Brown 'harming Labour prospects'

A senior Labour MP has accused Gordon Brown of harming the party's general election prospects by ordering his Chancellor to deliver a pre-Budget report designed to wrong-foot the Conservatives.

Charles Clarke, the former home secretary, said the Government should acknowledge that Labour made "serious misjudgements" in the run-up to the global financial crisis in order to preserve Mr Brown's reputation for economic competence.

Criticising a "theatrical" one-off supertax on bankers' bonuses, Mr Clarke said Alistair Darling's pre-Budget report should have spelt out more clearly how Labour would cut the deficit in the public finances. He dismissed a planned Fiscal Responsibility Bill to halve the deficit over four years as "vacuous and irrelevant", adding: "Substance is what is needed and this is no time for deliberate vagueness."

Mr Clarke said Labour should have made a stronger case for fair taxation instead of launching crude and ineffective "scattergun class warfare attacks on certain groups such as high-paid public service leaders and bankers getting bonuses".

He said the report was "disappointing" because Mr Brown had over-ruled Mr Darling. "The obvious course for Labour was a pre-Budget report unequivocally in the national interest, without reference to brazen pre-election 'dividing lines' with the Conservatives or crude party advantage," he added. "This weakness can only come from fear of discussion of our past failures and fear that it is too dangerous to set out our future plans. The real danger for Labour is that this weakness will pave the way to political defeat in 2010.

"No full account of our economic predicament was provided, no systematic reform of banking was promoted and no clear account of Labour's approach to closing the fiscal deficit was made."

However, a poll today shows the Tories' popularity has fallen since the pre-Budget report. An ICM survey for The Guardian gives David Cameron's party a single-digit lead for the first time in a year. The Tories are down two points to 40 per cent, Labour are up two points on 31 per cent, and the Liberal Democrats are down one point on 18 per cent.