UKIP took votes from both Labour and Tories winning almost 100 seats, well over predicted 80, also gained what US would term 'Reagan Democrats' in industrial north, the working class that's been abandoned by traditional political parties. Two UK parties hired Obama gurus Axelrod and Messina and both flopped

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5/23/14, "Labour group leader ousted by UKIP in Solihull," itv.com

"With seven results in at Solihull, Ukip has taken the Kingshurst and Fordbridge ward from Labour, unseating the party's group leader, David Jamieson - a former MP who once served as parliamentary under-secretary for transport in Tony Blair's government."

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5/23/14, "Euroskeptics Make Big Gains in UK Local Elections," AP via ABC News
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"Britain's anti-European Union party has made big gains in local elections, taking votes from both the governing Conservatives and main opposition Labour Party.

It's a strong performance for the U.K. Independence Party, which advocates pulling Britain out of the EU and stopping the unfettered right to entry of European citizens.

With about a third of results declared Friday from voting for 161 local authorities, UKIP had almost 100 seats, well over its predicted total of 80.

Party leader Nigel Farage said the result meant "we are serious players" in British politics.

Labour also made gains, especially in London, which largely defied the UKIP surge.

Britons also voted Thursday in European Parliament elections. Those results will be announced Sunday along with tallies from 27 other EU countries."

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David Axelrod was hired to advise UK Labour, Jim Messina to advise Tories. Correlation doesn't equal causation:

5/16/14, "Former Obama adviser stumbles in British election," CBSNews.com, Jake Miller

"The British election will pit Axelrod against a onetime ally of his back home: Jim Messina, the president's 2012 campaign manager, is advising the Tories." (last sentence)

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5/23/14, "Some Reflections On The UKIP Earthquake," James Delingpole, Breitbart

"1. UKIP are not just the "Conservative party in exile." Some of their most significant winnings have been in the industrial north, in towns like Rotherham. Like Margaret Thatcher they have galvanised the working classes - see also their success in Essex - and stolen traditionally Labour votes.

2.CCHQ's carefully orchestrated anti-UKIP smear campaign, which embraced not just all the right-wing newspapers but even their new friends of convenience at the Guardian, was a disaster. It almost certainly brought UKIP many more votes than it lost them, by making them seem unfairly persecuted, while burnishing their rebel image. Expect lessons to be learned and the attacks to be much more insidious and subtle in the run-up to the 2015 General Election.

3. The case for a UKIP/Conservative pact - as advocated by Jacob Rees Mogg, Douglas Carswell and Peter Bone - is looking stronger than ever. Grant Shapps ruled this out on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning. But how long is Shapps going to keep his job anyway?

4. The Lib Dems are toast. At least the other two loser parties can claim some sops of consolation from this debacle - Labour for seizing Hammersmith and Fulham; Conservatives for capturing Kingston from the Lib Dems. But the Lib Dems this election has been a nightmare. Everyone hates them. And what reason would anyone not to hate these principle-free chancers?

5. No good deed goes unpunished: "In Basildon, the Tory council leader Tony Ball, who pushed through the controversial traveller evictions at Dale Farm, lost his ward to UKIP." One of the tragedies of what - for all UKIP's appeal to Labour voters - is really a civil war of the right is that sound politicians are being punished as well as rubbish ones. Bitter Conservatives shouldn't blame UKIP: they should blame David Cameron and his "modernisers" who threw the baby out with the bathwater.

6. Labour's poor showing will only increase demands for the defenestration of their appalling leader Ed Miliband, who remains the Conservatives best hopes of winning an outright victory in 2015. They've probably left it too late but I still think they should. He needs more than David Axelrod's turd-polishing skills to make him look remotely electable.

7. UKIP are here to stay. Roll on the Euro Election results. Viva la revolucion!"

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5/23/14, "Nigel Farage: UKIP to be 'serious players' at general election," BBC

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5/23/14, "Rejoice! But Not Too Much - a first response to the elections," HitchensBlog, UKSundayMail

"I think that by Sunday night it will be even clearer that the discredited old parties of British politics are in serious trouble. They are paying for nearly 50 years of treachery and lies. They lied about the real nature of the Common Market and its successor, the European Union.
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They lied about immigration. They lied about the economy, they lied about schools, they lied about crime and justice. They lied about unemployment and they lied about global warming. They are still lying about all of them, aided by great battalions of professional liars, hired by them but paid for by you and me.

I have been saying all these things for years, and derided for it by the 'mainstream opinion' which is now utterly puzzled by an unprecedented voters' revolt. They maunder about what the existing parties can do to head this off, or contain it, or defeat it, not realizing that the whole point of it is that these parties have themselves been rejected by legions who once supported them. and in many cases will never do so again. 

They see the voters' revolt as a problem to be managed not a reason for change. They are too used to lying, and they lie too instinctively, to turn for honesty when it is the only possible remedy. 
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As so often I am reminded of Rudyard Kipling’s bitter jibe in another circumstance, summarising the secret motto of the politician as ‘I would not dig, I dared not rob - and so I lied to please the mob’.

These parties, their spokesmen and the supposedly independent commentators who have been in their pockets and at their lunch tables for so long have no idea what has hit them. How funny that the Republic of London, which is barely part of Britain any more, was the only major part of England where UKIP’s surge was weak. But London is where all these people live, who do not understand their own country because they never visit it, except for swift and insulated photo-opportunities.
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On Friday morning they floundered to explain the UKIP vote, which they had all hoped to destroy with a tornado of smears. Well, the smears failed. The collusion between media and political parties failed. The BBC’s blatant bias failed. If they can fail once, can they fail again? Will they keep on failing? That is one of the things I am not sure of.  
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Listen. Millions of people really are sick of the unwanted changes forced on them by European Union government. They are tired above all of the mass immigration which they were never asked about and which has changed their lives.
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Will this now turn into a real political change? That is very doubtful. The major parties still have huge resources, especially access to millionaire donors, to state aid and to the special treatment which the BBC gives them under broadcasting rules (not to mention the even more special, but less helpful, treatment it gives UKIP).
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And UKIP itself is a formless thing, a mixture of exiled Thatcherites, golf-club nostalgists and now of Labour defectors who might not feel much in common with their fellow-voters. It has no coherent position beyond departure from the EU, no real answer to the Left’s cultural and moral revolution, only one significant or persuasive figure (and dozens of very unpersuasive ones).
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The Conservative Party, which ought years ago to have been closed down for multiple fraud, may yet survive,  especially if David Cameron’s luck holds and Scotland votes to leave the United Kingdom. That would give him the real chance of a Westminster majority, an aim which would otherwise be laughable.

So today I delight in the discomfiture of the enemies of Britain, and in the defeat of a nauseating and inexcusable alliance between politicians and media against the people.
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But I still see no clear way out of the deep steep-sided pit into which this country has been led by its political class. All that is happened is that we now know that we are *in* such a pit." via Lucianne


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