NIGEL FARAGE has set his sights low for next year’s general election, speculating that Ukip will concentrate on two or three dozen seats, hoping to win a “clutch.”

But the two main parties remain obsessed with Ukip’s impact in the European parliamentary elections.

Tory notables are puffing and panting to breathe credibility into their pledge to renegotiate repatriation of some powers from Brussels before holding an in-out referendum.

Blowhard-in-chief David Cameron warns that appointing conservative Eurofederalist Jean-Claude Juncker could force him to prioritise an exit vote over talks.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, masquerading as a politician of substance rather than someone hanging on to his job by his fingernails, pontificates that Cameron “knows very well that he can’t come back with nothing.”

This byword for flint-hearted incompetence claims to have “looked him in the eye” to secure Cameron’s confirmation that an in-out referendum will take place if the Tories win the election.

This isn’t a pledge. It’s a transparent general election pitch for the nine voters in every hundred who backed Ukip in the Euro-elections.

Two things are likely in the next year. First, there will be talks about European Union “reform” that Cameron will present as a triumph for his tough approach to Brussels.

Second, if the Tories are elected and they hold a referendum, he and the majority of his party will back a Yes vote to remain in the EU.

British big business and US financial and industrial conglomerates are firmly opposed to Britain’s withdrawal from the EU and, when push comes to shove, their wishes dictate Tory Party policy.

Labour too is mesmerised by the Ukip landslide that wasn’t, with senior figures looking for a way to appear to be learning political lessons.

They could match the Ukip/Tory bidding game to allow voters a choice on Britain leaving the EU, but they fear the verdict and prefer therefore to deny the electorate a democratic voice.

Ed Balls has hinted at stronger anti-immigrant rhetoric, which would not only be shameful but doomed to failure since voters attracted by racism and xenophobia would trust other parties to carry this out.

Shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna faced both ways at Lord Sainsbury’s Blairite think tank Progress at the weekend, accusing Farage of “maliciously” distorting the immigration debate while warning that public concern can’t be ignored.

He noted that many people have problems over jobs and money and feel “powerless in the face of huge change.”

But he, with much of Labour’s front bench, fuels feelings of alienation, distrust and hardship by backing the bankers’ austerity agenda and subservience to a remote, insensitive EU decision-making bureaucracy.

Telling people you feel their pain is useless if you insist, as shadow Treasury minister Chris Leslie does, that Labour will persist with a public-sector pay freeze and cuts in jobs and services.

Affecting “financial responsibility” by telling working people to expect little from Labour is a recipe for disaster.

Exposing Ukip leaders as Thatcherite Tories can help but only if accompanied by a pro-working class agenda of rail and utilities public ownership, a crackdown on corporate and fat-cat tax dodging, a massive council housebuilding programme and investment in productive industry.

Calling opponents names while aping their policies is the kind of yah-boo politics that alienates working people and opens them up to Establishment phoney alternatives such as Ukip.