The UK Independence Party (UKIP) is a right-wing populist and Eurosceptic political party in the United Kingdom which was founded by Alan Sked on 3 September 1993. UKIP was initially a single-issue political party which opposed Britain's membership in the European Union, but Nigel Farage eclipsed Sked as the party's leader in 1997 and became its official leader in 2006. Farage oversaw UKIP's adoption of a wider platform which included opposition to rising immigration, and it promoted British unionism and nationalism, rejected multiculturalism, opposed immigration and the "Islamification of Britain", promoted economic liberalism, and held traditionalist views on gay rights, education policy, and criminal justice. In its early years, UKIP appealed mostly to middle-class Eurosceptics in Southern England, most of whom were former Conservative Party members who opposed European integration. After 2009, however, the party employed populist rhetoric to appeal to white working-class voters who had traditionally voted for either Labour or the Conservatives before either ceasing voting or voting for the British National Party due to Labour's launching of the centrist "New Labour" program and the Conservative Party's support for the EU. By 2014, UKIP's voter base was 99.6% white, 57% over the age of 54, 55% primary school dropouts, 42% working-class, and only 24% college-educated. UKIP reached its zenith from 2013 to 2015, when it swept the 2013 local elections and the 2014 European Parliament elections and successfully agitated for a 2016 referendum on "Brexit", Britain's exit from the European Union, which was finalized on 31 January 2020. Following Brexit, UKIP drifted further to the right, leading to Farage and relatively moderate UKIP members forming the Brexit Party in conjunction with leftist supporters of Brexit. UKIP went into a steep decline as the result of the formation of the Brexit Party, and, by 25 October 2020, its sole political representation was 14 local government office-holders in a country with 19,698 local office-holders.
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