United Kingdom Independence Party

United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), British political party founded in 1993. It espouses a populist libertarian philosophy centred on the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union.

Origins and the growth of Euroskepticism

The party has its roots in the Anti-Federalist League, a group led by London School of Economics professor Alan Sked that campaigned against the 1991 Maastricht Treaty on European Union. Sked founded UKIP in 1993, following Britain’s ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, the document that established the European Union. UKIP fielded nearly 200 candidates in the 1997 general election, but the party fared poorly, averaging only about 1 percent of the vote. UKIP fared better in the elections to the European Parliament in 1999, when it won three seats. Capitalizing on an increase in anti-immigration sentiment (and general weariness with the governing Labour Party), UKIP candidates won 12 seats in the European Parliament in 2004, and it posted a respectable showing in local elections that year. This momentum failed to translate into success in the national Parliament, however, as not one of the nearly 500 candidates the party fielded in the 2005 general election won a seat in the House of Commons. The party had an impressive electoral showing in 2009, however, when it won 13 seats in the European Parliament, surpassing the Liberal Democrats and pulling even with Labour.

In the European Parliament, UKIP generally sided with other Euroskeptic and anti-immigration parties, including France’s National Front and the Dutch Party for Freedom, and its members gained a reputation for making what some saw as outlandish or attention-seeking statements. In February 2010 UKIP leader Nigel Farage insulted EU President Herman Van Rompuy, and in November of that year, a UKIP member of the European Parliament was fined for an outburst in which he called a German member a fascist. In local elections in Britain in 2012, the UKIP made significant gains at the ballot box, increasing its share of the vote in England (mostly at the expense of the Conservatives) to about 14 percent, though this translated into a gain of only one seat (bringing them to a total of seven).

The party improved on that performance in spectacular fashion in May 2013, winning almost a quarter of the votes in English wards that it contested and gaining more than 100 local council seats. UKIP carried that momentum into the following year, winning more than 160 council seats in local elections in May 2014. Those elections were held concurrently with polls for the European Parliament, and UKIP rode a wave of Euroskeptic sentiment to a historic first-place finish, capturing more than 27 percent of the popular vote. That result marked the first time in modern British history that a party other than Labour or the Conservatives had won a national election. UKIP built on that success in October 2014, when it won its first elected seat in Parliament in a by-election in Clacton.

In the May 2015 general election, UKIP received nearly four million votes. Although that represented 13 percent of the total votes cast, it translated into just one parliamentary seat because of Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral methodology. Farage cited the result as evidence of a “bankrupt” voting system and called for a reform of the process. Having failed to win a seat in the Thanet South constituency, Farage announced that he would resign as party leader. UKIP’s executive committee refused to accept his resignation, however, and Farage continued in his role as head of the party. A year later, in May 2016, UKIP made further significant electoral inroads by winning seven seats in the National Assembly for Wales.

Brexit and its aftermath

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Perhaps the most obvious sign of UKIP’s growing influence in the British political scene was the June 2016 “in or out” referendum on Britain’s continued membership in the EU. The referendum had been promised by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron in January 2013, at a time when support for such a measure seemed mixed at best. As the EU struggled to deal with an increasingly assertive Russia on its eastern flank, a migrant crisis, and a wave of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS])-sponsored terrorist attacks, however, Euroskeptic sentiment in Britain rose. Despite a largely successful renegotiation of Britain’s role within the EU, polling indicated that the two sides were approaching the June 23 “Brexit” referendum evenly matched. Turnout for the referendum topped 70 percent, and 52 percent of voters opted to leave the EU. Farage characterized the event as Britain’s “independence day.” Cameron, who had staked his government on the outcome of the vote, resigned as prime minister.

Farage announced his resignation as UKIP leader in the wake of the referendum, and the party faced a turbulent succession contest. UKIP deputy chair Diane James was elected party leader in September, but she resigned after just 18 days, citing an inability to effect change among UKIP’s “old guard.” The leadership search resumed as Farage once again took up the leadership mantle on an interim basis. Steven Woolfe, a member of the European Parliament (MEP) who was widely seen as a front-runner in the race, withdrew his candidacy and quit the party after engaging in a physical confrontation with another UKIP MEP. In November 2016 MEP Paul Nuttall was elected leader of UKIP; Nuttall pledged that UKIP would supplant Labour as the party of the British working class.

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This prediction was not borne out at the polls, however. Nuttall himself failed to capture a parliamentary seat in a by-election in Stoke-on-Trent Central in February 2017, and Douglas Carswell, UKIP’s sole sitting MP, quit the party the following month. The party’s fortunes turned significantly worse on May 4, 2017, when UKIP suffered an almost complete collapse in local elections. In Britain’s first significant electoral test since the Brexit vote, UKIP’s representation in local councils all but evaporated with the loss of more than 140 seats. Nuttall said that the party had been a “victim of its own success,” and it appeared that UKIP supporters had overwhelmingly shifted their support to Conservative candidates. With even longtime supporters calling UKIP a spent force, Nuttall faced the monumental challenge of rebuilding the party in the weeks prior to a snap general election.

The 2017 general election and the decline of UKIP

That election, held on June 8, 2017, was a disaster for UKIP: the party failed to win any seats in Parliament, and it captured fewer than 600,000 total votes. This represented a precipitous 85 percent decline from the party’s performance in the 2015 general election. Nuttall announced his immediate resignation and went so far as to delete his accounts from the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May had called the election in the hope of securing a conclusive pro-Brexit mandate ahead of negotiations with the EU, but a surprisingly strong performance by Labour led to evaporation of the sitting Conservative majority, resulting in a hung Parliament. Talk immediately shifted to implementation of a “soft Brexit” that would preserve many of the ties between Britain and the EU. Farage reacted to the election outcome by calling for May’s resignation and suggesting that he would have “no choice” but to return to frontline politics if it appeared that Britain’s break with the EU was in jeopardy.

May formed a government with the support of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), and she would spend the next two years trying to usher through a Brexit deal while preserving the fragile coalition. UKIP was able to capitalize on the frustration of some voters during this period, garnering support as May struggled to gain approval for her Brexit plan from even the members of her own cabinet. Frequent leadership turnover, however, meant that public dissatisfaction failed to translate into any real political gains for UKIP. With the election of Gerard Batten as leader in 2018, UKIP tacked away from its libertarian roots to embrace an overt anti-Islamic stance. Farage responded by leaving the party in December of that year, and in April 2019 he launched the Brexit Party.

Almost immediately the Brexit Party eclipsed UKIP as a political force. In elections for the European Parliament in May 2019, Farage’s month-old party won one-third of the vote and 29 seats; UKIP managed to return none of the 24 MEPs who had been elected under Farage’s leadership in 2014. May announced her resignation, and she was replaced by Boris Johnson as Conservative leader and prime minister. After struggling to reach an agreement with Parliament, Johnson announced a snap election in an effort to break the Brexit deadlock. Farage strategically withdrew Brexit Party candidates from competitive Conservative constituencies in an effort to concentrate the “Leave” vote, and on December 12, 2019, Johnson’s Conservatives won a smashing victory at the polls. UKIP did not factor at all in the results, winning barely 0.1 percent of the total vote and leading many to question the viability of the party.