“UKIP is a serious party here to stay and Tory MP Claire Perry needs to wake up to that”

The champagne is on ice as jubilant UKIP supporters prepare to celebrate success when the EU election results are announced tomorrow (Sunday) following the surge in their support at the council elections.

Though there were no council elections in Wiltshire – they took place last May – they believe the evidence of winning 167 council seats across the country demonstrates that UKIP is a serious political contender.

And that it will be taking parliamentary seats at next year’s general election.

“I am convinced – and I think most UKIP supporters are – that we will end up with a dozen or more MPs next year,” David Pollitt, UKIP’S parliamentary candidate for the Devizes constituency, told Marlborough News Online.

“And here in Devizes we shall be giving Tory MP Claire Perry a real run for her money.

“We were dismissed as a protest vote and a passing fad last year and, true to form, the disconnected politicians of the old parties are dismissing us again today. And they keep trotting out this nonsense.

“If anyone had any doubts before, I think they should all realise now that we have arrived and are a serious and substantial political party, certainly something fresh and different that people seeking change want to vote for.”

He said that with UKIP taking votes from Labour, Conservative and Lib-Dem parties, they also failed to understand that 10 to 20 per cent of UKIP’s supporters were people who had refused to vote in the past.

“They felt themselves disenfranchised by the political system,” 57-year-old businessman Mr Pollitt, Wiltshire’s sole UKIP councillor, pointed out.

“And certainly I haven’t spoken to anyone during the EU campaign who said they were just voting for us in the local and EU elections but not in the general elections.

“That didn’t happen with the Lib-Dems in their rise of support in the past and it isn’t going to happen to us. And we will prove that once the EU results are announced tomorrow and you will see that people have voted for UKIP in their millions.”

Former Tory councillor Tony Molland, now chairman of Devizes UKIP, who received 40 per cent share of the vote when he fought a Tory councillor at last year’s Wiltshire Council elections, agrees.

“The council election results are what I was expecting, at the minimum. We hoped that at least 150 seats across the country would be taken, may be more.  And by winning 167 we scored a great success.

“I bet Jane Scott, the Tory leader of Wiltshire Council, was very pleased we didn’t have any elections here this year because on the swing that we have seen indicates we would have taken seven or eight council seats, not just the one David Pollitt achieved.

“I just hope that David Cameron stops treating the swivel-eyed loonies, as he thinks we are, and realises that we are a sensible, main-stream political party, which is what we now are.

“And I think Claire Perry will have a considerable loss of her majority when Devizes goes to the polls next year. The way things are going at the moment from all the campaigning we have been doing in the constituency make that obvious.

“In the past six weeks I’ve been out on the campaign trail I don’t think I came across less than half a dozen people who were against us. And I talked to hundreds of people.”

“What was significant was they included an element hadn’t voted for years. “But they were certainly going to vote for UKIP at the first opportunity and were disappointed that we didn’t stand at the 2010 general election,” he added.

Marlborough News Online is waiting for comments from the Conservative and Labour parties.