(AFP) – Sep 29, 2008

BIRMINGHAM (AFP) — The Conservatives blasted Prime Minister Gordon Brown Monday over his handling of the economy, saying Britain is now "bust" and presenting themselves as a government-in-waiting.

Shadow Chancellor George Osborne told the centre-right party's conference that Brown, in his 10 years as finance minister, had allowed British households to borrow more than any country in Europe.

Brown had also let Britain build up the biggest budget deficit of any economy "in the developed world," leaving it poorly placed in the current global economic crisis, Osborne said.

"We forgot that an economy built on debt is not an economy built to last," he told party supporters in Birmingham. But now, "the credit has dried up, the engines of the economy have stalled, the party is over.

"The boom is over and the bust has come," he said.

Osborne said the Conservatives, who have a nine-point lead over Brown's Labour party in opinion polls with a general election looming by 2010, would aim to balance the books.

"We will put the government finances on a path out of the red and into the black... We will make sure that this mess never happens again."

Osborne, who at 37 is 20 years younger than Brown, mocked the prime minister's assertion last week that the difficult economic situation made this "no time for a novice" -- a jibe aimed at the youthful Tory leadership.

"He is going to campaign as the candidate of experience. Well let him try. We've all had quite enough of the Gordon Brown experience," Osborne said to rapturous applause.

Osborne, who would be finance minister if the Conservatives come to power, said bankers must take some of the blame for the crisis in the financial markets, which led Monday to the nationalisation of ailing British bank Bradford and Bingley.

"You helped cause this mess and you can help pay to clear it up," he said of the banks.

"I will not increase taxes of the family earning 20,000 pounds to carry on paying the bonuses of the banker earning two million pounds.

"We want the City (of London) to succeed," Osborne said, but he warned its workers: "If you pay yourself sums far beyond what anyone else in any walk of life does, then be prepared to lose it when you make mistakes."

Osborne said the British taxpayer should not have have been left to foot the multi-billion-pound bill for Bradford and Bingley, Britain's eighth-biggest bank.

The nationalisation had left the taxpayer "exposed to a multi-million-pound bill for the mistakes of the management and the big money that backed them."

The effect of the financial turmoil in reshaping policy has been clear at this conference, as the Conservatives -- traditionally opponents of government intervention in the financial sector -- have called for more regulation of the markets.

Osborne said there had been "terrible failures of regulation."

Under Tory plans, the Bank of England would be given new powers to prevent banks getting deep into debt, and a newly-created Office for Budget Responsibility would oversee government borrowing.

In an eye-catching domestic proposal, Osborne announced that the Conservatives would freeze levels of the deeply unpopular Council Tax for two years if they were elected. The nationalist-run devolved government in Scotland has already proposed similar changes there.

Party leader David Cameron, who will give his keynote speech on Wednesday, urged supporters Sunday to avoid complacency after months of outpacing Labour in the polls, saying victory in the next general election was "not yet sealed."

The latest polls show Labour has cut the Conservatives' lead in half in the past month.

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