Reddit reviews UKIP: Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics

Other people have addressed the EU question, so I'll focus more on politics in general. There's some decent BBC media which covers current politics, it can sometimes be a bit tedious, some shows are better than others, and I certainly wouldn't recommend rigorously following all of them, but it's pretty good for familiarising yourself with the current state of affairs. Some TV and radio shows to follow -

Daily Politics - daily show analysing politics, which often gets high profile politicians on.

This Week - weekly show, airing after Question time, with a slightly comedic approach to political analysis.

Andrew Marr Show - weekly show, the one which senior ministers (the prime minister, the chancellor, the home secretary, etc) are most likely to appear on.

Question Time - weekly topical debate program, with questions from the audience directed towards politicians.

Any Questions - radio version of Question Time. Often not quite as annoying as Question time.

Today in Parliament - daily radio show covering news from parliament.

 

Parliament.uk and gov.uk are both great resources for learning how parliament and government functions, and learning about legislation. If you'd prefer a less fragmented read, such as a book, then Exploring British Politics by Garnett and Lynch seems like a good introductory source, though I will add the disclaimer that I've only used it occasionally as a reference book, and it is fairly pricey.

 

It can sometimes be difficult to understand the significance of things in politics without a basic grounding in the historical context, so I will recommend some more books to help with that (although much of the info can be found online). Two of the most important figures in recent British political history are Thatcher, and Blair. Charles Moore's Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One is a good book for starting to understand the political context of the Thatcher era, although it is obviously quite biographical too, and being the first volume it only covers roughly the first third of her time in government. The comprehensive tome on Blair and his wide-ranging effect on the functioning of british politics is surely Seldon's Blair's Britain, 1997-2007, although I will warn you that is it most definitely a tome - incredibly thorough and a bit of a slog. The best way to approach this is probably to read the sections on things you are interested in, like the NHS, and leave the rest until you feel you want to learn about them. Sections of Seldon's Cameron at 10 are definitely worth a read if you want some more insight into the first Cameron ministry, and the coalition years.

 

I can't really recommend any comprehensive histories on the political parties (although what I've read of Tim Bale's The Conservatives Since 1945 is pretty good). One I would recommend is Goodwin's Revolt on the Right, which offers a fairly original analysis of the phenomenon that is UKIP. There's a more up-to-date follow-up to that, (UKIP: Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics), which I imagine is also pretty good, but I haven't read it. Familiarising yourself with general political ideologies (to rattle off an incomplete list: one nation conservatism, high toryism, classical liberalism, social liberalism, libertarianism, social democracy, democratic socialism, etc), how these relate to each other, and how they have manifested in the various 3 main parties over time is a must for understanding the parties and the political tensions within them. Wikipedia should suffice in filling in the details there (and in other places), for now.

Could you link the original studies here? I'd love to take a look since I spent a ton of my undergrad researching this exact topic. One variable I noticed that was interesting was education (I.e. eurosceptic in France for example were overwhelmingly the most educated (Masters/Phd's by in large. I also would reccomend these two books, i've read both and while they are focused primarily on Britain and UKIP the first is a good primer while the second is riddled with data, graphs, number sets, trends, and scatter graphs!

1)Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain (Extremism and Democracy)Mar 18, 2014
by Robert Ford and Matthew J Goodwin

http://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Right-Explaining-Extremism-Democracy/dp/0415661501/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462988605&sr=8-1&keywords=revolt+on+the+right

2) UKIP: Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics 1st Edition
by Matthew Goodwin (Author), Caitlin Milazzo (Author)

http://www.amazon.com/UKIP-Inside-Campaign-British-Politics/dp/0198736118/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462988668&sr=8-1&keywords=ukip