British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labour party is currently in third place among voters. An Ipsos Mori poll released on Tuesday, just before the Labour Party annual conference gave the Conservatives 36 percent of potential votes, the Liberal Democrats 25 percent and the Labour Party 24 percent. But after speaking at the conference, Brown might have felt like the most popular man in the room after fellow party members responded enthusiastically.

Struggling to overcome those dismal poll numbers ahead of an election due sometime in the next nine months, Brown unveiled a string of new policies in his speech and attempted to put a distance between Labour and the Conservatives. He proposed free childcare for low income families, extra measures to tackle anti-social behavior and crime, and a law on bankers' bonuses and their performance.

"We will pass a new law to intervene on bankers' bonuses whenever they put the economy at risk and any director of any of our banks who is negligent will be disqualified from holding any such post," he promised.

He presented himself as a global leader during the financial crisis, and said the opposition Conservatives had been wrong on several issues during that time. Their policies, he said, would have left Britain in an even worse state that it currently is.

"They made the wrong choice on Northern Rock," he said, referring to the bank that was an early victim of the financial crisis, "the wrong choice on jobs and spending, the wrong choice on mortgage support, the wrong choice on working with Europe. The only thing about their policy that is consistent is that they are consistently wrong," he said.

Despite these confident claims, there have been calls from within his own party for him to stand aside, with some detractors saying that the only chance Labour has of winning the next general election is with a different candidate. Brown responded to the critics, promising repeatedly to fight.

He said he would, "not bow out, not walk away, not give in, not give up, but fight, fight to win for Britain."

A new strategy

One attendee who clearly fell into in the supporter camp was Sarah Brown, the prime minister's wife. She introduced Brown, saying he had a job she wouldn't want. "But each day I'm thankful that he's the one who has it," she continued, "that he's the one choosing the policies and making the calls."

Sarah Brown is quite popular in Britain, and Matt West, editor of the political website politics.co.uk, told Deutsche Welle he thought her inclusion was a tactical move by the party.

"She really reveals the man underneath the sort of veneer of the hard prime minister, that scary persona," he said. "They know she's an asset and they want to use her as such."

Author: Olly Barratt, London (hf)
Editor: Michael Lawton