DOUGLAS Carswell, formerly Ukip’s sole MP but now turned independent, leads a solitary, spectral life at Westminster. When he’s there, that is. Carswell is tall, thin and lugubrious. If he has any charm he hides it well. All in all, he is a tragic figure – a footnote in the Ukip story. Not that he deserves any sympathy. For Ukip has helped propel England to the edge of the Brexit cliff. Hopefully, Scotland will grab its own lifebelt.

Carswell’s exit from Ukip is more a case of being pushed than jumping. Since its formation in 1991 as the Anti-Federalist League – it was renamed the United Kingdom Independence Party two years later – Ukip has been a factional bear garden. Nigel Farage ousted the original founder, Alan Sked – the latter was educated at the old Allan Glen’s school in Glasgow and once stood as a Liberal candidate in Paisley.

Shortly before the 2004 European election, Sked denounced Farage’s Ukip, saying: “They are racist and have been infected by the far-right.” He added that “Ukip is even less liberal than the British National Party (BNP). Certainly, there is a symbiosis between elements of the parties”. Mind you, Sked’s own romantic notion of British nationalism led him to share political platforms with Enoch Powell.

There certainly are former far-right elements in present-day Ukip: Martyn Heale, who chaired the Thanet South campaign during Nigel Farage’s failed bid to win a Westminster seat, was a branch officer of the overtly neo-fascist National Front (NF) in the 1970s. And Farage himself has gone out of his way to court defections from the openly racist BNP. Once upon a time the BNP — under Nick Griffin, also ex-NF — was a direct competitor to Ukip. It captured a stunning 940,000 votes in the 2009 European elections. But the BNP votes were disproportionately in northern English Labour heartlands and so a barrier to Ukip’s expansion. At the 2011 Oldham East by-election, when the BNP was engaged in a bout of internecine warfare, Farage seized the opportunity to appeal directly to its voters. Paul Nuttall, now Ukip leader, later told The Guardian: “It was the first time that we ever said, ‘come and vote for us’.”

The tactic worked like a charm. The BNP imploded and disappeared into the dustbin of history and its near one million votes went to Ukip at the 2014 European elections. The result Farage could rightly claim as “a political earthquake”. Ukip outpolled both Labour and the Conservatives, with 28 per cent of the vote. At the 2015 General Election, David Cameron was forced to try to defuse the popularity of Ukip by offering an in-out referendum on EU membership. The rest, as they say, is history.

Where does Ukip and its brand of narrow British nationalist politics go from here? With Brexit on the horizon, steered by the mainstream Tory Party, is Ukip a busted flush? Certainly, the hapless and tweedy Paul Nuttall lost the strategic Stoke-on-Trent Central by-election to Labour in February. With Carswell gone, Ukip now lacks representation in the Commons, though there are three members asleep somewhere in the Lords. The party still has 20 members in the European Parliament, but obviously not for long.

But let’s not write off populism in the UK too soon. Right-wing currents are still gathering pace across continental Europe. The first round of the French presidential election will be held on April 23. The latest poll (published Saturday) has the independent centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron in the lead with 26 per cent, only one point ahead of the right-wing National Front candidate, Marine Le Pen. In the expected run-off, Macron is expected to garner enough centre and left votes to see off Le Pen. However, he is relatively inexperienced and lacks a party base. Macron is another identikit, former investment banker who could prove vulnerable to Le Pen’s jibes.

TO understand the political likely direction of modern populism we need to distinguish it from the classic fascism of the 1920s. Early fascism was a violent confrontation between a powerful worker’s movement and petty bourgeois groupings, in a period of extreme economic collapse. Crucially, fascist currents were funded by big business and used to physically destroy the trade unions. Virulent anti-Semitism was used both as a way of dividing the worker’s movement and creating an internal “enemy” as a scapegoat.

Latter-day populism, while nasty, is a different kettle of fish. For starters, it is an electoral movement, not a street battle. Second, the victory over fascism in the Second World War using conscript armies embedded popular support for welfare provision; eg pensions and free health care. That makes it difficult for the right to dismantle welfare gains – witness the problems Trump is having abolishing Obamacare. Third, popular experience with genuine fascism has reduced the scope for the right to manufacture ethnic scapegoats.

It is the economic project of modern populism that is key to its progress. You can see this in the friction between Douglas Carswell and Nigel Farage. Carswell joined Ukip partly to “sanitise” its anti-immigration line and make Brexit sound more acceptable to middle-class Tory voters. And partly to pursue his extreme free market, neo-liberal economic strategy, involving deep tax cuts for business. But Farage dumped Ukip’s dalliance with free trade and moved the party towards a “Britain First” economy, to better hoover up ex-Labour voters. Here Farage is dancing to the tune of the Leave campaign’s biggest financial backer, Aaron Banks. Banks wants Ukip to reinvent itself as a social movement using the internet, to better outflank the traditional parties. He thinks the big banks and multinational companies have rigged the EU as a racket to support their own narrow economic interests. Instead, Banks wants the UK to forge a new zone of influence with the Commonwealth and Trump’s America.

However, the omens do not look good for Ukip. It is unlikely that Donald Trump will accommodate Banks’s romantic view of the world. To Trump, the UK remains nothing more than a big aircraft carrier moored next to mainland Europe. Theresa May has (so far) managed to keep the disparate wings of the Tory Party together and there is no evidence she will renege on Brexit. She is also seeking to park her tanks on English Labour’s front lawn. It is difficult to see where either Ukip or Banks’s Ukip Mk2 can find electoral space to prosper. Which suggests that Scots, if they don’t want to live under Tory rule for the next decade or two, should make their own constitutional arrangements.

However, the future is a dark glass. The global economy is slowing while the three big trading blocs (US, China and EU) are edging towards protectionism. North Africa and the Middle East remain in turmoil. There are new Cold wars in Europe and the China Sea. The British economic recovery is a mirage, meaning that the next Tory government is going to start cutting pensions. In these dangerous waters, right-wing populist currents mobilised via the internet remain a distinct threat. Douglas Carswell was too much a Tory toff and intellectual snob to be part of that. But he has plenty of successors waiting in the wings.