Anti-European Union party Ukip wins first seat in British parliament

Britain's anti-EU UK Independence Party has won its first seat in parliament by a landslide, and came a close second in another vote, posing a threat to the country's two main parties in next year's national election.

Ukip, which wants a British EU withdrawal and strict curbs on immigration, was expected to do well in both votes. But its unexpectedly wide margin of victory in the seaside town of Clacton and its strong performance in a northern England election, which it almost won too, came as a surprise.

In Clacton, it won 60 per cent of the vote after the sitting parliamentarian for Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives defected to Ukip, which did not put up a candidate for the area when it was last contested in 2010. In Heywood and Middleton, in northern England, a traditional stronghold for the opposition Labour party, Ukip won almost 39 per cent of the vote, up from less than 3 per cent in 2010.

"There is nothing that we cannot achieve," Douglas Carswell, Clacton's new Ukip member of parliament, said.

There is little prospect of Ukip winning more than half a dozen of 650 seats in a national election in May. But its success threatens to split the centre-right vote and chip away at the traditional left-wing vote, making it harder for any one party to win an outright majority.

That increases the likelihood of a hung parliament, another coalition government, and potential political instability in the world's sixth largest economy.