UK:BRITISH prime minister Gordon Brown has denied allowing himself to be "pushed around" by mutinous colleagues after a government U-turn averted the risk of defeat on a key budget measure days before next week's local and London elections.
Labour rebels promptly withdrew their proposed amendment to the Finance Bill yesterday after chancellor Alistair Darling confirmed that the Labour government would compensate the estimated five million low paid workers set to lose-out through the abolition of the 10p starter tax rate.
Having previously maintained that he could not "rewrite" his Budget, Mr Darling bowed to backbench demands that the compensation package be backdated to the start of this financial year.
In a BBC interview last night the prime minister insisted "the fundamentals" of his tax changes remained in place, that the 10p rate would still be abolished, and that other "mechanisms" would be used to compensate those who stood to lose hundreds of pounds as a result of the change he had introduced last year in his last Budget as chancellor.
A defiant Mr Brown also insisted he and his ministers had been "right to listen" to the public concerns relayed by Labour MPs, "and right to move having listened".
During rowdy exchanges in the Commons, however, Conservative leader David Cameron accused Mr Brown of "weakness, dithering and indecision" and suggested the prime minister's reputation might never recover.
Many Labour MPs looked uncomfortable when Mr Cameron claimed Mr Brown's "humiliating climbdown" spelt "a massive loss of authority" and that the prime minister cut "a pathetic figure" as a result.
Seeking to take full advantage of the divisions and uncertainty evident in Labour ranks in recent weeks, Mr Cameron charged: "Isn't it the case that the Labour Party has worked out that they've got a loser, not a leader?"
The only time Mr Brown listened to people, Mr Cameron went on, was "when he is face to face with personal defeat".
Mr Brown replied that, a year after the original proposal, "everybody" was now agreed that the 10p tax band was not the best way of tackling poverty.
The prime minister also said Mr Cameron's "new-found" interest in poverty had lasted but "a few seconds", and declared: "We're for opportunity for everyone, they're for opportunism in every thing."
Mr Brown also responded tartly to an attack by Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, who suggested Labour had been doing the Conservative Party's job for it by "penalising the poor". The Labour government had done more than any government since 1945 to take children out of poverty, Mr Brown countered.
However the prime minister remained on the defensive last night when asked if he had sent the "wrong signal" to Labour MPs by showing he could be "pushed around". He told BBC political editor Nick Robinson: "The issue is not about whether people push or not but whether you are making the right long-term decisions."
But with important mid-term elections just a week away, Mr Cameron scored a direct hit with his mocking suggestion that yesterday's decision was on a par with Mr Brown's cancellation of a planned general election last autumn "because he thought he would win it".
For the staggering implication of yesterday's developments was that the Labour whips had concluded the government was at real risk of defeat on a key element of a Finance Bill carrying the personal imprimatur of the prime minister - and just days before "mid-term" elections with the capacity to set the national mood for what might be a general election year.