Parliament Has It's First U K I P Member

[ChillDoubt]

Douglas Carswell has won the Clacton seat following his defection from the Tories to UKIP and by some margin it would appear.

Link and full voting breakdown to follow.

[ChillDoubt]

UKIP 21,113
Conservative 8,709
Labour 3,957

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-29549414

A 44% swing to UKIP and Carswell had 60% of the vote.

[ChillDoubt]

Very magnanimous speech by Carswell and got a good dig in at the Tories and their smear campaign against himself and Reckless.

I have a feeling that Farage will be a tad more forthright when interviewed.

[Gromit]

Will this convince the other Eurosceptic Conservative MPs to defect?
Will Kate Hoey defect from Labour?

[Postdog]

Please don't let that smug git get any more. They are just Tories by another name and that guy is so full of himself and horse dung.

[BlackadderV]

LibDems in Clacton, 1.37% of the votes. Lost deposit. God is good!

[ChillDoubt]

Nice, reasoned assessment there Postdog.......

Odd though that so many of the electorate are so severely disillusioned with the norm that he's managed to sway them.

[BlackadderV]

One could argue the case that UKIP are Tories and the Conservatives are not, hence the popularity of the former.

[ChillDoubt]

And as many said last week, you can't really put a Rizla between the Labour and Tory parties at the moment anyway.

[Hypognosis]

If the parties have become indistinguishable then, in a weird way, we're being governed by -unelected- focus-group members.

Put differently, aren't we paying them £74,000pa to be visibly different in polcies, so that we have a choice at the ballot box?

We can't steer the car unless there's an obvious fork in the road.

[youngmafbog]

UKIP absoluytley anhialtred the other parties:
UKIP 59.7 %
Cons 24.6 %
Lab 11.2
LibDem 1.4.

This cannot be good for ANY of the other parties.

No doubt Mickey (and his mates) will be along shortly to tell us UKIP is not popular again though!!

[janbee]

UKIP has it's first, but not last, MP. It's time the other parties sat up and took notice. They've been too complacent for too long and now it's payback time. Lab/Con/LIMP ... they're all the same at the moment. Not one of them cares about Britain, the indigenous Brits or what WE think/want/need. They are ALL self serving Brussels Boys. The other parties have had this warning so... ...

[youngmafbog]

I think you mean won? If you do then no it is not sad and certainly not terrifying.

It is the wake up call we need to our main parties to stop ignoring the electorate.

We all owe Nigel a debt of gratitude for that.

[ludwig]

It's an interesting result. Even allowing for the fact that European and mid-term elections are used as protest votes, the size of the majority is impressive.

[naomi24]

Had an 'unknown' been standing for UKIP, I wonder if the result would have been quite as impressive?

[Cloverjo]

PiperH, when you said "the Ukip one", I assumed you meant Farage himself. ;)

[berniecuddles]

ukip may not be popular but they *** it tho didnt they!

[naomi24]

They certainly did - and they weren't far off in the other one either. There will be some worried politicians on both sides out there this morning.

[ToraToraTora]

The message to Dave is clear, get a lot more Eurosceptic or hand no 10 to the marxist.