In his most detailed comments to date on his party's electoral strategy, UKIP leader Nigel Farage said he hoped to build on surging poll ratings to make big gains in local elections on 2 May, win European Parliament elections next year, and secure a "substantial number" of parliamentary seats in Britain in 2015.
The party holds no seats in the British Parliament, but is represented in the European Parliament.
"There's a huge vacuum on the centre-right of British politics today and I think UKIP could be ... the catalysts over the course of the next few years for a really fundamental realignment of the way politics is structured in Britain," Farage told parliament reporters.
"I am leading a movement that is becoming a very successful modern different movement in British politics. My job is to change the entire nature of the national debate," he added, saying he hoped to alter the way the country was governed.
Once dismissed by Prime Minister David Cameron as "a party of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists", UKIP has seen its poll ratings surge to 17% after tapping into growing public disenchantment with the EU and unease over immigration levels.
Farage wants Britain to leave the EU and to halt what he calls "open-door immigration". Although UKIP has 12 lawmakers in the 754-member European Parliament, it does not yet have any MPs in the British Parliament.
Farage's views on Europe and immigration have caused problems for Cameron, the leader of the ruling Conservative party. Some of Cameron's own members of parliament feel he has become too liberal and should be pushing the same policies.
Demise of an idol
For many of them, Thatcher, who died on 8 April and was Britain's longest-serving prime minister of the 20th century, remains an idol. Farage told them he had inherited Thatcher's ideological legacy.
"I cannot believe that a young Margaret Thatcher leaving Oxford [University] today would join the Conservative Party. I think she'd come and get involved with UKIP," he said.
"On Europe yes we are the true inheritors of Thatcher."
