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 ...
David Cameron is more interested in forcing Britons to celebrate sodomy than he is in making the economy work.
Margaret Thatcher, if she were still out in the public, would be ashamed of her party.
UKIP’s main faces, Farage and Hannan, are excellent speakers and debaters. They have a grasp of all issues. I wish they could run for office here.
Daniel Hannan is still a member of the Conservative Party. He is one of those trying to turn the Tories back to the right. Frankly, this is the best strategy IMHO, because all voting UKIP does is split the vote and allow the likes of Labour and the Liberal Democrats to win seats and help to accelerate Britain’s decline.
I’d never vote UKIP for a general election, maybe for a byelection like this though to give the Tories a slap in the face to try and bring them to their senses..
We do not have a parliamentary system.
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.
Sounds a bit familiar.
Oh, really? So what happened to the Whigs?
They ceased to exist.
My ex-oldlady sold her whig.
Why did the GOP come into existence?
Time to push the GOP in and cover the grave.
They wanted to be the Get Along Gang.
The Republicans came in and said "NO!" To the Kansas-Nebraska Act or whatever Trick the Dem's were using to expand Slavery to the West.
Because the Whigs wheeled and leaded to limited the growth of governm-, I mean slavery only made things worse, finally when it became Clear that the New Republican Party didn't need any of Slave states to win the Presidential Election of 1860, the south said "To Hell with this" and the rest is history.
So it splintered into anti-Democrats, Free Soilers and Know-Nothings.
Only after the Whigs collapsed did the Republican Party become a national force.
The GOP did not begin as an organized, coherent faction of the Whigs who took the Whig Party over and then transformed it from within.
Nor did the GOP begin as a breakaway faction from the Whigs that contested elections as a third party against the Democrats and Whigs.
The GOP was a response to the chaos that ensued when America had only one organized national party left - the pro-slavery Democrats.
The GOP was a response to a power vacuum.
Right, that is what I am saying here, the GOP is dying and soon we will have the Party of Government left.
The Opposition to expanded Government power won't have a party because the GOP will have gone the way of the Whigs, so those Republicans who genuinely are against all of this and us Independents, Tea Pariters and Libertarians will form a new one.
Like the Original GOP or UKIP.
Gee, sounds an awful lot like a Party in this country.
Even the UKIP scenario is currently a pipe dream.
The UKIP has not replaced the Conservatives, it is sort of competing with them a little bit.
The UKIP's votes went from 600K to 900K in the last two elections.
The thing is, the Liberals are the third party and UKIP is the fourth.
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