Claim 7dd72a43Checked 09 Jul 2026
Partly True/FalseOn the truth scale
“UKIP picks up classical liberals.”
Reasoning & Evidence09 Jul 2026
UKIP did present itself as a libertarian, low-state party, and contemporaneous reporting showed it was attracting some disillusioned former Liberal Democrat sympathisers as well as Conservative defectors. (ukip.org) But the best academic evidence from around the same period found that UKIP support was driven mainly by Euroscepticism, anti-immigration sentiment, and dissatisfaction with mainstream parties, with two main voter groups: affluent Conservative "strategic defectors" and more disaffected "core loyalists." (cambridge.org) So "UKIP picks up classical liberals" is directionally plausible, but it overstates how central classical liberals were to the party’s broader support base. (ukip.org) Sources: UKIP Constitution (UKIP / ukip.org); "Ukip attracts anti-immigrant vote as polite alternative to BNP" (The Independent); "Strategic Eurosceptics and polite xenophobes: Support for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in the 2009 European Parliament elections" (Cambridge University Press / European Journal of Political Research).
From article
It would be silly to say that – you could never, ever represent the whole country – and since I was elected to the European Parliament I’ve always said that I’m not going to represent the whole constituency (and remember it’s vast – six million voters), I’m there to represent the people who voted for me and to use that position to try to persuade others that we are actually right.
But the interesting thing about [the UK Independence Party] is that it attracts an incredibly diverse range of people. We pick up what I would call ‘patriotic Old Labour’, we pick up classical liberals who hate the big state and believe in individual freedom and we pick up traditional Tories who believe in the country. And don’t forget that when we started [in 1993], only about six of us in the country believed in this.
Sources opened+ 132 search hits considered
| [1] | academic.oup.com |
| [2] | cambridge.org |
| [3] | theguardian.com |
| [4] | independent.co.uk |