UK's Osborne Slaps Down Suggestion of Electoral Pact with UKIP

    By Nicholas Winning

    MANCHESTER, England--U.K. treasury chief George Osborne Monday slapped down any suggestion candidates from his center-right Conservative party could contest elections on a joint platform with the small anti-European Union U.K. Independence Party.

    UKIP has overtaken the Liberal Democrats--the smaller party in the governing coalition--in some opinion polls, fueling talk it will split the right-wing vote for the first time in decades at the general election in 2015, scupper Prime Minister David Cameron's bid for a second term and hand victory to the opposition Labour party.

    A few Conservative lawmakers have suggested running on a joint ticket at a local level and Mr. Farage said in a newspaper article Monday that a deal with like-minded Tory candidates makes sense. But the Chancellor of the Exchequer poured cold water on the idea.

    "There aren't going to be any deals with UKIP and there are not going to be Conservative-UKIP candidates locally," Mr. Osborne said on BBC radio on the fringes of the Conservatives' annual conference in Manchester, northwest England. "The only candidates that will stand for the Conservative party at the election are Conservative candidates."

    The Conservatives have toughened their stance on Europe and immigration since they formed a coalition with the Lib Dems in 2010 in a move observers say has been aimed at nullifying the UKIP election threat but has so far failed.

    Mr. Cameron has pledged that if he wins a second term he will renegotiate Britain's ties with the EU to return some powers over domestic affairs from Brussels and then hold a national referendum on the U.K.'s membership of the bloc under the new terms by the end of 2017.

    Although UKIP have yet to win a seat in Britain's parliament--the party has a handful of European members of parliament--their central message that the U.K. should leave the EU and criticism that the main three parties in Britain have nothing to offer has resonated with voters struggling with the economic downturn and years of austerity. The same pattern has been seen in other European countries where fringe parties, often with an isolationist bent, have grown in stature to threaten more established parties.

    Mr. Farage said in his article in the Times newspaper that he would be attending three events at the Tory party conference Monday. UKIP was opposed to many Tory policies and the party's leadership, but should any Conservative lawmakers wish to propose running on a joint ticket on a local level he would be happy to hear their reasoning, he said.

    "After all, we are a party that believes in real localism and doesn't think that the center is the repository of all wisdom," Mr. Farage said. "But I suspect that Conservative Central Office would crush such innovative thinking."

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