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Sunday September 27, 11:20 PM
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Britain to enshrine deficit control in law - Brown
By Matt Falloon and Keith Weir
BRIGHTON, England (Reuters) - Britain's ruling Labour Party will legislate to make governments cut a record budget deficit, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Sunday, seeking to start a political recovery before an election due next year.
Brown said government and central bank efforts to revive Britain's recession-hit economy were working and dismissed gossip that his health might prevent him from leading his party into an election expected to be held next May.
Concern at record government borrowing -- set to hit more than 12 percent of GDP this year -- have contributed to downward pressure on the pound on currency markets this year and put Britain's top-grade credit rating at risk.
"People will see that we will invest for the future within sustainable public finances," Brown told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper in an interview coinciding with the opening of the party's annual conference in the southern English city of Brighton.
Aides say details of the Financial Responsibility Act will be fleshed out in the coming weeks. The government set out in its April budget plans to halve the budget deficit over four years.
Brown is planning tough laws to curb extravagant bank bonuses, which many see as a key factor behind the credit crisis, after leaders from the G20 group of developing and developed countries agreed to take action.
The opposition Conservatives' finance spokesman, George Osborne, attacked Brown for "reinventing himself as the guardian of the nation's finances after doubling the national debt".
FACING DEFEAT
Opinion polls suggest Labour -- which swept to power in 1997 with a large majority -- is facing electoral defeat to the centre-right Conservatives for the first time since 1992.
The party's standing has been severely damaged this year by a politicians' expenses scandal, soaring unemployment as a result of a deep recession and sustained criticism -- internally and externally -- of Brown's leadership.
An ICM poll in the News of the World newspaper gave the Conservatives a 14-point lead over Labour, broadly in line with other recent surveys and enough to win a healthy majority if translated into votes at the election.
Finance minister Alistair Darling told the Observer newspaper the party needed to raise its game and risked appearing like a struggling soccer team that had "lost the will to live".
Brown was asked in a BBC television interview about rumours in Westminster that he took prescription painkillers and pills.
"No, this is the sort of questioning that is all too often entering the lexicon of British politics," he replied.
Brown lost the sight in one eye in an accident playing rugby as a teenager and had a series of operations to save the sight in the other eye.
"When people ask questions about these things, particularly about my eyesight, I feel that I have done everything to show people that I can do the job even with the handicap that I have had as a result of a rugby injury."
(Editing by Andrew Dobbie)
