Anthony Butcher

That may be so, but it gives them enough concrete evidence, combined with the GLA seat, to claim to be on the up I think. People do tend to vote for potential winners, hence politicians spend so much time saying 'only the Lib Dems can beat Labour here' etc.

I really hope so.

I was largely basing my observation on London. I think that in every ward, the vote for Gerard Batten was considerably lower than the UKIP ward result. In every case Barnbrook got more votes than Batten. This strongly suggests to me that many of the voters were choosing BNP as their first choice and UKIP as a second option.

If we take a look at the top up votes, which might be more accurate than the Mayoral personality vote, UKIP dropped from 3% in the wards to just under 2% in the top ups (where a BNP option was available). In other words, 1/3 of UKIP voters switched to the BNP when that option was present.

2% is UKIP's realistic share of the vote when the BNP are present (in London at least), which is a drop from the General Election average of 2.34%, although I don't know how UKIP fared specifically in London in 2005. It may be that the rest of the country dragged up the London average last time.

I could be wrong of course, and I hope that I am.

What this tells me is that UKIP needs to spend a lot of time and effort developing its own core vote. It seems that there is too much complacency and burying of heads in the sand. You can bet that the BNP will have a full raft of MEP candidates, and while this remains UKIP's specialism, these results suggest that it may be a much tougher fight next time around, especially if the Tories are also still rising.

I think that UKIP should be looking for a major relaunch and new direction because whatever Farage has done for the last year and a half certainly hasn't worked in London.

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mrabody

I don't believe UKIP London's results represent the state of the party in the rest of the country. UKIP has put in strong performances, especially up north.

In London, UKIP tore itself to pieces during the RKS debacle and I don't think that until recently at least a concerted effort has been made to put it back together. I also think that Gerrard should have started campaigning earlier than he did. The fact is you can't show up at election time and expect to do well if you haven't been present and visible to the public in the period between elections. Unfortunately I think activists in UKIP too often think that flying the flag once every one, four, or five years at election time will move us forward. If Gerrard had decided to stand a year ago and had spend the past year talking about abolishing the congestion charge, freeing up parking spaces etc, he probably would have done much better than he did.

I'm not sure UKIP needs a relaunch, it just needs to work harder between elections which is something that appears to be happening in some branches and with some candidates.

I do agree that UKIP needs to develop its core vote, and while on the surface it would appear that our general philosophy and policies would seem to have the greatest appeal to disaffected Tories I also think they could be easily sold to Labour voters. In particular our plan to raise personal exemptions to £9000 and introduce a flat tax should resonate strongly in Labour areas in the wake of the 10p fiasco if sold as a policy to help poorer members of our society. And as David Cameron has promised to keep to Labour's spending plans, and refused to cut taxes, we should be able to prevent those voters from going to the Tories if we contrast our policy with theirs. And I think this goes for a lot of our other policies on law and order, education etc.

The Crewe byelection is an excellent opportunity to test this strategy.

arden forester

That was a piece of good publicity, nothing more. There is no Beauties for Britain Party but merely saying she was standing for "them" got yards of press columns. An Independent means nothing to the Daily Mail. Look at Mr.Walklate. He hasn't had a mention.

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Anthony Butcher

I completely agree. Immigration, while still an important topic, is going to get dwarfed by economics for the next year or so I think. UKIP's policies certainly will appeal on a superficial level, but when it comes to money management, I think that credibility is more important than the policies themselves. The general election could very well just swing on one big question: who do you trust to run the economy?

UKIP's policies are certainly improving overall, but so far there isn't a realistic spending plan.

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eublues

A powerful statement on the current state of the UK economy, and what UKIP would do differently, from Messrs Tim Congdon and John Whittaker, would be useful at this time. Congdon is well-known as an economist so his name would surely get it into the national media.