The UK Independence Party (UKIP,  /ˈjuːkɪp/ YEW-kip) is a Eurosceptic and right-wing populistpolitical party in the United Kingdom. The party was founded on the idea of Britain's withdrawal from the European Union but has since become a multi-issue party with a full manifesto.

UKIP has never won a seat in the House of Commons. UKIP holds two in the unelected House of Lords, both due to defections from Conservative peers. It has 12 seats in the European Parliament, down from 13 won due to defections; but one gained from the defection of Roger Helmer from the Conservative Party

The leader of UKIP, Nigel Farage, was re-elected on 5 November 2010, having first served from 2006 to 2009. Farage has been a UKIP MEP since 1999 and is a founding member of the party after leaving the Conservative Party in 1992 when it led Britain into the Maastricht treaty.

In the 2009 election to the European Parliament, UKIP attained 13 seats with 16.5% of the vote, coming second behind the Conservative Party, overtaking the Labour Party in terms of votes, and drawing with it in terms of seats. In the 2010 general election, the party polled 3.1% of the vote, an increase of 0.9% from the 2005 general election. In the 2011 local elections, UKIP took control of Ramsey town council, as well as maintaining its seven councillors across England, and one in Northern Ireland.

Godfrey Bloom (born 22 November 1949 in London) is a Member of the European Parliament for Yorkshire and the Humber for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). He was first elected in 2004, and re-elected in 2009.

Before becoming an MEP, Bloom worked as a financial economist.

Godfrey Bloom is the president of the European Alliance for Freedom, a eurosceptic pan-European political party.

In 2004, Bloom's election to the Yorkshire and the Humber seat was the UKIP's first seat in the region in the European elections.

A few weeks after his appointment to the European Parliament's Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality on 20 July 2004, Bloom told an interview in Strasbourg that, "No self-respecting small businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age. That isn't politically correct, is it, but it's a fact of life. The more women's rights you have, it's actually a bar to their employment." Around the same time, he was reported^{[by whom?]} as commenting, "I just don't think [women] clean behind the fridge enough" and that "I am here to represent Yorkshire women who always have dinner on the table when you get home."

Nigel Paul Farage ( /ˈfærɑːʒ/, FARR-ahzh; born 3 April 1964, Farnborough, Kent), is a British politician and is the Leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), a position he also held from September 2006 to November 2009. He is a Member of the European Parliament for South East England and co-chairs the Eurosceptic Europe of Freedom and Democracy group.

Farage is a founding member of the UKIP, having left the Conservative Party in 1992 after they signed the Maastricht Treaty. Having unsuccessfully campaigned in European and Westminster parliamentary elections for UKIP since 1994, he gained a seat as an MEP for South East England in the 1999 European Parliament Election — the first year the regional list system was used — and was re-elected in 2004 and 2009. Farage describes himself as a libertarian and rejects the notion that he is a conservative.

In September 2006, Farage became the UKIP Leader and led the party through the 2009 European Parliament Election in which it received the second highest share of the popular vote, defeating Labour and the Liberal Democrats with over two million votes. However he stepped down in November 2009 to concentrate on contesting the Speaker John Bercow's seat of Buckingham in the 2010 general election.

Jeremy Dickson Paxman (born 11 May 1950) is an English journalist, author and broadcaster. He has worked for the BBC since 1977. He is noted for a forthright and abrasive interviewing style, particularly when interrogating politicians. His regular appearances on the BBC2's Newsnight programme have been criticised as aggressive, intimidating and condescending, and also applauded as tough and incisive. He is also the question master of University Challenge, succeeding Bamber Gascoigne when the programme was revived in 1994.

Paxman was born in Leeds. His mother, Joan, born 1920, was a housewife. Paxman is the eldest of four children and has two brothers, one of whom, Giles, is the British Ambassador to Spain (having previously been ambassador to Mexico), and a sister, Jenny, a producer at BBC Radio.

He was brought up in Yorkshire and Peopleton, near Pershore, Worcestershire. In 1964, he went to Malvern College and read English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he edited the undergraduate newspaper Varsity. While at Cambridge, Paxman was briefly a member of the Labour Club.

Edward Samuel Miliband (born 24 December 1969) is a British Labour Party politician, currently the Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition. He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for the South Yorkshire constituency of Doncaster North since 2005 and served in the Cabinet from 2007 to 2010 under Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He and his brother, David Miliband, were the first siblings to sit in the Cabinet simultaneously since Edward, Lord Stanley, and Oliver Stanley in 1938.

Born in London, Miliband graduated from Corpus Christi College, Oxford and the London School of Economics, becoming first a television journalist and then a Labour Party researcher, before rising to become one of Chancellor Gordon Brown's confidants and Chairman of HM Treasury's Council of Economic Advisers.

As Prime Minister, Gordon Brown appointed Miliband as Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster on 28 June 2007. He was subsequently promoted to the new post of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, a position he held from 3 October 2008 to 11 May 2010. On 25 September 2010, he was elected Leader of the Labour Party.