London, April 30: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown laughed off a campaign gaffe and stressed his economic credentials in a final election debate, trying to convince voters he was the man to secure future growth.
The economy is a key issue ahead the May 6 election as Britain struggles with sluggish growth and a deficit running at more than 11 percent of GDP.
The run-up to Thursday’s debate had been overshadowed by a blaze of bad publicity after Brown, whose ruling Labour party are behind in the opinion polls, was caught calling a supporter of his Labour Party “bigoted” on Wednesday.
Brown, finance minister for a decade before he took over as prime minister in 2007, made light of his mistake and warned the opposition Conservatives’ plan to cut a record budget deficit this year risked plunging the country back into recession.
“There’s a lot to this job and as you saw yesterday I don’t get all of it right,” he said.
“But I do know how to run the economy in good times and in bad. When the banks collapsed I took immediate action to stop the crisis becoming a calamity and the recession becoming a depression.”
Brown, Conservative leader David Cameron and the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Clegg clashed on a range of economic issues, including taxes, the banking sector and the decline of British manufacturing industry.
They were also quizzed on immigration, a topic which has surfaced in each of the three debates and triggered Brown’s outburst on Wednesday.
FIRST FOR BRITAIN
Three U.S.-style television debates, the first in British politics, have dominated campaigning, boosting the profile of Clegg, whose party has in the past been in third place.
Opinion polls put the Conservatives in the lead but predict the Liberal Democrats will grab enough votes to deny both traditional main parties an overall majority, an outcome not seen since 1974.
Cameron criticised Brown’s economic record and raised the spectre of crisis-hit Greece.
“The whole reason we’re having this debate about how difficult it’s going to be to get taxes down, cut spending is because this prime minister and this government have left our economy in such a mess with a budget deficit that this year is forecast to be bigger than that of Greece,” he said.
Clegg stressed he would take a hard line with banks in the wake of the credit crisis.
“We need to be frank about the cuts that will be needed. We’ll need to break up the banking system so that irresponsible bankers can never again put your savings and your businesses at risk,” he said.
—Agencies