Brown insists he can win battle with Cameron

LABOUR CONFERENCE:BRITISH PRIME minister Gordon Brown yesterday launched a bid to restore the Labour Party's fortunes, warning voters that "the future of Britain" is at stake in next year's election battle with the Conservatives.

Labour’s very philosophy is being tested, said Mr Brown, who is struggling with consistently poor polling figures. He insisted the battle with Conservative leader David Cameron could be won.

Mr Brown and other senior Labour figures contrasted the parties’ attitudes to public spending and, particularly, the Conservatives’ plans for quickly enforced spending cuts, compared with Labour’s slower approach.

Making repeated references to “the future”, Mr Brown told delegates at the party’s conference in Brighton: “We believe it is right to intervene and take action and never walk on by on the other side of the street when things are wrong.”

The Conservatives, on the other hand, “would take us back to the years that we thought we had left behind”, said Mr Brown, during a question-and-answer session with delegates and elections candidates.

Ed Miliband, British secretary of state for energy and climate change, said the Conservatives wanted to introduce “a Ryanair model of public services: lots and lots of queuing and waiting, a bare minimum service for the many while the few get to pay their way”.

“That’s the choice we’ve got to lay before people. The Ryanair model may be an okay way to run an airline but it is no way to run a hospital, a care home or any of our public services,” Mr Miliband said to loud applause.

Today Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, Alastair Darling, is to pledge legally binding commitments to cut the UK’s ballooning public deficit, which could rise more than £1 trillion (€1.09 trillion) within the next year.

A decision by cabinet ministers early last week to present a coordinated front emphasising Labour’s future ambitions came somewhat unstuck during a series of Sunday newspaper interviews.

In his own, the chancellor said Labour had “a good story” to tell, but was failing to do so.

“We don’t look as if we have got fire in our bellies. We have got to come out fighting. It is rather like a football team. Sometimes you see them playing and their heads go down and they start making mistakes and they lose the will to live,” he said, although his remark was subsequently reported as Mr Darling saying Labour had “lost the will to live”.

Meanwhile, British foreign secretary David Miliband’s effort – which repeatedly focused on the need for Labour to push its future ambitions, not past achievements – was interpreted by the UK media as a pitch for the leadership in a post-Brown era.

Mr Brown was also forced to deny during a BBC television interview unsubstantiated, unsourced internet-fuelled allegations that he takes prescription painkillers and pills.

Insisting that he is fit and that he runs regularly, Mr Brown, who faced similar questions last week on US television, said: “No, this is the sort of questioning that is all too often entering the lexicon of British politics.

“When people ask questions about these things, particularly about my eyesight, I feel that I have done everything to show people that I can do the job even with the handicap that I have had as a result of a rugby injury.”

Former cabinet member Charles Clarke last week indicated that Mr Brown could quit before the election on the grounds of ill-health, though when pressed he acknowledged that he had no grounds for believing Mr Brown had any health issues.

The two latest polls continued Labour’s tale of woe. An ICM/News of the World poll gave the Conservatives a 14-point lead over Labour.

Forty-three per cent favoured Mr Cameron to make a better prime minister, with just one-fifth opting for Mr Brown.