UKIP wins big in UK local government elections

UKIP leader, Nigel Farage looks a happy man here, with good reason.  His party have been big winners in the British local government elections.  UKIP is a strongly libertarian party.

With the count not yet completed, they have won at least 42 seats and have come second in around two hundred others.  The gained second place in two by elections with 28% and 24% of the vote.

Here is UKIP’s report: 

The overnight story of the county council elections has seen UKIP on course to taking well over a million votes across the country. 

Earlier today, UKIP had taken 43 seats already. Not even a quarter of all results have yet been declared yet we have already surpassed the prediction of political pundits that we would take 40! 

UKIP has taken a staggering 16 seats on Lincolnshire County Council. With just a few seats left to declare, it is almost certain that we have denied the Conservatives an overall majority on that Council and we will no doubt become the ‘official opposition’.

 

Elsewhere, Hampshire saw UKIP take 10 seats and in Essex, the Party took nine seats – tied with the Lib Dems and Labour. Other wins included a District Council by-election, and seats in Surrey, Dorset and Gloucestershire.

 

Where UKIP and Labour both stood, we have outpolled them – taking three votes to every two that Labour take on average. That 3:2 ratio also holds where UKIP and the Liberal Democrats both stand.

 

Where we are standing, we are taking an average of 26.2% of the vote meaning we will take more than 1 million votes – more than we took at the entire General Election in 2010!  We might even reach 1.5 million.

 

Where we stood in 2009 and 2013, our vote has gone up by 14.5% on average so far.  And in addition to the 43 seats that we have won, we have another 200 second-place finishes.

The big losers were the conservatives who lost 66 seats, and the Liberal Democrats, (no relation of ours) who have lost 16 of their seats.

In the South Shields by election UKIP came second, beating the Conservatives by a 2 to 1 margin.  The Lib Dems came in 7th behind the British National Party who beat them 2-1 and they only narrowly beating 'Howling Laud Hope' (Right) of the Monster Raving Loony Party.  This result puts them down into real joke territory.