Afternoon:
10°c
Brown warns 2009 'won't be easy'
1 Jan 2009- Unemployment rate hits 16-year high
- Bank: UK set to avoid recession
- PM to tackle drink abuse 'scandal'
- Witness 'put at risk' given payout
- Clergyman 'found dead at vicarage'
- Murder probe after girl, 13, dies
- Bid to rescue crisis-hit Rangers
- Legal challenge to pensions reform
- Poll reveals GP hospital care fears
- Inequality 'hits child development'
Gordon Brown has warned the country that 2009 "won't be easy" as it faces up to the economic crisis.
In the Prime Minister's traditional New Year message, he insisted that Britain would pull through - but admitted the challenge was "enormous". He wrote: "This coming year won't be easy, but I am determined that this government will be the rock of stability and fairness on which the British people can depend."
"The scale of the challenges we face is matched by the strength of my optimism that the British people can and will rise to meet them. Because we're not a do nothing people and we've always risen to every challenge. We can meet the security challenge, the environmental challenge and the enormous economic challenge."
Amid widespread pessimism about 2009, the premier sought to strike an optimistic note at the start of what will be a make-or-break year for the Labour government. The prospects for a fourth consecutive term in office are likely to turn on the eventual length and extent of Britain's first recession since the early 1990s.
But Mr Brown insisted the British people, and the Government, had demonstrated their ability to get through similar challenges in the past. He said the task for 2009 was to "build tomorrow", with jobs for the digital age and the green agenda, new transport and communications infrastructure and enhanced skills.
Working together with Britain's world partners, he said, such actions would ensure the UK would "hit the ground running" after the downturn. He wrote: "Today the issues may be difference, more complex, more global. And yet the qualities that are needed to meet them have been demonstrated in abundance by the British people before."
The Prime Minister also set out his ambition to see a new economic philosophy replace the "unbridled free market dogma" which has been discredited by the financial crisis, "I want 2009 to be the year when the dawn of a new progressive era breaks across the world," he said.
That would mean governments investing through economic lows and offering "real help" to families and businesses when they were most in need. In a swipe at the Tories, the Prime Minister insisted failure to act would lead to a worse downturn and a weaker economy in the future.
He portrayed the Government's response to the autumn banking crisis - such as the recapitalisation of high street banks - as a "decisive" strategy to quell people's fears. He said: "The scale and speed of the global financial crisis was, at times, almost overwhelming. I know that people felt bewildered, confused and sometimes frightened. That is why the response had to be swift and decisive."
Insisting that his "guiding principle" was the wellbeing of British families and businesses, he added: "What keeps me up at night, and gets me up in the morning, are the hopes and aspirations of the British people."
