Tom Mludzinski: Europe is only the fifth most important issue to UKIP voters

Tom Mludzinski is Deputy Head of Politics for Ipsos MORI. In this article he tries to answer the question - 'Who are the people voting for UKIP?'.

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With UKIP recording their highest standing that Ipsos MORI has ever seen in our Political Monitor this week, and ahead of Prime Minister, David Cameron’s greatly anticipated and then postponed speech on Europe, it is a pertinent time to take a deeper look at UKIP voters. We have looked at our aggregate data from 2012 (combining all our polls from 2012) to build big enough base sizes to try to answer some questions about UKIP voters: who are they, where have they come from and what do they care about?

Following UKIP coming second in the Rotherham by-election last year, Nigel Farage, the party’s leader took the opportunity to claim “We're not just a protest collection of Tories from the shires.” Is he right?

Looking across everyone in 2012 who told Ipsos MORI they would vote for UKIP at an immediate general election, 43% of them had voted for the Conservatives in 2010. Therefore almost half of the support for UKIP is coming from former Conservative voters (note of course , this does not mean half of 2010 Conservative voters are switching to UKIP as we discuss later). Around a quarter are loyal UKIP supporters having voted for them in 2010. The rest is made up of handfuls of Liberal Democrats, Labour and BNP voters as well as people who did not vote in 2010.

Tom Mludzinski: Nuclear disarmament is vital

Tom Mludzinski, a Warwick University student and Research Assistant for BASIC, wants more momentum towards a nuclear weapon free world.

Obama’s slogan is simple and effective… Yes we can. It can be applied to anything and yet it rarely is. His brilliant and inspiring speeches succeed in breeding hope and inspiration, but what can the change be? Try putting this question in front of Obama’s beloved answer: Nuclear disarmament? … Yes we can. 

The British American Security Information Council (BASIC) aim to see a nuclear weapon free world, although this sounds impossible and the inevitable first reaction is ‘it will never happen’ there are movements to suggest otherwise. Barack Obama and indeed David Cameron talk of real change, new agendas, making a difference, so why not. Nuclear disarmament? Yes we can.

January 4th 2007 saw a seismic shift in movement toward a nuclear weapon free world when a group of former Secretaries of State and Defense published an article in the Wall Street Journal calling for a world free of nuclear weapons. The politicians involved are not those you may expect. Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, Sam Nunn and William Perry, hardly representatives of the liberal-left wing of American politics, but nevertheless concerned about the threat nuclear weapons pose to the world. Twelve months later they produced a follow up highlighting the urgency of the need to disarm.