DAVID CAMERON has accused Gordon Brown of effecting his budget U-turn in a desperate attempt to save his own skin and avert a Labour defeat in next week’s Crewe and Nantwich byelection.
The Conservative leader yesterday challenged the beleaguered prime minister to call an immediate general election – even as Mr Brown flagged an autumn Queen’s Speech that could sustain the Labour government’s legislative programme until the last available date for a 2010 election.
In a robust defence of his position during Prime Minister’s Questions, Mr Brown again attacked Mr Cameron as “a salesman without substance”. However, Labour MPs had to endure mocking Tory laughter when Mr Brown confirmed he had no plans to visit Crewe and Nantwich ahead of next Thursday’s byelection.
Mr Brown and chancellor Alistair Darling are hoping their controversial £2.7 billion tax cut – targeted at more than four million of the low-paid workers hit by the abolition of the 10p starter tax rate – will reduce Conservative chances of taking the seat held by the late Gwyneth Dunwoody at the last election with a majority of 7,078.
A surprise victory for Labour candidate Tamsin Dunwoody, daughter of Gwyneth, would offer a much needed respite for Mr Brown amid feverish speculation, encouraged by former Blairite loyalists, that the Labour leader elected unopposed less than a year ago could be forced out by autumn. However, the scale of Labour’s task in defending the seat was starkly underlined when Ms Dunwoody declined during a television interview to describe the prime minister as “an asset”.
Some experts warned yesterday that higher taxes or lower spending would have to follow Mr Darling’s mini-budget response to the government’s current unpopularity, while predicting long-term damage to the government’s reputation for “prudence”.
There was more bad news for Mr Brown last night as governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King said the outlook for UK inflation had “deteriorated markedly”.
With inflation running at a higher than expected 3 per cent and ministers privately predicting house prices set to fall by 10 per cent “at best” in the next year, Mr King spoke of the bank’s difficult balancing act in juggling a slowing economy and accelerating inflation.
“The balancing act faced by the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) is even more challenging than it was in February,” he said as the bank presented its quarterly inflation report. “The MPC is facing its most difficult challenge yet. For the time being at least, the nice decade is behind us.”
Asked by one MP yesterday if he had made any mistakes, Mr Brown again tried to rally Labour with the promise not to repeat the mistakes that had given the UK 15 per cent interest rates, 10 per cent inflation and three million unemployed under John Major’s Conservative government in the early 1990s.
But Mr Cameron insisted people wanted to hear about “the future” as he sought to characterise the government as well as the prime minister as having run out of road, money and ideas.
The Tory leader maintained Mr Brown’s underlying weakness was that “he won’t be straight with people”. In a widening clash over Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander’s new-found enthusiasm for a referendum on independence, Mr Cameron suggested this now applied to Mr Brown’s position on the key constitutional issue – “the one thing people thought he would care about”.
As he unveiled his legislative programme for next year, Mr Brown said government priority would be to help family finances and to steer the economy through global economic problems.