British voters are sick of an out-of-touch political elite and want a new breed of leaders to stem immigration and free Britain from the shackles of the European Union.
So goes the pitch from the UK Independence Party, which expects to take votes from Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives in local elections on Thursday and so lay the foundations for a bid to break into parliament in 2015.
Formed partly by Conservative rebels to pull Britain out of the EU following the then Conservative government's signing in 1992 of the Maastricht Treaty on economic union, UKIP has since broadened its appeal to voters who dislike mainstream leaders' support for immigration and social changes such as gay marriage.
Like far-right movements across Europe, a party that polled 3 percent in the 2010 general election could make further gains from prolonged economic gloom and eat into support for Cameron, who already failed to secure an absolute majority two years ago.
While denying that "we hate Europe, or foreigners, or anyone at all" and calling the EU "only the biggest symptom of ... the theft of our democracy by a powerful, remote political elite", UKIP's populist manifesto ideas of rule by referendum in a Britain restored to greatness taps into a sense that "political correctness" has left today's Conservative leaders out of touch.
Attention on May 3 may focus on the race for mayor of London but Cameron will cast a more anxious eye on UKIP's performance across England. He may see evidence of grassroots anger among Conservative voters at what they see as his too centrist stance.
Some Conservatives, or Tories, blame him for a disappointing showing in 2010 against an unpopular Labour government that left Cameron in coalition with the very pro-Europe Liberal Democrats.
One recent survey suggested the Conservatives could lose 30 of their 307 parliamentary seats in 2015 because of Cameron's liberal views on issues like gay marriage. Another put support for his party below 30 percent for the first time since 2004.
After a bumpy few months for the government and its leader, with economic growth elusive, the budget unpopular and talk of scandal over party funding and Cameron's ties to Rupert Murdoch's media empire, UKIP activists scent blood.
"We're breathing down their necks at the moment. It's battle royal," beamed Bill Etheridge, who last year quit the Tories to seek a seat for UKIP in Dudley in the Black Country, an area of central England near Birmingham that was once the power house of the Industrial Revolution but is now peppered with deprivation.
"When you come out to the more traditional areas like the Black Country, the people around here are fiercely eurosceptic, determined to maintain good, old British values and they are unhappy with a liberal elite that pervades everything," he said.
Of Cameron, Etheridge was scathing: "I don't share any of his principles or beliefs. I am not sure he has any, but if he does, they aren't mine. That man and I have zero in common."
Etheridge, who runs a local branch of the Campaign Against Political Correctness, angered fellow Tories last year by posting a Facebook photograph of himself holding a golliwog - a black-face doll whose transformation over barely a generation from common childhood toy to shunned relic of a racist past symbolises for some Britons a form of elitist thought-control.
A NEW THREAT
Cameron has already had trouble taming a sizeable anti-EU, or "eurosceptic", faction within a party that has in the past torn itself apart over Europe. Such battles in the 1990s helped end the careers of the last two Conservative premiers, Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and Cameron is keen to avoid that fate.
But the emergence of a separate eurosceptic party building a broader portfolio of right-wing policies now poses him a distinct, external threat. While, like other minor parties, UKIP may struggle to concentrate enough votes in any one district to win a seat in parliament, it could split the vote on the right sufficiently to let others take seats from the Conservatives.
Some Conservative parliamentarians are openly annoyed with the leadership and worry about being outflanked on the right.
"If we are going to win elections, we've got to build that coalition of people who are broadly conservative," said Philip Davies, a eurosceptic Conservative rebel who enjoyed a 10-percent swing in his favour in the 2010 election after UKIP decided not to run against him and even endorsed his campaign.
"The people who might otherwise vote Conservative are not going to vote Conservative," Davies told Reuters. "It should worry everybody in the Conservative Party."
Once dismissed as a party of oddballs skating on the thin ice of acceptability, UKIP now has 12 of Britain's 78 seats in the European Parliament - thanks to proportional representation there - and has worked to break out of its southern heartland and broaden its appeal beyond hardliners who despise the EU.
Mid-term dips go with the territory for governments but Cameron may lose valuable support at grassroots level to UKIP on Thursday, which he may not be able to recover in 2015.
"The fact that people vote for UKIP in these elections needs to be taken seriously and it does obviously reflect a relatively widespread hostility to Brussels and all its works," said Philip Whyte, at the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank which generally supports the European Union's broad goals.
"It's a part of a wider European trend - the fact that the economy across Europe is so weak, that also helps a relatively inward looking agenda, which is what UKIP represents."
EMBARRASSED LEADERS
Cameron has come out this year to criticise what he called the failure of "state multiculturalism" and he angered fellow EU leaders in December by blocking plans intended to bolster the euro zone economy. But would-be UKIP voters seem unimpressed.
The party, whose logo uses the symbol for the pound sterling which it fears mainstream parties might one day abandon in favour of the euro, has touched a nerve in the Black Country.
"We like UKIP policies," grinned Elaine Poole, a 75-year-old retired secretary as she enjoyed a drink in a cosy and eccentric village pub, where customer lined up in single file to buy feisty, home-brewed ale through a wooden hatch.
"We want out of the Common Market," she said, using the name commonly used when a Conservative government took Britain into the European Economic Community in 1973. "We're getting all of the stones and none of the plums. They are dictating to us."
Her husband, Jeff, another uncompromising character of traditional values, clutched two dry old meat ribs between forefinger and thumb and bashed out a hectic rhythm, half-singing, half-shouting an old ditty between gulps of cider.
"We're the salt of the earth around here," he said.
But in the pubs and shopping malls of Dudley, Europe is just part of the problem: many voters are angry that the leaders of the major parties have ignored their views on everything from immigration to Europe. These should be core Conservative voters, but critics say Cameron's approach has alienated many.
"Most of the current generation of politicians are obsessed with positioning themselves in this so-called centre ground, so anything that looks like you are too far on one side of the argument, they shy away from," said Conservative lawmaker Davies.
OPPORTUNITY, RISKS
This disconnect presents a golden opportunity for a radical party like UKIP, but it is an opportunity riddled with hazards, notably that UKIP attracts support its rivals can brand racist.
"There is a profoundly dissatisfied and also quite xenophobic group of voters. UKIP won't want to hear it, but I'm afraid those are the people they are rallying," said Matthew Goodwin, an academic at the University of Nottingham and an expert in the politics of the far right.
"There remains quite a considerable amount of potential for a radical, anti-mainstream challenger party - the question for UKIP is whether it wants to occupy that territory."
He noted that in-fighting among more overtly racist or anti-Muslim far-right groups, like British National Party, National Front and English Defence League, could favour UKIP and limit the BNP's chances of repeating its 2-percent score of 2010.
UKIP's Etheridge balks at any association with the fringe right. Rather, he said, UKIP policies reflect widespread opinion which has been stifled by the scourge of political correctness among politicians in London, 100 miles (150 km) to the south.
"I would never, ever want anyone to put me in the same bracket as the British National Party and the National Front - I vociferously oppose them. I detest them," Etheridge said.
"But even when people are on the doorstep and they want to talk about immigration, they are terrified to say it."
Shoppers in Dudley, a struggling Black Country town of 200,000, perched on rugged hills once rich with the coal and limestone that fuelled the Industrial Revolution, are certainly uncomfortable talking freely about foreign workers.
"Immigration is definitely a problem," said one unemployed man who declined to give his name because he did not want to be labelled a "racist". "The eastern Europeans are taking jobs off of us - I've experienced it," he said, before hurrying away.
UKIP leader Nigel Farage, whose television appearances have established him as a polished spokesman for the party, also dismisses charges of xenophobia - his wife is German, he likes to point out - and perhaps understandably prefers to fudge the debate over where the party sits on a left-right spectrum.
"I don't see how defending liberty, defence of a small state, battling to save vital issues ... puts us to the right. Our support comes from across the board - Conservative, Labour and Lib Dems," he told Reuters as he looked forward with some relish to Thursday night's local election results.
"If we were perceived as being a protest party against the EU, we are now perceived to be much more than that."
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