Britain’s potential leaders spar over economy in election’s final TV showdown

Last chance to woo UK voters in final TV debate

LONDON — Britain’s three main candidates in the neck-and-neck parliamentary election campaign will face off for the last time in a TV debate Thursday night, tackling the issue of how to repair the fragile economy.

For Prime Minister Gordon Brown, reeling from a major campaign gaffe Wednesday in which an open microphone caught him calling an elderly widow a “bigoted woman,” the third and final debate may be his last chance to repair his tarnished reputation.

In opinion polls, little separates Britain’s three main political parties before next week’s poll — and the country appears headed toward a chaotic hung Parliament, in which no group will hold a majority and urgently needed decisions on the economy may be delayed.

Britain’s first-ever televised debates have already spurred an unexpected transformation in the country’s politics, allowing the perennially third place Liberal Democrats to capitalize on rare equal billing with their two larger rivals — the Labour Party and the Conservatives.

The Liberal Democrats have made an unlikely surge — even leapfrogging Brown’s incumbent Labour Party into second spot in many recent surveys.

But if the TV duels will deliver a decisive moment, it must come Thursday when Britain’s three prospective leaders address a crucial issue which so far they’ve largely attempted to avoid: The economy.

Whoever governs Britain after the country’s vote May 6, their first priority must be action to quickly tame a mammoth 152.84 billion pounds ($235.9 billion) deficit racked up during the global financial crisis. Britain will likely suffer the largest cuts to public services since World War II, taxes are sure to rise and efforts to cut unemployment will take time to ease current hardship.

“It really is the defining issue of the campaign — so we’ll have to hope that they will finally be nailed down on the subject,” said Howard Archer, chief U.K. economist at IHS Global Insight, before Thursday’s 90-minute tussle, which is being held in Birmingham.

Archer said all three main parties have been so far reluctant to give specifics of “the gruesome details” of budget trimming and economic constraints ahead. “Of course, they’re not particularly vote winning policies,” he said.

In two weeks since the first debate, the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Clegg has pushed himself forward as a credible new contender to lead Britain — shaking up the electoral dominance of Brown’s Labour and David Cameron’s main opposition Conservative Party. The two major parties have traded power since the 1930s.

Clegg’s party’s has jumped dramatically — to about 30 percent of potential votes in opinion polls — since the first debate. In early April, the Liberal Democrats were polling at 18 percent. Latest surveys show Cameron’s party leads with about 33 percent and Brown’s Labour sits third with 28 percent.

And voters still uncertain who to back before next week’s vote suggest it will be the parties’ economic policies that sway them.

In the struggling town of Lowestoft, on England’s eastern coast, a once bustling port has suffered from sharp decline, with little interest in the dwindling catches offered for sale at a daily fish market.

Resident Daniel Edwards said there’s one key issue for him. “Employment. There are no jobs in Lowestoft, I’ve been unemployed for six months to a year,” he said.

Britain has struggled through a deep 18-month recession in which around 1.3 million people have been laid off and 50,000 families have had their homes repossessed.

Some angry Britons blame an influx of 6 million foreigners since Brown’s Labour took office in 1997 for worsening their plight. Immigrants — many from poor countries — have been accused of snatching jobs, pushing down pay rates and overwhelming welfare services.

It has driven some to back the far-right British National Party. The issue also got the prime minister into trouble.

Brown, apparently forgetting that he’d left a television microphone pinned to his chest, called 66-year-old Gillian Duffy a “bigoted woman” as he was being driven from a public meeting where she had needled him on immigration.

Other voters are simply confused about which party is best placed to kick-start the economy, and boost employment.

“I think it’s time for somebody else to have a go — who is the right person? Who knows? It’s an impossible job,” said Mark Harvey, a supervisor at Lowestoft’s market, for wholesaler JT Cole Fish.

Associated Press writer Andy Drake contributed to this report from Lowestoft, England.