UK’s Brown takes another hit after calling voter ‘bigoted’

MANCHESTER/LONDON: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was caught by a microphone calling a voter he’d just met in northern England “a bigoted woman”, describing the encounter as “a disaster”.

Brown was discussing the concerns the voter, Gillian Duffy, had about immigration in Rochdale, near Manchester, as he campaigned before the May 6 election. Brown made the comments, played on Sky News television, while still wearing his microphone after he got back into his car.

“She is just the sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be Labour,” Brown said in the car. “That was a disaster. Who put me with that woman?” Speaking in an interview on Sky News later, he said he’d apologised to Ms Duffy.

Brown’s comment threatens to undermine his campaign, with his Labour Party already in third place in some opinion polls behind the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Gains in seats by the Liberal Democrats have increased the likelihood of a hung Parliament where no party has a majority.

“I am very upset,” Duffy told reporters in Rochdale after hearing Brown’s comments. “He’s an educated person, why has he come up with comments like that?”

Asked if she wanted an apology from Brown she replied, “Yes, I think so.” “I don’t want to speak to him again,” she said. “I want to know why I was called a bigot, that’s all.”

“We have found out the prime minister’s internal thoughts,” Conservative Treasury spokesperson George Osborne told Sky News television. “He has got a lot of explaining to do.”

Brown faces a third and final televised debate on Thursday with Conservative David Cameron and Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg. Clegg was judged by polls the winner of the first encounter. The second, last week, was judged to have had no clear winner. Because of the uneven distribution of votes, Labour may still be the biggest bloc in Parliament, though without a majority.

The threat of a hung Parliament may roil markets on concern that power sharing between parties would create a government too weak to fix Britain’s finances. A ComRes poll last night showed the Conservatives at 32% support, compared with 29% for Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

That would give Labour 277 seats, with Conservatives taking 248, and the Liberal Democrats 93 in the 650-seat House of Commons.

The pound has dropped 1.9% against the dollar since the first TV debate as polls have pointed increasingly to a hung Parliament. Sterling fell to $1.5197 at 1:01 pm in London from $1.5265 in New York late on Wednesday.

Investors are concerned about possible lack of action to narrow the UK’s budget deficit, the biggest of any Group of Seven country. The deficit widened 76% in the year through March to £152.8 billion ($233 billion), the largest since World War II.