Cameron: Brown's had his boom, now he's bust

David Cameron pinned the blame for Britain's economic crisis on Gordon Brown yesterday as his party countered Labour's claims about who was best placed to guide the country through troubled times.

Faced with polls showing that Labour has eaten slightly into the Tory lead, Mr Cameron opened his party's conference by ridiculing Mr Brown's ten-year stewardship of the economy. He told delegates in Birmingham that Mr Brown had had his boom, but that his reputation was now bust.

“We have to ask the question, who brought us and our economy to this position? Who was it that spent and spent and borrowed and borrowed and gave us that massive Budget deficit? Who was it who said that he, and he alone, had rewritten the laws of economics to end boom and bust? The answer is our Prime Minister, the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown.”

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Mr David Cameron and other Tory chiefs will use their conference to emphasise to the party and country that, if elected, the Conservatives would inherit difficult economic circumstances. In a BBC interview he again refused to rule out the possibility that taxes might have to rise.

Their pitch will be that by tackling debt the Conservatives would never allow such a crisis to happen again. They believe they have to puncture what they see as the myth that the Brown chancellorship was a success.

Under plans to be announced today by George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, a new independent office of budget responsibility would issue regular reports on whether the Government was reducing the budget and paying back national debt, and the Bank of England would have greater power to tell banks to cut their lending. The Conservatives have recruited Mr Brown's former City envoy, Sir James Sassoon, to help to prepare an overhaul of financial regulation. More