Conservatives lead Labor by 20 points

LONDON - Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labor Party has fallen 20 points behind the surging Conservative Party as Britain's economic woes deepen, a poll released yesterday says.

The Ipsos-MORI poll of 1,001 British adults could spell bad news for Brown and Labor, the party in power since May 1997, in advance of the next general election, which must be held by the summer of 2010.

Julia Clark, Ipsos-MORI political research director, said that Conservative Party leader David Cameron is well positioned to become prime minister when that vote is held.

"Unless there is a major scandal, or an international crisis that causes people to rally behind their current leader, Cameron should be elected," she said.

The poll suggests the brief bounce Brown enjoyed after he intervened to rescue the banking system has dissipated.

The Conservatives enjoy backing from 48 percent of those who said they were "absolutely certain" to vote while Labor got only 28 percent support from this group, the poll states.

"This is a very low share for Labor, among the lowest since we began polling in the '70s," Clark said. "We have to remember that they were very unpopular before the economic crisis hit, then they had a bit of a reprieve when people rallied behind Brown, but now that is over and people are remembering why they were unhappy in the first place."

The margin of error for this part of the poll was 4 percentage points, she said.