UK Independence Party
Based on Wikipedia: UK Independence Party
In the summer of 2014, something unprecedented happened in British politics. A party that had been dismissed as a collection of cranks and single-issue obsessives topped a national election for the first time since 1906—and it wasn't Labour or the Conservatives. The UK Independence Party, known universally as UKIP (pronounced "you-kip"), had arrived. Within two years, they would achieve their ultimate goal: pulling Britain out of the European Union. And within four years after that, they would be functionally extinct.
This is the story of British politics' most successful insurgency—and its spectacular collapse.
The Professor's Rebellion
UKIP began not as UKIP at all, but as something called the Anti-Federalist League. The founder was Alan Sked, a history professor at the London School of Economics who had undergone a political conversion while teaching European Studies. The more he learned about the European project, the less he liked it.
In 1991, European leaders were negotiating the Maastricht Treaty, which would transform the European Economic Community into the European Union—a much deeper political union with ambitions toward a common currency, shared foreign policy, and something approaching federal governance. Sked thought this was a terrible idea. More importantly, he thought nobody in mainstream British politics was willing to say so.
So he started his own party.
The name "Anti-Federalist League" was deliberately chosen to echo the American Anti-Federalists who had opposed the United States Constitution in the 1780s. When Sked ran for Parliament in Bath in 1992, he received 0.2 percent of the vote. Not an auspicious beginning.
Two years later, Sked rebranded. The new name—UK Independence Party—was carefully crafted. He specifically avoided using "British" to prevent any confusion with the British National Party, a genuinely far-right organisation with roots in neo-fascism. This distinction would prove increasingly difficult to maintain as the years went on.
The Wilderness Years
Through the mid-1990s, UKIP remained a marginal force, dismissed by commentators as a typical single-issue party. Some drew comparisons to the French Poujadist movement of the 1950s—a populist, anti-tax, anti-establishment wave that flared brightly and burned out quickly.
The bigger problem was competition. In 1994, a billionaire named James Goldsmith founded the Referendum Party with the same Eurosceptic message but vastly deeper pockets. In the 1997 general election, the Referendum Party beat UKIP in 163 of the 165 constituencies where they competed head-to-head. Only one UKIP candidate managed to secure more than five percent of the vote: a former City commodities trader named Nigel Farage, running in Salisbury.
Then Goldsmith died. His party dissolved. And many of its members flowed into UKIP.
This is when things got interesting—and messy.
The Coup
Shortly after the 1997 election, a faction within UKIP decided that Alan Sked had to go. They found him too intellectual, too dictatorial, too professorial for a party that needed to connect with ordinary voters. The coup was led by Farage, along with two colleagues named David Lott and Michael Holmes.
Sked didn't go quietly. He left alleging that the party had been infiltrated by racist and far-right elements, including spies from the British National Party. The accusation gained traction when photographs emerged of Farage meeting with BNP activists.
Holmes took over as leader and immediately achieved what Sked never had: real electoral success. In the 1999 European Parliament elections—the first British EU election to use proportional representation rather than the traditional first-past-the-post system—UKIP won 6.5 percent of the vote and three seats. Farage became a Member of the European Parliament, representing South East England.
Proportional representation deserves a moment's explanation here because it's crucial to understanding UKIP's trajectory. Under Britain's normal system, the candidate with the most votes wins, even if they only get thirty percent. This brutally punishes smaller parties whose support is spread thinly across the country. Under proportional representation, seats are allocated roughly in proportion to vote share. A party with ten percent of the vote gets roughly ten percent of the seats. For UKIP, this meant the European Parliament was the one arena where they could actually win.
The irony was exquisite. The institution they despised was the only one where they could gain power.
The Farage Era Begins
Holmes didn't last long. After he suggested the European Parliament should have more power over the European Commission—a position that made no sense for an anti-EU party—the party's national executive committee, led by Farage, removed him. A period of relative stability followed under Jeffrey Titford and then Roger Knapman, a former Conservative Member of Parliament who brought some much-needed experience of mainstream politics.
The real breakthrough came in 2004. UKIP placed third in the European elections, winning twelve seats and 2.6 million votes. The party had received a boost from an unlikely source: Robert Kilroy-Silk, a former daytime television chat show host with a deep tan and considerable name recognition. Kilroy-Silk won a seat in the East Midlands, then immediately started agitating to take over the party.
When his leadership bid failed, Kilroy-Silk stormed off to found his own rival party called Veritas. He took several UKIP members with him, including both of the party's representatives on the London Assembly. UKIP's membership dropped by a third. Donations fell by more than half.
Veritas went nowhere. But the damage was done.
The Man of the People
In 2006, Nigel Farage finally became leader in his own right. He immediately set about reinventing the party's image—and his own.
Farage cultivated what might be called the "man in the pub" persona. He smoked openly. He was photographed with a pint in hand so often it became his visual signature. He spoke in a way that seemed unscripted, even when it wasn't. He dripped contempt for the established parties, whom he called "the Westminster bubble." He presented himself as an outsider, despite having attended a private school and worked as a commodities trader in the City of London.
The pose worked. Farage had an undeniable talent for connecting with voters who felt ignored by the major parties—particularly older, working-class white men in economically depressed areas of England.
More substantively, Farage transformed UKIP from a single-issue Eurosceptic party into a broader right-wing populist movement. Immigration became a core issue. The party called for drastically reduced numbers and explicitly rejected multiculturalism. Grammar schools—selective state schools that had largely been abolished in the 1960s and 70s—were to be restored. Climate change was dismissed as alarmist. Tax cuts were promised.
The target audience was clear: former Conservative voters who felt the party had abandoned them. Under David Cameron, who became Conservative leader in 2005, the Tories had moved in a socially liberal direction, embracing environmentalism and eventually supporting same-sex marriage. Farage's UKIP positioned itself as the home for those who found this intolerable.
Cameron responded with memorable contempt, describing UKIP members as "fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists." This only reinforced Farage's narrative that the establishment was out of touch and afraid of UKIP's popularity.
The Surge
Two events in 2009 turbocharged UKIP's rise. First, the parliamentary expenses scandal devastated public trust in mainstream politicians. Members of Parliament from all major parties were revealed to have claimed taxpayer money for everything from moat cleaning to duck houses. The public was disgusted, and outsider parties benefited.
Second, the European elections arrived at precisely the right moment. UKIP won 2.5 million votes and thirteen seats, becoming the second-largest British party in the European Parliament after the Conservatives. They had overtaken Labour.
Farage briefly stepped down as leader, returning in 2010 after his successor, Lord Pearson, proved unpopular with the party's grassroots. Pearson was perceived as too establishment, too friendly with the Conservatives. The rank and file wanted a fighter.
Under Farage's second stint as leader, UKIP refined its targeting with almost surgical precision. Data analysis showed the party performed best in areas with high concentrations of white working-class voters without university degrees. The party did poorly in diverse urban areas and places with lots of graduates. The campaign strategy adjusted accordingly.
The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, formed in 2010, provided an ideal backdrop. Its austerity programme—cuts to public services, wage freezes, benefit reductions—was perceived by many as punishing ordinary people while protecting the wealthy. UKIP positioned itself as the voice of those left behind.
Peak UKIP
By late 2012, opinion polls showed UKIP at around ten percent nationally. In the 2013 local elections, they averaged twenty-three percent in the wards they contested—up from sixteen percent four years earlier. Their number of local councillors exploded from four to 147. Political commentators reached for historical comparisons. This was the strongest result for a minor party since the Social Democratic Party in the 1980s, they said. This was an insurgency.
The 2014 European elections were UKIP's crowning achievement. They received 27.5 percent of the vote—more than any other British party. They won twenty-four seats. They came first or second in every region of the country, including their first seat ever in Scotland. In Wales and the industrial areas of northern England, traditionally solid Labour territory, UKIP made stunning inroads.
Farage and UKIP had become, as one observer put it, "truly household names."
That autumn, two Conservative Members of Parliament defected to UKIP: Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless. Both resigned their seats and won the subsequent by-elections as UKIP candidates. For the first time, the party had representatives in the House of Commons.
The 2015 general election looked like it might be a genuine breakthrough. Instead, it demonstrated the brutal mathematics of the British electoral system. UKIP won nearly four million votes—12.6 percent of the total, making them the third most popular party nationally. They received only one seat. Carswell held on; Reckless lost. The Liberal Democrats, with a third of UKIP's vote share, won eight seats.
Farage had promised to resign if he didn't win his own constituency of South Thanet. He lost. He resigned. Three days later, the party's national executive committee rejected his resignation and reinstated him. The episode did not suggest a healthy organisation.
Victory and Dissolution
Despite the disappointing general election result, UKIP's pressure had achieved something remarkable. David Cameron, desperate to stop the hemorrhaging of Conservative voters to Farage, had promised a referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union.
The referendum campaign of 2016 split the anti-EU forces. The official Vote Leave campaign was dominated by Conservative politicians like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. Farage and UKIP aligned with a separate group called Leave.EU, which ran a harder-edged campaign focused heavily on immigration.
Farage's most infamous contribution was a poster showing a long queue of refugees with the slogan "Breaking Point." It was unveiled the same day that Jo Cox, a Labour Member of Parliament who supported remaining in the EU, was murdered by a far-right extremist. The timing prompted widespread condemnation.
On June 23, 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union by 51.89 percent to 48.11 percent.
UKIP had achieved its foundational goal. And in doing so, it had made itself irrelevant.
The Collapse
What followed was a slow-motion disintegration. Farage resigned as leader again—this time for real. His successor, Diane James, lasted eighteen days before quitting. Paul Nuttall took over. Carswell left the party in early 2017 to sit as an independent, saying UKIP had served its purpose. Reckless followed shortly after.
The local elections of 2017 were a catastrophe. UKIP lost nearly all of its councillors. In the general election that year, their vote share collapsed to less than two percent—down from nearly thirteen percent just two years earlier.
The party lurched further right. Subsequent leaders flirted with anti-Islam rhetoric that went well beyond anything Farage had said. The party's remaining members and organisers drifted away. Some joined the Conservative Party. Others followed Farage to his new venture, the Brexit Party, which he founded in 2019 and later renamed Reform UK.
Today, UKIP exists largely on paper. Its leadership is obscure—the current leader, Nick Tenconi, is the chief operating officer of Turning Point UK, an American-style conservative youth organisation. The party's membership has dwindled to a fraction of its peak. It has no elected representatives at any level of government.
What UKIP Was
Analysts have long debated how to classify UKIP. Was it a single-issue party that grew beyond its original purpose? A right-wing populist movement? A far-right organisation masquerading as something more respectable?
Political scientists generally describe it as right-wing populist—a category that includes parties across Europe like France's National Rally (formerly the National Front), Italy's League, and the Sweden Democrats. These parties share certain characteristics: Euroscepticism, opposition to immigration, hostility to established elites, and appeals to a culturally conservative working class that feels left behind by globalisation.
UKIP fit the pattern neatly. Its economic policies were influenced by Thatcherism—low taxes, deregulation, scepticism of the welfare state—but its primary appeal was cultural. It spoke to voters who felt that Britain was changing in ways they didn't like, that immigration was transforming their communities, that the political establishment in London didn't understand or care about their concerns.
Farage was masterful at articulating this grievance while maintaining just enough distance from explicitly racist rhetoric to preserve mainstream acceptability. He called his supporters the "People's Army." He positioned UKIP as the voice of ordinary Britons against a detached elite. He framed European Union membership not as a technical policy question but as an existential threat to British identity and sovereignty.
The party's voter base, at its height, was remarkably specific: older, working-class, white men living in England, particularly in economically depressed areas along the east coast and in the post-industrial towns of the Midlands and North. These were places where traditional industries had collapsed decades earlier, where immigration was relatively low but anxiety about it was high, where the benefits of European Union membership seemed abstract while its costs—particularly the free movement of workers from Eastern Europe—felt immediate.
The Legacy
UKIP's most obvious legacy is Brexit itself. Without UKIP's pressure, the referendum would never have happened. David Cameron called it to neutralise the threat to his party's right flank. He expected to win easily and be done with the European question. He was wrong.
But UKIP also demonstrated something about the fragility of political parties and the volatility of electoral coalitions. A party can rise from nothing to winning a national election in the space of two decades. It can collapse from that peak to irrelevance in the space of three years. The forces it channeled—anxiety about immigration, distrust of elites, resentment of cultural change—did not disappear when UKIP did. They simply found other vessels.
Reform UK, Farage's current vehicle, is widely considered UKIP's successor. It operates with the same basic playbook: right-wing populism, anti-immigration rhetoric, hostility to the political establishment. Whether it achieves UKIP's level of success—or suffers UKIP's fate—remains to be seen.
What is certain is that UKIP changed British politics permanently. It proved that a new party could break through, at least at the European level. It demonstrated the power of populist messaging in an era of economic anxiety and cultural change. It achieved its primary goal against all expectations. And then, having achieved it, it ceased to have any reason to exist.
In the end, UKIP was undone by its own success. There may be worse political epitaphs.