alfred the great

The election of a tory goverment in the next general election, is a foregone conclsion. People have short memories.18 years of a party that took us into europe and signed every treaty put in front of it.A party that invented the word sleaze,was then followed by this shower.There is no conceivable difference in what either of the parties intend to do about europe or immigration.We will have tory landslide because of how bad this lot are. The only alternatives are ukip or the bnp. One represents 1 social class ,the other.Ido see a demise for ukip,because its not sowing good seeds in the ground,ef its votes in council elections are poor , were i live ,there is only the bnp standing .So until there is an alternatve they will get my vote.No disrespect to ukip but its not a grassroots movement.ps excuse spelling i have just finished a night shift.

Mikeuk

Correct. Cameron is now even masquerading as a right-winger on crime.

Brown needs to change the rules to save himself and PR could help all small parties.

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'We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say "We must not wage war." It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace.'

Martin Luther King Jr 1964

Raymond Finch

Alfred.

I agree the 2 parties are as bad as each other.
I have to disagree about UKIP not being a grassroots movement. Where I live we are. We also more than doubled our seats contested and more than doubled our percentage share of the vote in may. We had the youngest age profile of any partys candidates and we also had the youngest candidate in the county. We were, on a night when the Tories crushed all before them, the only other party to increase our vote. We beat Labour more times than they beat us and we were also about 30 votes from second place in my ward. This was the first year we in Havant have done any real campaigning in the local elections. The secret is going out on the streets, talking to people, writing AND DELIVERING leaflets on local issues rather than banging on about how a 10 years dead PM should be dug up and hanged. Those things are unimportant to the vast majority of people on a day to day basis. They want their council tax lowered and their bins collected regularly. If you can persuade them that you can and will do those things, they will vote for you. It is that simple.

As for the party you presently vote for. Where they do well electorally is they intensely target specific seats. We in UKIP tend to stand everywhere we can. The 2 strategies both have things to commend them but I personally favour, long term, our one. It builds party strength and also helps in the General Election as voters are more aware of us by the time the serious election takes place. I am the PPC for Eastleigh and I fully expect the work the local party do where we enter a full slate in the locals to, at the minimum, save the deposit. I fully intend to win the seat though and we have a programme in place where I can campaign effectively to get to as many of the voters of Eastleigh as possible. We have started it already and, if I am good enough as a candidate (and I would not stand if I did not think I was better than those in power now) then we should cause a real stir.

It is in the end down to belief, a full policy range, organisation and, crucially, fund raising. You need all four of those pillars to start winning. I think, at least where I work, we are well on the way to getting there.

marcus

I can vouch for the intial point, at I have come in contact with many tories who say they vote ukip at euro elections. Speaking to the tory table here in Richmond during the London elections, most i spoke to were all eurosceptic, however were not as clued up as to the influence the eu has. I hope the strong eurosceptic wing of the tory party continues to grow.

Nigel has predicted our results accurately thus far, I pray and hope he is right about the euros as well. His aim is for us to be the biggest single party at that election. Now although the Euro MEPS can't get us out of the EU it would be a massive statement for the government. Can you imagine, we are members of the EU but almost all the British MEPs were from a party that wanted out of it. The government of the day would almost be forced to give an in/out referendum. There would be massive press around it as well, lifting ukip right into the heart and give us a great launch pad going into the GE.

HM

Maybe this 'long term, spread out' strategy would be good under proportional representation but it is clear that if you campaign intensively in one area with first-past-the-post, you're going to start getting councillors.

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mrabody

I believe that the BNP should be given credit for recognizing the importance of contesting local elections and working to get local councillors elected. Whilst individual UKIP branches have been putting up local candidates for several years, it appears that the party has only begun to recognize the importance of regularly contesting in the past couple of years. Obviously, it will take time before this strategy bears fruit.

The problem for the BNP is that it is a much smaller and less wealthy party than UKIP and while it has made very effective use of the resources available to it to date it is beginning to bump up against the constraints it's lack of resources impose. Given how unpopular Labour is, this year's local council elections should have been a watershed for the BNP. They should have been able to win at least 40 seats. Instead they only won about 10. I suspect that they were relatively unsuccessful because they had to denude various regions of money and volunteers in order to get a seat on the London Assembly. Likewise they admitted that they didn't stand in Crewe and Nantwich because it was too soon after local council elections and the London elections.

So if UKIP continues to contest local elections, our we will over time improve our results and we will outperform the BNP simply because we have more resources.

The BNPs problem is further compounded by the fact that in national contests such as the Euro elections next year, its small size and lack of funds make it very difficult to mount a credible campaign where it is unable to focus on a few key areas but needs to do well "across the board".

Independence Now!

Is it? The latest opinion poll puts the Tories on just 41% and the Labour Party on 28% so the previous chasm is starting to narrow. Mr Cameron is a complete lightweight and I hope and believe the British people will recognise this when we get nearer that election. If I were the Labour Party, I would really start to focus on the Tories and their lack of coherent policies some of which could well have been written on the back of a fag packet in a pub.

Jonathan Lloyd

To get seats at Westminster we need to build up some sort of regional powerbase, as the Labour party did in the Industrial areas of the North in the early 20th C. I think we should concentrate efforts for Westminster elections in key areas where we do well, and where we have active members, such as the South West - regardless of whether the tories standing are Europhile or not. We polled more votes at the last election than the SNP and Plaid Cymru, but they have seats, because all their support is concentrated in Wales and Scotland.