UKIP claim first parliamentary seat following Clacton by-election victory

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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U.K. Independence Party have claimed their first seat in British Parliament following victory in Clacton by-election early on Friday, posing great deal of threat to the country’s mainstream parties.

The anti-EU and anti-immigration party also came close of achieving success in second seat proving it a potential contender in May 2015 election run-up.

The victory in Clacton came as a surprise which made Douglas Carswell Ukip’s first elected MP through claiming 60 per cent of the votes after he defected as a sitting parliamentarian for Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives to UKIP, which didn’t put up a candidate for the area when it was last contested in 2010. Whereas, his nearest rival Giles Watling, who replaced Mr Carswell as the Tory candidate in the seat, won just 24.6%. And the Liberal Democrats lost their deposit.

While in Heywood and Middleton, in northern England, a traditional stronghold for the opposition Labour party, UKIP got almost 39 per cent of the votes, up from less than 3 per cent in 2010. They lost the seat with just 617 votes against the Labour candidate Liz McInnes. 

The new Ukip member, Mr Carswell has told supporters after the poll results: “There is nothing that we cannot achieve.”

After the by-election results that represent one of the biggest swings in British electoral history, Ukip leader Nigel Farage has stated: “We are the most national of all political parties.

“We are the only party that can get big vote shares in Tory heartlands and in Labour heartlands. No other party crosses those boundaries – those old divides of left and right and the divides of class.

“The focus has now moved across the Thames estuary to Rochester and Strood, where another Tory lawmaker, Mark Reckless, joined his friend Carswell last month by switching to Ukip. There is a chance of more defections from Conservatives if they would not take appropriate measures to tackle the problem.

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