UK parties launch election race, promise lean times

Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown is seen appearing on ''The Andrew Marr Show'' on the BBC in London, January 3, 2010.

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's political parties launched what could be a long and bitter election campaign on Monday, promising voters years of belt-tightening rather than the usual election sweeteners.

The opposition Conservatives, led by David Cameron, a 43-year-old former public relations executive, are favorites to end 13 years of rule by the Labour Party, led by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a dour 58-year-old Scot.

Labour's popularity has been undermined by a deep recession, an increasingly unpopular war in Afghanistan and a scandal over politicians' expenses.

But analysts say the center-right Conservatives have failed to build up a big enough opinion poll lead to make it a foregone conclusion that they will win a parliamentary majority at the election, widely expected to be held in early May.

They say a "hung parliament," in which neither party commands an overall majority, is a real possibility.

That prospect frightens financial markets because they fear a minority or coalition government would be too weak to take decisive action to rein in Britain's ballooning budget deficit.

Public borrowing is set to hit 178 billion pounds ($287 billion) this year as Brown spends heavily to ease the country through a recession that has slashed output by 6 percent.

"I think the odds on a hung parliament must be increasing now unless the Conservatives can push (their) share of the vote above 40 percent," Simon Lee, senior politics lecturer at Hull University, told Reuters.

Lee said however that he still believed that a small Conservative majority was the most likely outcome.

CLASS-WAR STRATEGY

Brown, the son of a Church of Scotland minister, was accused of planning a "class-war" election strategy after he accused the Conservatives last month of dreaming up their tax policy "on the playing fields of Eton."

Cameron was educated at Eton, one of Britain's most exclusive private schools, and Oxford University and a number of the Conservative top team share his privileged background.

By contrast, Brown, who lost sight in one eye in a school rugby accident, said on Sunday he had had to fight for everything he had achieved in life.

With New Year celebrations barely over, Labour and the Conservatives have rushed out of the election starting blocks.

The Conservatives, who launched their campaign on Saturday, published the health chapter of their draft election manifesto on Monday, pledging to target resources on the poorest areas with the worst health problems.

Labour finance minister Alistair Darling attacked what he said was a 34 billion pound funding hole in the Conservatives' tax and spending plans. Cameron dismissed Darling's 148-page dossier, calling it "complete junk from start to finish."

In an unusual strategy for an opposition party, the Conservatives are demanding urgent and deep cuts in the deficit, and do not hide that it will require painful spending cuts.

Labour is less ambitious, planning to halve the deficit by four years, but it also predicts lean years ahead.

"I don't make any bones about the fact that the next few years are going to be tough, they are going to be difficult," Darling said.

In a first for Britain, the main party leaders have agreed to hold live televised debates in the run-up to the election.

Opinion polls show the Conservatives leading Labour by 9 or 10 percentage points. But that is the minimum lead they need to ensure a parliamentary majority under the vagaries of Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system.

That explains why both Cameron and Brown have been markedly nicer toward the smaller opposition Liberal Democrats in recent days. They know the Liberal Democrats could be kingmakers in a coalition if the big parties fail to win a clear majority.