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Upstart British Party Gains in Local Elections Insurgent Party in Britain Gains in Popular Support
(about 20 hours later)
LONDON — The populist United Kingdom Independence Party made sweeping gains in local British elections and finished second in a parliamentary by-election, according to results announced Friday, jolting mainstream political parties, consolidating its position as an emerging political force and claiming a “sea change” in national life. LONDON — By winning about a quarter of all votes cast in local elections across England, the United Kingdom Independence Party, a hitherto gadfly force on the center right of British politics, appeared on Friday to have reset the political landscape, challenging all major parties, and the Conservatives in particular, with its demands for Britain’s withdrawal from the 27-nation European Union.
Once scorned by Prime Minister David Cameron as “a bunch of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists,” the party, which wants Britain to leave the European Union and strictly control immigration, ambushed its rivals, gaining about a quarter of the vote in a series of contests in different areas of the country on Thursday. Calling also for stringent immigration controls and a rollback of the country’s welfare system, the Independence Party, known as UKIP, had struggled for years to shake off the scornful labels pinned on it by political opponents in all major parties who have worried that UKIP’s breakthrough moment might eventually come.
“We have been abused by everybody, the entire establishment,” Nigel Farage, the Independence Party leader, told the BBC, “and now they are shocked and stunned that we are getting over 25 percent of the vote everywhere we stand across the country. This is a real sea change in British politics.” Prime Minister David Cameron, the Conservative leader, once described the party as “a bunch of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists,” and one of his ministers, Kenneth Clarke, used his own dismissive term, “a bunch of clowns,” on the eve of Thursday’s voting. Harsher critics, particularly on the left, have sought to link UKIP to two far-right fringe parties, the British National Party and the English Defence League, that have plied a politics tinged with racist and Nazi sympathies.
Before the elections, a government minister, Kenneth Clarke, dismissed some members of the upstart party as “clowns” but, after pulling off his electoral upset, Mr. Farage had the last laugh in media interviews, parrying with the words, “Send in the clowns.” But as the ballot counting for 2,300 council seats was completed, results from widely separated areas of England, including districts that will be swing-vote battlegrounds in a general election set for May 2015, showed that UKIP had drawn levels of popular support not matched by any insurgent party in an electoral contest with the mainstream parties, mainly the Conservatives and Labour, since Labour’s rise in the 1920s.
The results of the electionswere particularly alarming for Mr. Cameron’s Conservatives, who were pushed into third place in a by-election in South Shields, in northeastern England, to fill the seat vacated by former Foreign Secretary David Miliband. The opposition Labour Party retained the seat, but with a reduced majority. UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, 49, a former commodities broker, made the most of the party’s red-letter day, poking fun at detractors in ways that reinforced his popular image as a raffish, jocular and, as British newspaper profiles have described him, a “bloke-ish” fellow unafraid to voice opinions that many politicians regard as better left in the pub.
Even before the latest victories, the Independence Party had propelled British politics to the right and prompted Mr. Cameron to harden his policy stance against immigration and the E.U. “We’ve been abused by everybody, the entire establishment, and now they’re shocked and stunned that we are getting over 25 percent of the vote everywhere we stand across the country,” Mr. Farage told reporters. “I know that everyone would like to say that it’s just a little short-term, stamp-your-feet protest — it isn’t. There’s something really fundamental that’s happened here.”
The results suggested that the Independence Party might yet have a larger impact and pose the biggest challenge to the grip of established parties since the 1980s, when a now-defunct centrist party appeared. The results prompted caution and surprise among political analysts, who noted that UKIP, despite its strength in the popular vote, remained a distant fourth in the number of council seats won. It secured only 147 of the contested seats, compared with 1,116 for the Conservatives, 538 for Labour and 352 gained for the left-of-center Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives’ partners in the coalition government formed after the general election of 2010.
In recent years, populist parties have exploited the mood of disenchantment among voters in several countries across Europe, from the Netherlands to Greece, and one, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, applauded the outcome of Britain’s elections as sending an “unmistakable signal.” A BBC tally showed that UKIP won an average of 25 percent of the vote in the 1,700 seats it contested. Another BBC projection that used Friday’s results to compute the vote share that each party would win in a general election showed Labour with 29 percent, the Conservatives with 25 percent, UKIP with 23 percent, and the Liberal Democrats with 14 percent. It was the first time in decades that all major parties have scored below 30 percent in the BBC calculation, leading some voting experts to say that Britain had entered a new era in which it would be unlikely that any party could win a majority at a general election.
Critics have questioned the staying power of the Independence Party, citing what they see as a flimsy policy agenda and a reliance on Mr. Farage, its raffish, eloquent leader. Though its members sit on the European Parliament, it still has no representatives in Britain’s national Parliament. Local elections, particularly midterm votes held between the general elections that determine the makeup of the national government every five years, have been precarious predictors of general election outcomes. Often, the surge of minor parties in similar contests has turned out to be a protest vote, with supporters returning to their traditional loyalties when it comes to choosing a party, and a prime minister, to lead the country.
But with results announced in 32 of the 34 election districts that were voting, the Independence Party had won more than 130 seats and was averaging 25 percent of the vote in the elections where it fielded candidates. That gives it a solid platform for new elections next year to the European Parliament, in which it could finish first among Britain’s parties. But the scope of UKIP’s surge this time had many politicians saying that the old mold of politics had been broken. While guarded about the longer-term implications, many political commentators said UKIP appeared to have crossed a crucial threshold by establishing itself as socially and politically respectable, and by thrusting its key policies, particularly on Europe, into the mainstream of political debate.
Significantly, it made gains outside its normal strongholds in the southeast. UKIP was founded in 1993, and made the most striking of its previous electoral breakthroughs — and then only with scattered successes — in elections to the European Parliament, where Mr. Farage, whose second wife is German, first made his mark.
Grant Shapps, a leading Conservative, conceded that it “has not been a great night for any of the mainstream parties.” A pointer to bigger successes came with the party’s second-place finish in a by-election for a seat in the British Parliament outside Southampton in February. UKIP drew 28 percent of the vote, about 3 percent more than the Conservative candidate in a seat once considered solidly Conservative. But few foresaw the scope of the latest success.
Mr. Cameron, when asked on Friday about his “fruitcakes” comment about the party — made in 2006, before he was prime minister — adopted a more respectful tone, saying it was no good insulting a party that had won many votes. As the scale of UKIP’s performance became known, Mr. Cameron and other political leaders keen to draw UKIP voters back to the mainstream parties in the battle of 2015 were quick to rescind their contempt. “We need to show respect for people who have taken the choice to support this party, and we are going to work really hard to win them back,” Mr. Cameron said.
Mr. Farage warned that his supporters were not going away: “The people that vote for us are rejecting the establishment,” he said, castigating the “metropolitan elite” as failing to respond to what he depicted as Britons’ desire to retrieve British sovereignty from the European Union. “It’s about getting our country back.” Many of UKIP’s successes came in districts known as redoubts for the Conservatives, in counties that included Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hampshire, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Warwickshire. The importance of these erstwhile strongholds for the Conservatives is based on a long-established pattern in British politics, in which the Conservatives have relied on their strong support in England in general elections to offset the strength of rival parties in Scotland and Wales.
The results, he said, were a vote against the established political parties, which “look the same and sound the same and are made up of people who basically have never had a job in the real world.” The vulnerability of Mr. Cameron, 46, lies in the fact that UKIP’s priority issues — Europe, immigration and welfare — are shared by an increasingly restive bloc of at least 100 Conservative Parliament members, a third of the Conservative strength in the House of Commons. Mr. Cameron’s push for approval of a same-sex marriage bill this year has been a touchstone for many of his Conservative detractors.
The Independence Party’s success in winning over disaffected Conservative voters is likely to put more pressure on Mr. Cameron at a time when the British economy has only just escaped a triple-dip recession. A continued surge in support for the Independence Party could deprive the Conservatives of the seats they need to win in the next general elections, due in 2015. But the calls for Mr. Cameron to adopt new policies more amenable to his right-wing critics, or to resign and make way for a new Conservative leader, were dismissed by senior members of his cabinet. Michael Gove, the education minister, widely admired among the party’s right-wingers, told the BBC that Mr. Cameron’s position was not at risk.
Mr. Cameron has already promised to renegotiate Britain’s relations with the European Union, then hold a referendum on whether to stay in the bloc. “Any of my colleagues who want to engage in leadership speculation,” he said, “should spend the weekend reading history books and considering whether any party’s election prospects have been improved by a leadership change.”
He is now facing pressure from euro skeptic lawmakers to introduce legislation immediately that would schedule the referendum to follow the next general election.

Stephen Castle contributed reporting from London, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

That would send a strong signal that the Conservatives are really committed to holding the vote, these skeptics argue.
The main opposition Labour Party had a reasonable but patchy performance in the elections, but they were another setback for the Liberal Democrats, the junior partner in Britain’s coalition government. Until the party joined the government, it had been a traditional repository of protest votes, many of which now seem to be switching to the Independence Party.
With most of the national votes counted, the BBC projected Labour in the lead with 29 percent, the Conservatives in second place with 25 percent, the Independence Party in third place with 23 percent of votes, and the Liberal Democrats fourth with 14 percent.
The results could also have economic repercussions, analysts said. “The surge in support for the U.K. Independence Party, which campaigns to take the United Kingdom out of the E.U., will work against the efforts of Chancellor George Osborne to attract investment to the U.K.,” Rob Wood, chief economist for Britain at Berenberg Bank in London, wrote in an analysis.
“The strength of the anti-E.U. vote slightly raises the uncertainty about the U.K.'s prospects of remaining in the E.U. after 2017, which can’t be a good thing for companies thinking about investing in the Britain,” he added.
But the political ramifications seem more jarring. A leading political analyst, John Curtice of Strathclyde University in Scotland, said the Independence Party had far exceeded pollsters’ expectations, and its message — particularly its call for tighter immigration controls — seemed to have resonated with voters at a time when the British economy was “still in the sick bay.”
“This is frankly a phenomenal performance,” he told the BBC. “We are going to mark this as a historic set of election results.”

Stephen Castle reported from London, and Alan Cowell from Paris.