Brown confident that Britain will 'weather' economic storm

Insisting Britain can weather the "almost overwhelming" economic storm by building a "better tomorrow today", Gordon Brown stuck a defiantly upbeat note in his new year message.

In today's address he admitted that 2009 will be fraught with problems but called upon a wartime spirit to see the nation through the deepening recession.

"Britain as a country has faced down many even greater challenges than those before us today," the Prime Minister said. And in a foretaste of political battles ahead this year, he took a series of swipes at the Conservatives for "doing nothing" during the downturn.

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Mr Brown's optimistic tone comes after a year in which his personal political fortunes recovered as Britain plunged into recession. But Labour is still lagging in the polls and senior party figures believe their election prospects depend on the length and depth of the downturn.

Ministers are braced for a succession of gloomy news on redundancies, business failures and falling property prices during the next few months.

But Mr Brown argued the country was well-placed to emerge from the downturn because of the "innate strength and decency of the British people". He predicted that 2008 would be remembered for a global financial crisis the scale and speed of which was "at times almost overwhelming" and as the year in which "unbridled free market dogma was finally ushered out".

He said this year "won't be easy" but he promised investment in thousands of jobs for the digital era and "green" industries, as well as more money for roads, railways and communications.

"We must not just plan for tomorrow. Our task over the next 12 months is to build tomorrow, today," he said.

Mr Brown pledged action nationally and internationally to foster economic growth and to help the world community set up a global early warning system for future financial crises.

"All of these actions will play a role in delivering real help now and real hope for the future. And they will ensure that when we come out of this downturn we hit the ground running. I am confident that we can steer Britain safely into the future," he said.

In an attack on the Conservatives, Mr Brown said cutting back on investment would hamper Britain's ability to recover from recession.

"The lesson of this crisis is that we do not recession take its course, yield to defeatism or simply muddle through and just hope for things to get better."

Insisting that his "guiding principle" was the wellbeing of British families and businesses, he added: "What keeps me up at night, and gets me up in the morning, are the hopes and aspirations of the British people."

Mr Brown hailed the election of Barack Obama as US President as an opportunity to build an international response to global warming. Echoing Mr Obama's "Yes we can" slogan, the Prime Minister said: "I believe we can do it – and because we can, we must. The stakes are too great with our planet in peril for us to do anything less."

George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, responded: "Gordon Brown talks of tomorrow, but ignores the role he played in creating the mess of today."

* The Archbishop of Canterbury warned yesterday against focusing solely on economic woes as he described children and the most vulnerable as the "real treasure" and wealth of society. Dr Rowan Williams said that "our hearts would be in a very bad way" if we concentrated on the state of our finances to the exclusion of the welfare of fellow human beings.