I am writing this at 0230, utterly shattered. Half of the voting day I have been sat/stood outside a polling station, proudly displaying my rosette, and chatting to a fair proportion of those exiting about their strength of feeling for UKIP. That was motivation enough for me to keep up the good fight!
Then, I observed the verification of the Euro votes – where I live we only had the Euros. Ballot papers face down, but the few flashes we had of them showed 50/50 Tory/UKIP votes in a mainly rural council area. We knew the postal vote turnout was around 20%, and the ballot box turnout was 20-25%, so an awesome turnout for Sunday night’s count, and another night of excitement. This will definitely be a record turnout for the Euro election.
But, as I write this, I am listening to BBC’s “Vote 2014” and following their ticker on the screen. While we have not yet achieved the Valhallah of overall control of a council (although there is a prediction we could take Great Yarmouth), we are taking lots of votes, +25% on the 2010 results, and, as I write this, 56 seats from the 500 declared so far, around 11% of seats, which would give us well over 200 seats, far more than Nigel’s very modest 100 seat prediction. However, we need to beware of London, where we are unlikely to take many seats.
Some wonderful results tonight – Rotherham 10 seats, UKIP the official opposition. Castle Point, Southend and Basildon in Essex take 5 seats each, and push the councils into “no overall control”.
The LibLabCon pundits on the programme are waffling. Of course, there are no UKIP people in the studio, but Steve Crowther, Steven Woolfe and Winston Mackenzie have been interviewed over the airwaves.
The legacy parties (and the BBC) are running scared of UKIP. The People’s Army is on the move!
Steve, indeed they are fantastic results and see a few samples of good results in Byron’s examples in http://ukipdaily.com/purple-tide-continues/#.U4BZRfldWSo.
The significant poll was one which said that 60% of people voting for UKIP in the Euros would vote for us in the locals, and 40% in a General Election. That would give us over 32% (on average across the country with higher in areas other than London, Scotland and Wales) for the Euros, but around what the Opinion Polls give us for the GE: 14-17%. That is the real challenge.
However, just like the Lib Dems in the past, we have to focus on our “hotspots”, where we are strongest with Councillors on the ground. Nigel has already said this, quoting 20 as the number although there perhaps needs to be some debate over the precise number – in my opinion, activists won’t want to travel a long way (say, more than an hour’s travel), so we need a fair spread across the “hot” regions.
Fantastic results. Fingers crossed for tomorrow. A Euro win would be the icing on the cake, and re-inforce the message that UKIP are serious players, and are here to stay.
“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.” Go UKIP.
Well done, and thanks for all your work writing here.
I’m looking forward to the inevitable spin, first instances of which were that the Libdems have more seats than UKIP – but don’t mention how many seats they lost … and then absolutely staggering memory loss by the hacks, who now blame the results on the bad campaigns by the legacy parties.
If it still holds true that many voters who have voted for their old, non-UKIP local councillors have voted UKIP in the EU elections, then we’re in for a stellar Sunday night, and I am already looking forward to the general meltdown in the MSM come Monday. we’ll not let them get away with what they’ve done!
Well done Brian,
I have been glued to the computer for hours watching the ticker-tape increase. Great results so far. Lets hope it keeps up.