UKIP is essentially a circus.
Whether you support them or despise them as I do, they fulfil the same role: to confirm your existing opinions of them. I have always seen Frottage as a fraud. He is a privately educated former city trader who used to be a member of the Conservative Party, his only reason for leaving being that they became too liberal. The hierarchy is a similar group of rabid Thatcherites who think the British Empire was a good thing and do little to hide their contempt for foreigners. When a story crops up about a councillor wanting to shoot "poofters" or an MEP wanting Muslims to sign a code of conduct promising not to wage a jihad against Britain, it doesn't shock me. It simply confirms that they are a bunch of bigoted regressives.
On the other hand, if you support them, everything they do confirms how wonderful they are. They're just "telling the truth" and "saying what everyone else is scared to say". You go along with Frottage's man of the people act, take any opportunity you can to jump on the anti-immigrant bandwagon and somehow attribute every ill faced by British society on "faceless Brussels bureaucrats".
These two groups existed before UKIP became as prominent as they have done and will continue to exist no matter what happens.
What concerns me is the group who have started supporting UKIP in the last couple of years. These aren't people who fit into either group I just described and on the whole they could be described as apolitical. They don't like the Tories, they don't like Labour and they don't like the Lib Dems. UKIP are a very vocal alternative and they tap into the fears and insecurities held by these people - housing shortages, low paid jobs, strain on the health service and on education. It's almost as if desperation has thrown them into the arms of a bunch of people who genuinely could not care less about them.
We saw something very similar happen in America with the Tea Party. Foreign wars, economic crises, politicians that fail to address the issues faced by ordinary people despite promising to change things; it all adds up and turns into something very, very nasty. Fascism is a grassroots movement and it takes a while to spread.
Personally I'm more concerned about the actual government right now. The Tories are every bit as cruel as UKIP but their position of power makes them far more dangerous for the time being. It's convenient we have Nick Clegg to attack Frottage every day, just to distract us from the scum he shares a bed with...