Claim 8e4c0225Checked 21 Jul 2026
TrueOn the truth scale
“UKIP picks up people Farage calls “patriotic Old Labour.””
Interpreted asidiom
“UKIP attracts people Farage calls “patriotic Old Labour.””
Reasoning & Evidence21 Jul 2026
The claim that "UKIP attracts people Farage calls 'patriotic Old Labour'" is accurate as stated. Farage himself, in a December 2011 Guardian interview, referenced research showing that 49% of UKIP voters came from "classical liberals, patriotic old Labour and people who otherwise would not vote for anybody." While the British Election Study found that only 17% of UKIP voters had voted Labour in 2010 (vs. 45% Conservative), this refutes the idea that Old Labour was the *primary* source — not that UKIP attracted *any* such voters. The claim is modest, merely asserting that UKIP attracts some former Labour/patriotic Old Labour voters, not that they constitute the majority. Multiple sources confirm a non-trivial former-Labour component: LSE research (2013) found UKIP was "as successful winning over grumpy Labour voters during the previous government [2004-10] as it is at winning grumpy Tories now"; Ford and Goodwin (2014) found 71% of UKIP voters agreed with five leftwing ideological statements, close to Labour's 81%; and Oxford research (Evans) found former 2005 Labour voters did gravitate to UKIP, sometimes through circuitous routes. The existence of a former-Labour component of UKIP's support base is well-documented and not seriously disputed.
Sources: British Election Study, "UKIP: Picking up lumps of old labour support?" (https://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-findings/ukip-picking-up-lumps-of-old-labour-support/); LSE British Politics, "UKIP's rise is not just a problem for the Conservatives" (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ukips-rise-is-not-just-a-problem-for-the-conservatives-they-are-emerging-as-the-party-of-choice-for-disaffected-and-angry-voters-from-all-parties-cite-original-source/); The Guardian, "Farage says Ukip could offer Tories electoral pact" (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/dec/19/farage-ukip-tories-pact-referendum); The Guardian, "Ukip has divided the left, not the right" by Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/16/ukip-divided-left-right-cut-labour-support); University of Oxford, "Working class votes and Conservative losses: solving the UKIP puzzle" (https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4c4d2f06-30e4-40e5-b040-c3706a8646e8/files/rjq085k92n)
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