British prime minister Gordon Brown opened the first televised debate among party leaders in a British election campaign with an appeal to voters to return him to power to avert a renewed economic slump.
"Get the decisions wrong now and we could have a double- dip recession,"
Brown said at the start of the debate on ITV in Manchester, northern England, three weeks before the May 6th vote.
His Conservative opponent, David Cameron, said that while Brown's Labour Party had not done everything wrong, the country needed a new government.
"We need change, and it's that change that I want to help lead," Mr Cameron said.
Tonight's debate injects a novel element into UK politics and gives the participants a chance to reshape the closest campaign since 1992.
Neither Mr Brown nor Mr Cameron has enough support to win a majority in Parliament, polls show.
Mr Cameron, who in September 2008 held a lead of as much as 28 percentage points during Britain's longest recession since World War II, has failed to keep it in double digits this year.
A YouGov Plc daily poll published tonight showed the Conservative lead narrowing to six points from nine, with Cameron's party at 37 percent and Labour at 31 percent.
"The tightening of the polls over the past week puts an awful lot of pressure on Cameron to deliver," said Andrew Hawkins, chairman of ComRes Ltd., whose latest poll also put the gap at six points.
"It needs to be the performance of his life."
Mr Brown (59) described as "charismatic" by only 2 percent of respondents in a YouGov poll this month and Cameron (43) are used to sparring at prime minister's questions in the House of Commons every week.
Even so, a televised debate, a staple of US campaigns, has never featured in the UK.
Tonight's debate, which also includes Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, will be followed by two more on April 22 and April 29th.
Bloomberg