LONDON: British Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative party dropped its hostile tone towards the Eurosceptic UKIP party yesterday after it lost over 200 seats in local elections and a survey suggested it would lose a national vote next year.
The UK Independence Party, which wants Britain to leave the European Union and for immigration to be tightly restricted, won the fourth biggest number of seats in Thursday’s local elections, notching up its largest gains in such a vote ever.
It took seats from all three main political parties including the opposition Labour party, which came first but did not win as emphatically as it had hoped.
“We should show the highest respect for those who go out and cast their vote and respect too those who cast their vote for another party. That includes those who voted for UKIP,” George Osborne, Britain’s Finance Minister and a top Cameron ally, told a conference of grass-roots Conservatives in London. A different voting system and an expected higher turnout means UKIP will struggle to win many seats in a national election next year.
But its current success and expected strong showing in European election results on Sunday is spooking the established parties which see UKIP as an agent of disruption.
UKIP siphoned some support from Labour, polling showed, but took most of its votes from the Conservatives, stoking fears among Cameron and his allies it could split the vote in next year’s national election making it hard for them to win.
Before the vote, Cameron accused UKIP of saying “appalling” and “deeply unpleasant things” about immigration, which he has promised but failed to reduce. In 2006, Cameron dismissed UKIP as a bunch of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”.
However, Osborne, one of the party’s chief strategists, struck a different tone on Saturday as he sought to woo UKIP voters ahead of next year’s national election by telling them a vote for the anti-EU party would let Labour win power.
“There are too many people who share our values but did not feel able to vote for us,” he said.
“We’re going to do what I believe the public wants us to do - listen, respond, and deliver. Listen to the legitimate concerns people have about our economy, about immigration and welfare, about our schools and about Europe.”
Reuters
