Brown suffers further poll slump

By David Clarke

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour Party trails the Conservatives by the largest margin in more than 15 years, an opinion poll for the Sunday Times showed.

The poll by YouGov put Labour on 32 points, 13 percentage points behind the Conservatives on 45. Brown’s personal rating has also slumped since he took over from Tony Blair in June.

“At Westminster the sense of doom is growing, and no single analysis of Labour’s troubles seems entirely satisfactory,” Martin Bright, political editor of the left-wing weekly New Statesman, wrote in commentary published on Sunday.

Brown does not have to call an election until May 2010 and his advisers hope recent crises will pass, the economy will rebound and confidence in Brown and his policies will be restored before voters judge him at the ballot box.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband said it was the government’s job to take the difficult decisions needed to move the country forward, even if they aroused opposition.

“It doesn’t feel like meltdown at all,” he told the BBC. “In the end, what counts are not headlines but ideas. And it’s the ideas that this government in the end will live or die by.”

Brown was riding high in the polls after taking office. But the first run on a bank in more than a century, the loss of half of the country’s personal data in the post, allegations of sleaze and a downturn in house prices have all hit Labour.

Perceptions that Brown dithered over whether to call an early election or attend the signing of a new EU treaty, coupled with growing fears among voters of an economic recession have also undermined the former finance minister’s showing. 

Brown’s personal rating — the gap between those saying he was doing a good job and those saying he was doing badly — has plummeted from plus 48 in August to minus 26 four months later.

With an election some years off, the only risk to the prime minister is if his Labour Party begins to have serious doubts about whether he can defeat the Conservatives next time round.

However Brown is now coming under fire from the left of the political spectrum, a natural ally in the past.

The New Statesman has run a series of hostile articles in recent weeks and columnists such as The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee have criticised Brown for a lack of vision and a “catastrophic” attitude towards Europe.

There are few signs Brown’s woes will end soon. The Bank lowered interest rates this month in the face of softer growth but its concerns about inflation picking up may prevent a series of cuts to boost the economy.

In the YouGov poll, 53 percent of voters said they were worried Britain might face a recession next year and a third said Brown’s government would carry most of the blame. YouGov surveyed 1,481 electors in an online poll on December 13-14.

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