MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Tory party conference unveils plan to tackle financial crisis

Cameron blasts Brown's boom and bust reputation

Britain's opposition Conservatives unveiled in the Birmingham party conference their plan to tackle the financial crisis, accusing Prime Minister Gordon Brown of presiding over a debt-fuelled boom that has turned to bust.

Proposing new measures to rein in government deficits and debt, the Conservatives took aim at Brown's reputation for economic competence, built up during a decade as finance minister before he replaced Tony Blair as leader last year. The Conservatives said they would bind themselves to strict deficit reduction rules if they returned to power after 11 years in the political wilderness and would give Britain's central bank greater powers to monitor debt. The party would create an Office for Budget Responsibility to keep tabs on state spending. "My message to Gordon Brown is this. You've had your boom and your reputation is now bust" Conservative leader David Cameron told the party's annual conference. Instead of putting aside money during the good times, the government overspent and is entering a downturn with a big budget deficit, the Conservatives said. The Conservatives have opened a consistent opinion poll lead over Labour, but it has narrowed since Brown won praise for his performance at his party's annual conference last week. Cameron and his party's finance spokesman George Osborne are under pressure to convince voters they have the experience to deal with the economic gloom. Brown does not have to call a general election until 2010. The Conservatives met as the UK government was working out a rescue plan for troubled mortgage lender Bradford & Bingley that banking industry sources said meant the nationalization of the bank, hit by fallout from the credit crunch. The UK government has already nationalized another lender, Northern Rock, and brokered a takeover of HBOS, Britain's biggest home lender. The Conservative plan calls for the Bank of England to be able to take over and "reconstruct" banks that get into trouble. Treasury Minister Yvette Cooper called the Conservative banking proposals "incoherent and irresponsible". The Conservatives would also give the Bank of England a new responsibility to monitor the risk of rising debt in the economy. The bank is currently only required to target a set level of inflation when deciding interest rates. The credit crunch is spreading to the British economy, threatening to end years of steady growth. Unemployment is rising fast and the housing market has crashed, pushing Britain toward its first recession since 1992. Inflation is double the government's target. Britain's public finances swung deeper into the red last month, leaving the government with virtually no hope of meeting its full-year borrowing forecasts.