PM fires gun on election with budget date
The government will unveil a pre-election budget on March 24, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Wednesday, fuelling expectations of a general election in May.
Brown added that Britain's economic recovery "remains very fragile" and warned of "bumps in the road" ahead.
But in a personal appeal to voters, he said he would "not let them down" in steering the economy to safety, contrasting himself with Conservative leader David Cameron, whose party threatens to oust Labour at the poll.
The budget will be held "in two weeks' time", Brown said, while the Treasury confirmed the date was March 24.
Ministers have suggested the general election will be held on May 6 and this could be confirmed in the days after the budget, leading into a campaign lasting five weeks or a month.
The economy is expected to dominate electioneering.
The Conservatives had long held a double-digit lead in opinion polls but Labour has clawed back ground since data in January showed Britain emerged from recession, promising a close fight.
"We are at a turning point and a crossroads, for our domestic economic recovery... and for the global economic governance that will shape the next decades," Brown said in a keynote speech in London.
"For better or for worse, with me what you see is what you get. The stakes are high. We dare not risk the recovery."
"There will be bumps in the road," he said. "And I believe the only way to overcome them is by displaying the same strength and resolve as we did during the crisis. And I will not let you down."
Cameron's Conservatives are four points ahead of Brown's Labour according to the Sun newspaper's latest daily opinion poll Wednesday.
The Conservatives have 36 percent support, down three, with Labour on 32 percent, down two, and the centre-left Liberal Democrats on 20 percent, up four percent.
The YouGov poll questioned 1,524 people on March 8 and 9.
Experts say they need a bigger lead than that to secure an overall majority in the House of Commons, raising the prospect of a rare hung parliament in Britain for the first time since 1974.
Brown also tried to contrast himself with the 43-year-old Cameron, who has never held ministerial office and who Brown accuses of lacking experience, saying that questions of "policy" and "character" were closely linked.
"I believe that character is not about telling people what they want to hear but about telling them what they need to know," he said.
"It is about having the courage to set out your mission and the courage to take the tough decisions and stick to them without being blown off-course, even when the going is difficult.
Britain emerged from recession in the fourth quarter of last year with growth of 0.3 percent. The expansion in October to December 2009 followed a deep recession that lasted six quarters -- the country's longest since records began.
The country also has a budget deficit forecast to be 178 billion pounds for the current fiscal year.
Related information:
In military parlance, a gun is a muzzle or breech-loaded projectile-firing weapon. There are various definitions depending on the nation and branch of service. A "gun" may be distinguished from other firearms in being a crew served weapon such as a howitzer or mortar, as opposed to a small arm like a rifle or pistol, but there are exceptions, such as the USAF's GUU5/P. At one time, land-based artillery tubes were called cannon and sea-based naval cannon were called guns. The term "gun" morphed into a generic term for any tube launched projectile firing weapon used by sailors including boarding parties and Marines.
In modern parlance, a gun is a projectile weapon using a hollow, tubular barrel with a closed end—the breech—as the means of directing the projectile (as well as other purposes, for example stabilizing the projectile's trajectory, aiming, as an expansion chamber for propellant, etc), and firing in a generally flat trajectory.
The term "gun" has also taken on a more generic meaning, by which it has come to refer to any one of a number of trigger-initiated, hand-held, and hand-directed implements, especially with an extending bore, which thereby resemble the class of weapon in either form or concept. Examples of this usage include staple gun, nail gun, glue gun, grease gun. Occasionally, this tendency is ironically reversed, such as the case of the American M3 submachine gun which carries the nickname "Grease Gun".
Most guns are described by the type of barrel used, the means of firing, the purpose of the weapon, the caliber, or the commonly accepted name for a particular variation.
Barrel types include rifled—a series of spiraled grooves or angles within the barrel—when the projectile requires an induced spin to stabilize it and smoothbore when the projectile is stabilized by other means or is undesired or unnecessary. Typically, interior barrel diameter and the associated projectile size is a means to identify gun variations. Barrel diameter is reported in several ways. The more conventional measure is reporting the interior diameter of the barrel in decimal fractions of the inch or in millimeters. Some guns—such as shotguns—report the weapon's gauge or—as in some British ordnance—the weight of the weapon's usual projectile.
A gun projectile may be a simple, single-piece item like a bullet, a casing containing a payload like a shotshell or explosive shell, or complex projectile like a sub-caliber projectile and sabot. The propellant may be air, an explosive solid, or an explosive liquid. Some variations like the Gyrojet and certain other types combine the projectile and propellant into a single item.
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