EU Referendum


UKIP: a movement in waiting


01/11/2014



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Despite Labour Police and Crime Commissioner, Shaun Wright, resigning in disgrace over the Rotherham grooming scandal, Labour's Alan Billings, a former Anglican priest who taught ethics at Lancaster University, has been elected in his place.

In what is becoming locked in as a parody of democracy, the turnout was 14.88 percent, the vote made up of 3.5 percent at polling stations and 11.7 percent postal votes. Billings took 74,060 votes, representing 50.02 percent of the votes cast - a risible 7.4 percent of the electorate.

Despite parking their tanks on Labour's lawn, with its contentious advertisement exploiting the Rotherham scandal, the Ukipites only pulled in 46,883 votes, to trail in a poor second place, taking 31.66 percent of the vote and a mere 4.7 percent of the electorate.

Deprived of its expected victory, UKIP is claiming this as solid growth but they scarcely dented Wright's 2012 vote of 74,615. Then UKIP's Jonathan Arnott polled 16,773 votes, bumped by David Allen for the English Democrats with 22,608 votes – the total amounting to just under 40,000.

With the English Democrats getting a mere 8,583 votes this time, and the Conservative vote largely static (respectively 21,075 and 18,536 votes), UKIP seem to be the beneficiaries of the collapse of the ED vote – although the Lib-Dem absence is a confounding factor.

In the Euro-elections, UKIP took a mere nine percent of the electorate. Now, out of an electorate of nearly a million (995,040) it gets 4.7 percent - the support of less than 50,000. We're not seeing any great upsurge of popular support. If this is to be a mass movement, it needs a little more than "solid growth".

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