It is these views on immigration that has certain people viewing the party with fear and what it could mean to their communities should UKIP hold the balance of power over the UK. Over the past year UKIP have seen huge progress in gaining their first two seats in the House of Commons, Douglas Carswell winning the seat of Clacton and Mark Reckless. Mr Reckless had defected from the Conservatives and resigned his seat in order to cause the by-election. He was subsequently re-elected for UKIP in Rochester and Strood. UKIP have essentially followed the same strategy that was seen from the Liberal Democrats in the 1980's-90's by "building a network of local councillors as a springboard to success on the national stage."(Brant, 2014) .
As we can see from Figure 1 which compares the number of Google searches for both UKIP and Conservative Party's over the past 10 years. UKIP, when compared to the Conservative party, has become far more prevalent in peoples minds over the past two years, especially in May 2014 when the UK European elections were held and UKIP became the first party in over a century to win a major election over either Labour or Conservative (Robinson, 2014). However, this chart only represents the number of searches and not peoples opinion on what they found whether that be positive or negative. Though is does highlight various peaks in interest in UKIP which far outstrips interest in the Conservatives. .
What impact will UKIP have on British Politics following their initial success in causing the leaders of the 'big three' to start to worry after their win in the UK European elections. Looking at the polls one would be expecting UKIP to do very well in the upcoming election of 2015 should their trend continue upwards. As we can see from this aggregation of all the opinion polls for the political parties of the UK (Figure 2) the popularity of UKIP seen by the purple line has slowly grown since 2010 and has been recently polling 15% on a regular basis and effectively overtaking the Liberal Democrats as the third largest party in the UK opinion polls with some estimates coming to 25%.