(Updates with ComRes poll)
LONDON -(Dow Jones)- U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown sought to place his party back in the center-ground of politics on Saturday, promising to place middle class aspirations and social mobility at the heart of his Labour party's election agenda.
With his party still trailing the opposition Conservatives by some margin in opinion polls ahead of a general election which must be held by June, Brown said his party will continue the centrist New Labour agenda that has led Labour to three straight election wins since 1997.
"I believe in an aspirational Britain. Opportunity and reward cannot be hoarded at the top, and it is not enough just to protect people at the bottom," he said. "We have governed as New Labour and now we will campaign as new Labour."
Brown set as the party's defining mission of the coming years "a wave of social mobility not seen in this country since the immediate aftermath of the second world war" and said a Labour government would seek to not "only raise the glass ceiling" on people's aspirations but to "break it."
The speech was Brown's clearest signal yet that he hopes to recreate the broad coalition of political support that hoisted Labour to power in 1997. In recent weeks, Brown's hesitancy to talk openly about the need for spending cuts and his comments about opposition leader David Cameron's well-off background have led to charges that Labour was pursuing a campaign aimed at the core of its traditional working class voters.
Brown's centrist pitch was backed up by comments from Business Secretary Peter Mandelson in an interview with the Daily Telegraph in which he said that Labour was not "ideologically" committed to the new, 50% higher rate income tax. The government plans to institute the new higher rate in April, raising the top rate from the current 40%. When it came to power in 1997, Labour made a key promise to keep the highest level of income tax as low as possible.
In an interview, published Saturday, Mandelson said that it was "very important" to preserve competitive business tax rates.
"Personally, I would favor, when financial circumstances permit, for the top rate to come down, just as it has gone up when times were hard," he said. "If we had an ideological objection to the top rate being at 40%, why did we keep it there for so long?"
The 50% tax rate is for those earning over GBP150,000. It was introduced to help the government plug the deficit gap opened up by the financial crisis.
In his speech Saturday, Brown acknowledged the need for real cuts in some areas of government spending in order to pare down the U.K's soaring debt levels and he said that, just as financial services needed reform, so did government.
However he hit out at Conservative plans to scrap some tax credits and government support which currently goes to middle class families, accusing the Conservatives of planning "a raid on the quality of life of our middle classes."
"Ours is the only party that will protect and not squeeze the mainstream middle," he said in the speech to the center-left Fabian Society think tank.
The government has pledged to halve the U.K.'s budget deficit over the next four years but is facing calls to step up its deficit reduction ambitions if it is to protect the U.K.'s AAA sovereign rating.
The opposition Conservatives have said they want to reduce the U.K.'s debt faster than that but have yet to say how they will make the necessary savings.
However, a ComRes poll for the Independent on Sunday, released Saturday evening, shows how much Labour has to do to win reelection. The poll shows the Conservatives with 42% of support ahead of the election, up four points on a month earlier, Labour remaining with 29% and the Liberal Democrats with 19%. The support for other small parties slipped to 10% from 14% in a signal that voters are making up their minds about which party will have their support at the ballot box. The increase in the Conservative lead comes after Labour was rocked in early January by a call from two ex-ministers for a secret ballot on Brown's leadership.
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones Newswires
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