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British Prime Minister Gordon Brown vowed Sunday he would not "roll over" and give up the fight as his embattled Labour Party kicked off their last conference before the general election.
Brown said Labour would win round voters by stewarding the British economy out of recession and he insisted that the opposition Conservatives -- who hold a commanding lead in opinion polls -- could be beaten in the poll due by June.
"A setback can either be a challenge which means it is an opportunity to do something better, or you can roll over. I do not roll over," Brown told BBC television.
"A setback for me is a challenge, an opportunity to learn, of course, if you have made mistakes, and to do things better."
Welcoming delegates to the conference in Brighton on the south coast, Brown told them that Labour was a "great team moving forward," which was "fighting for what we believe in, fighting for the British people."
"We will not win every seat at the next general election, but we will win many that people think we will not win," he said.
"We are being tested. Not just us as individuals, not just our party, not just our government. What is being tested is our philosophy.
"Because we believe that it's right to intervene, and to take action, and to never walk by on the other side when things are wrong."
Brown, fresh from the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, admitted he sometimes wondered whether people thought someone else could do a better job as prime minister - but he was in "no doubt" he had taken the right decisions over the financial crisis.
However, the usually cautious finance minister Alistair Darling warned that Labour appeared to have lost "the will to live" and said all the cabinet, including Brown, must re-discover their appetite for a fight.
"We don't look as if we have got fire in our bellies. We have got to come out fighting," the Chancellor of the Exchequer told The Observer newspaper.
With the Labour conference effectively kick-starting the election campaign, cabinet minister Peter Hain said the centre-left party should draw on the experience of the Conservatives in 1992 to force a shock victory.
Seventeen years ago, the Conservatives, with prime minister John Major at the helm, had been widely tipped right up to polling day to lose to Labour, then in opposition, only to emerge victorious.
"I think the next election will be more like 1992 when everyone expected the government to lose but in the end voters considered the opposition too much of a risk," Hain, the minister for Wales, said.
The election would be decided "at the very last moment," he said.
The polls suggest Labour has an uphill battle to win next year's vote to earn a fourth straight term in office, after winning power in 1997.
Two newspaper surveys confirmed the Conservatives' lead Sunday. An ICM poll for the News of the World put them on 40 percent and Labour on 26 percent, while a BPIX/Mail on Sunday poll put them on 40 and 25 percent respectively.
Brown said he expected to see figures "pretty soon" that would show his economic policy was working, which would help Britain to finally follow economic powers such as France and Germany out of recession.
He also told the BBC he was bringing forward legislation in the coming weeks to ban excessive bankers' bonuses for short-term deals and punish banks which continue to pay them.
