Anti-EU, anti-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party wins 26% of vote

[FarCenter]

Ukip claims it will be 'lasting force' after 'remarkable' election success

Mr Farage, the Ukip leader, said voters were "rejecting the establishment" as the party won an average of 26 per cent of the votes in the wards where it had candidates standing.

Mr Shapps, the Conservative chairman, admitted that his party was "failing" to communicate its policies to voters but some MPs fear the wrong people are in charge of the message.

Among the 35 councils holding elections in England and Wales counting has been completed in 21 authorities so far. The Tories have lost 157 seats and relinquished control of six councils.

The Lib Dems lost 32 seats but Ukip were the night's biggest winners with 60 gains recorded by 2pm. The BBC estimated that Ukip could even take a larger share of the vote nationally than Labour, which has gained 116 council seats so far.

Ukip increased its share of the vote significantly and claimed second place behind Labour in the by-election held in David Miliband's former seat of South Shields. The Liberal Democrats secured just 352 votes in the contest, losing their deposit.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/local-elections/10034888/Ukip-claims-it-will-be-lasting-force-after-remarkable-election-success.html

kip will change face of British politics like SDP, says Nigel Farage

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/may/03/nigel-farage-ukip-change-british-politics

[Laelth]

1. Typical conservative clap-trap.

The conservative says, "his party was "failing" to communicate its policies to voters," and we all know that's crap, though it sounds exactly like the conservatives in the U.S. What they fail to grasp is that theirs is not a messaging problem, it's a policy problem. The people have rejected conservative policy. No amount of "messaging" can fix that. My hope is that the leaders of the Democratic Party learn this lesson before greater damage is done to the American people.

-Laelth

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Maybe they hadn't communicated their anti-EU, anti-immigration policies enough

and so the right wing fled to UKIP, who are open about it. The Tories, who try and look appealing to the centre as well, couldn't straddle the centre and the right.

[pampango]

3. Cameron probably wonders the right-wing populists abandoned his mainstream conservatives.

Right-wing populist who favor charter schools and are anti-gay marriage and anti-immigration cause trouble for a large "mainstream" (at least at one point in its history) conservative party. Why does that sound familiar?

David Cameron’s Conservative Party has taken a drubbing in local elections amid a surge of support for an anti-European Union and anti-immigration party, heaping pressure on the prime minister to shore up support ahead of the next general election.

The early results Friday show that the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, won 42 county council seats, while the opposition Labour Party gained 26. The Liberal Democrats — junior partners in Britain’s coalition government — were down 16 county council seats, while Cameron’s ruling Conservatives lost 74 seats.

The UK Independence Party has, as its name implies, one key policy - to leave the European Union. It has spent considerable effort on broadening its appeal. And judging from recent opinion polls its wider policies - grammar schools (akin to charter schools in the US, I think), curbing immigration and opposing gay marriage - seem to have struck a chord with disenchanted voters from the "big three".

The rise of UKIP adds to pressure on Cameron to staunch a flow of voters from his party ahead of the next general election in 2015 and to take a harder line on European reform and immigration.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/david-camerons-conservatives-suffer-blows-in-uk-local-elections-from-anti-eu-ukip/2013/05/03/75e5b3ac-b3d9-11e2-9fb1-62de9581c946_story.html

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Grammar schools aren't really the equivalent of charter schools

They are secondary schools run by the local education authority (normally the county council) which have an entrance test, at age 11. So the most promising pupils get into them, while the other go to "standard" schools (these used to be called 'secondary moderns', but I'm not sure if anyone is still calling them that - in the county where my brother's family lives, the schools are called 'grammar' and 'high' schools). In the sixties, there was a drive to get all secondary schools to become 'comprehensives' - that is, with no entrance test. Most counties did, but a few, like Essex or Buckinghamshire, have clung on to their grammar schools.

Much closer to the idea of charter schools are 'free schools', which the new Tory government introduced - basically giving central government grants to anyone who puts forward a proposal to start a new school, run with government money, not controlled in any way by the local authority, as long as they can fill the places.

[pampango]

6. Thanks for the explanation, muriel volestrangler. Is support for grammar schools a conservative

focus now or is it more widespread than that?

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. It's always had most support from conservatives

though I can't say I'd heard it had been a particular subject in this year's elections.

[Spider Jerusalem]

5. "failing to communicate policies to voters"...

or, you've communicated them just fine and the voters don't actually like them? That seems more plausible. (And it's also considerably more worrying as the UKIP vote is largely a protest vote from the Tory right who want to leave the EU, kick out all the immigrants, and pass a US-style "marriage is one man and one woman" law.)