UKIP is becoming patriotic party of England

Following UKIP's surge in the local elections, new survey data indicates that one possible explanation of their success - until now largely overlooked - is their emergence as the party with the strongest appeal to English patriots. The data, taken from the Future of England Survey (FoES) run by Cardiff University's Wales Governance Centre, the think tank IPPR and Edinburgh University, charts the strengthening of English identity, but also its politicisation. The 2011 Census found that 70 per cent of the English population identified themselves as either solely English or English in combination with some other national identity. Just 29 per cent of respondents identified themselves as feeling any sense of British national identity. Without explicitly promoting themselves as an English party, UKIP appears to have become the key political beneficiary of this trend because the more English someone feels, the more likely they are to believe that England is getting a bad deal from its membership of both the European Union and the United Kingdom. UKIP's supporters express the strongest sense of English identity (55 per cent describe themselves as either 'English not British' or 'More English than British'). And UKIP supporters are the most dissatisfied with the constitutional status quo in the United Kingdom (49 per cent agree that England should become an independent country compared to 36 per cent of Tories, 35 per cent of Lib Dems and 29 per cent of Labour supporters) while over 90 per cent want to withdraw from the EU.