Euroskeptic parties have made major gains in elections in Britain. The Conservative Party and the United Kingdom Independence Party (ukip) performed strongly in European parliamentary elections held throughout the European Union from Thursday to Sunday.

With the result from Northern Ireland still to be declared, the Conservatives won 25 of Britain’s 69 seats in the European Parliament with 27.7 percent of the vote. ukip won 13 seats with 16.5 percent of the vote. This means that Euroskeptic parties now control the majority of Britain’s seats in the European Parliament.

Britain’s ruling Labor Party performed terribly. Labor came in third, after ukip—an organization that used to be considered a fringe party. It dropped from holding 21 seats to 13, gaining only 15.7 percent of the vote. For the first time since 1918, the Labor Party lost the popular vote in Wales, where the Conservatives won 21.2 percent compared to Labor’s 20.3 percent. In the South East region, Labor came in fifth place, behind the Conservatives, ukip, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party.

Although ukip gained only one more seat over the last election, party leader Nigel Farage hailed this as a great achievement. “Last time ’round we came third,” he said. “Everybody said it was a complete fluke, it would never be repeated, and this time we’ve come second in a major national election.”

bbc political editor Nick Robinson pointed out that ukip’s success is especially impressive since it no longer enjoys the extra publicity that politician and talk show host Robert Kilroy-Silk generated in the 2004 elections. Kilroy-Silk has since left the party.

Labor also took a beating in the local county council and unitary authority elections held in England last Thursday. It didn’t win in any county, losing even county councils it had held for decades. Labor no longer controls a single county council in the country. The Conservative Party won 30 councils. The Liberal Democrats won one.

In terms of number of council seats won, Labor came in third. The Conservative Party won 1,531 seats, the Liberal Democrats 484 and Labor 178.

This comes at the same time that Prime Minister Gordon Brown is taking a beating from his own party. So far, six senior ministers and several junior ministers have resigned, most of them timing their resignation to cause the most possible damage to the prime minister. Some have also called for his resignation.

According to analysis by the Sunday Times, the local election results show that if a general election were to be held right away, the Conservative Party would win with a majority of 34 members of Parliament.

The parliamentary corruption scandal has been the single biggest issue in both the local UK and the European Parliament elections, with voters in Britain moving away from Labor in disgust. ukip leader Nigel Farage lamented that Europe wasn’t more of an issue in the elections, claiming that his party would have done better had it been.

Nevertheless, Europe is still a major issue. The fact that voters dissatisfied with Labor are moving toward ukip and the Conservative Party rather than the pro-Europe Liberal Democrats shows that the British public is largely suspicious of the EU. These latest shifts in British politics are moving Britain to a much more Euroskeptic position.

For more information on Britain’s future in Europe, see our article “Britain Was Warned.”