Posted on 03/04/2013 11:16:08 AM PST by SoFloFreeper
Once a marginal group of anti-Europeans, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) is now a force to be reckoned with after its best-ever national election result spooked Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives.
UKIP took 28 percent of the vote in Thursday's by-election in the southern English seat of Eastleigh... pushing the Tories into a humiliating third place.
Although the anti-Brussels party has yet to win a seat in the British parliament, the result is its best in a string of good performances in mid-term votes in recent months.
UKIP leader Nigel Farage said it was part of a trend.
"What happened here in Eastleigh was not a freak result. Something is changing. People are sick and tired of having three social democrat parties that are frankly indistinguishable from each other," he said.
The reasons for UKIP's success in Eastleigh are manifold, and not limited to the anti-European cause around which it was created. Immigration, the economy and general dissatisfaction with the government all played a part.
But the result has hit the Tories hard...because it feeds into growing fears that UKIP is eating away at its support.
The Tories have not won a parliamentary majority since 1992 and many in the party fear UKIP is syphoning off the anti-European, anti-immigration vote that they will need to ditch their Lib Dem coalition partners and win outright in 2015's general election.
Cameron's promise in January to renegotiate Britain's membership of the European Union and put it to a referendum by 2017 was widely seen as an attempt to...fend off the threat from UKIP.
After the result in Eastleigh, outraged senior Tories lined up to warn Cameron -- who once described UKIP as full of "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists" -- that they must reach out to traditional voters.
(Excerpt) Read more at uk.news.yahoo.com ...
Are members of the European Parliament directly elected? If so, why not vote UKIP in those elections to send a message to the Conservatives?
Agree both are great speakers but Hannan is not UKIP. He is a member of the Conservative Party.
some great recent Nigel Farage interviews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2C1-ZD6EKc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNf7ZRbktFU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk4eD1i5fXk
I wish we could have some tea party leaders as eloquent and quick as Farage.
The European Parliament is elected by proportional representation, so candidates are not directly elected, parties are. In this case, UKIP has done very well and came second in terms of number of seats won in 2009.
However, thanks to the First Past the Post system in General Elections to Westminster, the candidate with the most votes in any given consituency wins, and votes for the losing candidates become irrelevant thereafter, so each candidate needs a concentration of support in their contested constituency, rather than broadly across the nation in order to win a seat.
For this reason, all a vote for UKIP would achieve in a general election would be to siphon off votes for the Tory candidate and make it more likely that a Labour or Lib-Dem candidate would win the seat. IMHO this is like cutting your nose off to spite your face. UKIP simply cannot get enough support in any particular constituency to win a seat, and so voting for them is futile and counter productive if your agenda is to elect a government that will on the whole, stand up more for Britain than the other two main parties...
The way parties change in the USA is: they lose multiple elections until a new faction within the party gets the reins.
No third party has ever become the dominant party in US history, due to the structure of our Congress.
In the UK Parliament the UKIP Party is actually a fourth party after Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrats...
Good point. See post 20 - I corrected myself.
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