Brown sets out UK's jobs creation plan

Britain's next prime minister Gordon Brown set out plans on Tuesday to get up to 200,000 benefit claimants back to work, brushing aside union anger on public sector pay and tax breaks for buy-out firms.
The finance minister who will succeed Tony Blair as leader on June 27 told union delegates that retail, hotel, security businesses would join together with government to provide skills training that could lead to subsidised employment places.
"It's time to train British workers for the British jobs that will be available over the coming years and to make sure that people who are inactive and unemployed are able to get the new jobs on offer," Brown told the GMB Union conference.
Unemployment remains historically low in Britain but skill shortages have resulted in an influx of migrants from eastern European countries to plug the gap.
The jobs initiative is the latest in a series of announcements that has so far given Brown and his Labour party a bounce in the polls, though the opposition Conservatives under David Cameron are still ahead. But Brown was rated the best prime minister by 45 percent against 43 percent for Cameron in a Sunday Telegraph poll.
At the union conference on Tuesday, the 56-year old Scot repeated his pledge to build more houses for people to buy and also rent from the government. He said education and health would be a priority and renewed his calls for longer opening hours for doctors' surgeries.
But Brown, who has been characterised by the Conservatives as representing a shift to the left, stopped short of making any concessions to unions over tight constraints on public sector pay. He said firm wage control was needed to win the battle against inflation.
And he denied that replacing Britain's Trident nuclear defence system was a waste of resources. "We need to have Trident," he said, in a world where countries such as Iran and North Korea were trying to get nuclear weapons.
Responding to union outcry over tax breaks for private equity firms that mean top executives might pay 10 percent tax when many ordinary workers are charged 40 percent on gains on their investment, Brown said a government review on addressing anomalies was underway and would report "soon".