself would like to see put into hyper-drive. 

As one Twitter user had it, “Voting for Ukip because you don’t like the other parties is like setting fire to your hair because you don’t like your haircut.” 

Yet what the Ukip bandwagon does show is that in modern Britain, there is an appetite for change. 

The misguided perception that all of the parties are the same, I have always asserted, is a myth peddled by the right to keep Labour voters at home. 

But it is a myth that has taken hold. In the shires old-fashioned Tories are horrified by David Cameron’s “compassionate” Conservatism. And try telling bedroom tax victims that exists. In the industrial heartlands, where new Labour didn’t do nearly enough good, people are awaiting policies that will actually make a positive difference to their lives.

Old-fashioned Conservatism doesn’t interest me so much other than to state that I am 100 per cent opposed to its divisive and morally repugnant ideology. 

What does interest me is the people up and down the country who desperately need policies that will help them. This is exactly where we have to take the fight to Ukip.

We need to firmly end the suggestion that all the political parties are the same. It is time to draw the demarcation lines clearly in the sand and end any blurring at the edges. 

The Labour Party needs a policy platform for the next general election that not only eases the strain but returns dignity, hope and aspiration to ordinary men and women up and down the country.

We need to end the increasingly feeble notion that a job automatically means personal prosperity in an era of zero-hours contracts, part-time and low-paid insecure work and take proactive steps to level the playing field for workers and their representatives. 

We need a positive programme for industry to revive communities that were ravaged in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet of extremists and to fuel aspiration by providing a highly skilled workforce access to well-paid, secure employment. 

We need a house-building programme that ensures that ordinary people have a home.

We need to get rid of the image of an out-of-touch Westminster elite, though undoubtedly there is some truth in this. We need members of Parliament who can relate to the constituencies they represent and to get more working-class people into the Palace of Westminster. 

We need a simple and positive narrative for our Labour foot soldiers to take onto the doorstep when talking to voters.

I am convinced that by working together with our comrades from the trade union movement we can win the general election, put a stop to the monstrous actions of the current government, halt Farage’s bigoted bandwagon and can build a positive future that we can be proud to have the next generation inherit. 

We need to debunk the myth that Ukip is a party of straight-talking patriotic folksie types bringing common sense to the political arena. 

They need to be exposed for the Thatcherite ideologues that they really are. What was that about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel?

n Ian Lavery is MP for Wansbeck and chair of the trade union group of Labour MPs.