Britannist

I think the Greens are strong only in 'pocket areas'.

Places like the Oxford East constituency (where they are on about 20% of the vote) or in the Labour-held Brighton Pavilion constituency where they nearly came a very good second at the last General Election.

They also stack up votes in parts of the London Borough of Lewisham and one or two other areas.

UKIP should follow the strategy of the Green Party which is to target its strongest areas and build up support at local level (ward branches, getting councillors elected) in order to boost the prospects of their parliamentary candidates in those constituencies.

I now believe that there are up to four parliamentary constituencies in England where the Greens may be able to become the main challenger to the sitting MP in the medium or long term.

That is the position UKIP should now be in - not the leftist, europhile Greens.

Britannist

Last year UKIP won just one local council seat (Mr. Allison at Hartlepool) out of many hundreds contested.

On the other hand, the Christian People's Alliance - which hardly stood anywhere but concentrated its efforts in less than a dozen or so wards up and down the land - won three councillors at the London Borough of Newham.

This speaks for itself. Targeting works.

Ask the Respect Party, the Scottish Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, the Democratic Unionist Party and others. They all target. And they all have MPs as well as councillors.

rogerthomas

Nigel was indeed correct when he said that we would have 1000 candidates. He meant across ALL elections on May 3rd. The total including Welsh and Scottish Assembly elections is 1031.

Besoeker

Yes, I thought about that too.
The (increased) number of seats contested is somewhat academic. It's only seats won that can make a difference.

ENGLISH UNIONIST

Speaking as one of the 958, I think 958 candidates is a good start. The important thing to stress, it seems to me, is that without a strong local government base poliitcal parties all too often risk either becoming out-of-touch with the ordinary man, woman, child and dog in the street; and moreover, by contesting municipal elections we will hopefully help destroy the myth that UKIP is a single-issue party.

By way of an aside, may one be permitted to ask whether members (and particularly candidates) favour the retention of the first-past-the-post voting system for local government elections in England, Scotland and Wales, or the introduction of the single transferable vote (which, incidentally, already applies to local government elections in Northern Ireland)?

Jim Smith

As a % of the seats up for election it is about the same as 2006.

Since Membership has increased it does not look like much progress.

Anthony Butcher

Are you sure about that? UKIP doesn't release membership numbers, and when the leaders do give numbers they are rarely accurate (remember Roger Knapman claiming 30K at one time?). Even the party NEC apparently doesn't know how many members there are, so I would assume nothing.