Although the Queen’s speech on Wednesday is a formal occasion to outline the government’s agenda for the new parliamentary session, with less than six months to go before a general election, commentators are viewing it as the unofficial launch of Labour’s campaign.

Tony Travers, director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics, outlines some of the challenges the parties face before elections, which must be held no later than June 2010.

Do you have a question you would like to ask Chancellor Alistair Darling? Now is your chance.

At 1:30pm British time on Wednesday, October 21, Reuters is hosting an exclusive Web 2.0 interview with Darling and we want you to send us your questions to put to the top man from the Treasury.

From the crippling global recession to the debate over bankers' bonuses, it has been a tumultuous year at Number 11 Downing Street. You may want to quiz the Chancellor on one of these topics, ask him about the government's plans to prevent another downturn or how Labour plan to defy the polls and win the upcoming general election.

During the interview we will put as many of your questions as possible to the Chancellor and will be running a liveblog of the event, much like we did during this social media interview with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg.

Leave your question in the comments box below or via Twitter (using #askdarling) and join us on Wednesday for our Web 2.0 interview with the Chancellor.

As a conference first-timer, I was curious to know what goes on off stage in the conference centre — where the television cameras seldom go.

The lobby area at the Brighton Conference venue is packed with stalls for various campaign groups — everyone from the heavyweights of the Nuclear Industry Association to the Paul Daisley Trust, touchingly run by the widow of a Labour MP who died of colorectal cancer in 2003.

There are plenty of sweets on offer and the canvas bag with slogan is the favourite giveaway.

The Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association even allow visitors to try out on Wii Fit’s ski jump. For the record, your correspondent cleared 100 metres before crashing out on his second attempt — way off the conference record marked on the whiteboard.

The most arresting sight is a lollipop lady made of ice — she is slowly melting away in the conference heat. The Unison Union warns that public services would suffer a similar fate if political parties cut public spending.

The Prime Minister is on the move — and I will be following close behind.

I’m Sumeet Desai, Senior Reuters economics correspondent and over the next couple of weeks I will be with Gordon Brown as he travels to New York to the United Nations general assembly and then on to Pittsburgh for the eagerly anticipated G20 summit.

Then it is back to Britain — we will be at the seaside in Brighton for the Labour Party’s annual conference.

I will be live blogging throughout my journey, sending regular news and thoughts via my Twitter feed, which will appear in the box below, and will also post video updates from my travels with Gordon.

 Peter Mandelson gave a glimpse of Labour’s strategy in the next election on Monday, trying to scare voters from choosing the Conservatives by forecasting they would take the country back to the harsh days of the early 1980s.

    The business secretary invoked former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her hardline ministers as he
sought to portray the modern Conservatives as unchanged from
their predecessors who broke the unions and shrunk the state in
Thatcher’s Conservative revolution after 1979.

    In a speech to the Labour thinktank Progress, Mandelson
raised the spectre of figures loathed by the Left such as Norman
Tebbit, the Conservative cabinet minister famous for recounting
how his unemployed father had “got on his bike” to find work in
the 1930s.

    Mandelson’s speech sounded like the opening salvo in the
phoney war leading up to the general election that Prime
Minister Gordon Brown must call by next June.

    Polls show Labour, whose decade of boom culminated in the
worst bust in post-war British history, has a mountain to climb
if it is to cling to power.

    In a shift of strategy, the Labour government now
acknowledges there will be pressures on public spending once
Britain is through the recession.

    Mandelson said Britain will have to “prioritise and
economise”, contrasting this with the deep cuts he says the
Conservatives are eager to make.

    According to Mandelson, the Conservatives will cut public
spending if they win the next election not because the move has
been forced on them by the Labour government running up huge
debts, but because they are secretly itching to complete an
attack on public services started by Thatcher.

    His theory is that the Conservatives are relieved that the
economic crisis allows them to drop the modernising image they
have adopted under David Cameron.

    In fact, Mandelson’s attack may reflect Labour alarm over
polls showing that Cameron’s attempts to remake the Conservative
Party into a more caring party and shake off the old “nasty
party” image are having success with voters.

    Labour, traditionally seen as the defender of the National
Health Service, can no longer count on enjoying that position.

    A ComRes poll for the Independent on Sunday last month
showed only 39 per cent of voters agreed that the NHS was safer
with Labour, while 47 per cent disagreed.

    That was despite the embarrassment Cameron suffered in
August over Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan’s attack on the NHS.

    Despite promising cuts in public spending, the Conservatives
have pledged increases in NHS spending in real terms.

    Mandelson may also have been stung by Conservative shadow
chancellor George Osborne’s bold claim last month that the
modern Conservative Party was now the dominant progressive force
in British politics.

    “Real reforms to public services, allied to a commitment to
fiscal responsibility, means cuts on the frontline can be
avoided and we can deliver more for less,” Osborne said.

    A glance at recent speeches by Cameron’s front-bench team
shows they have tackled social issues ranging from the need to
regenerate inner cities to tackling the causes of crime.

    That suggests Mandelson and his Labour colleagues may have
difficulty portraying Cameron’s Conservatives as a reincarnation
of Thatcher’s team.

Chancellor Alistair Darling set out new plans to strengthen regulation of financial markets on Wednesday. The white paper proposes enforcing higher levels of capital for banks and increasing liquidity to prevent a re-run of the credit crunch.

Darling wants banking pay packages to be policed and for a new Council for Financial Stability to bring together the work of the Bank of England, Financial Services Authority and the Treasury.

Although the “tripartite” setup under which the finance ministry, Financial Services Authority and Bank of England supervise the financial markets was widely seen as failing to spot problems at Northern Rock and other banks early enough, Darling has decided not to scrap it.

Shadow Chancellor George Osborne called the Labour plans “more of a white flag than a white paper” in a rebuttal in parliament.

“The next Conservative government will abolish the tripartite system and will put the Bank of England in charge of the banks . . . and other financial institutions because you cannot separate central banking from the financial supervision system,” he said.

What do you think, are the new plans more of a white flag than a white paper? Are the Conservatives on the right track or should the tripartite system be retained?

Prime Minister Gordon Brown is starting to look like an over the hill punch-drunk heavyweight boxer stumbling around the ring desperately hoping that the referee will step in and end the agony.

Having been battered by a raft of cabinet resignations, a dismal performance in last week’s local government elections and now his Labour Party plunging to its lowest level in a century in European elections, Brown appears almost out for the count.

So much so that the bookmakers William Hill are offering odds of 7/4 that Brown will step down as PM by midnight this Saturday.

Former postman, now Home Secretary, Alan Johnson is the 5/4 favourite to replace Brown, with Harriet Harman at 7/1, David Miliband at 8/1, his brother Ed at 9/1, Jon Crudass at 12/1, with the PM’s close friend Ed Balls at 14/1.

And with the Conservative Party’s odds at 1/20 to win the next general election, Brown’s potential successor will need to be a miracle worker to keep Labour in power.

Who do you think should replace Gordon Brown?

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Gordon Brown setting out a plan to overhaul MPs’ unpopular allowances and announcing it on YouTube too.

A week later the plan has unravelled in the face of opposition protest and internal Labour party misgivings. The upshot is more bad press and the feeling that Brown’s authority has been further undermined.

Throw in a budget in which the government has been forced to admit to the worst economic performance since World War Two and it has been a few days to forget for Brown.

Commentators are increasingly writing about the Conservatives as a government-in-waiting, a focus that carries risks because it exposes their policies plans to closer scrutiny.

His visit to Pakistan on Monday also brought reports of a snub after he appeared at a press conference with  Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani rather than President Asif Ali Zardari.  

So is the game up for Gordon? Well, it certainly is hard to see how Labour can overhaul their deficit in the polls. But Brown was being written off in 2008, with rumours of his impending removal, but  emerged stronger when the credit crisis hit.

It’s been a bad week for Brown, but a year in politics is an eternity.

Hosting a shindig conference at one of Britain’s most prestigious racecourses in the genteel spa town of Cheltenham hardly sends out a message that David Cameron’s opposition Conservatives are trying to reach out to the masses.

But the decision to come to the rolling hills of the Cotswolds sheds light on one of the obstacles standing between Cameron and the keys to No. 10 Downing Street.

Britain’s third main party — the Liberal Democrats.

The LibDems won the parliamentary seat of Cheltenham in the 2005 election with a majority of about 2,000 over the Conservative candidate.

It is the kind of seat the Tories will want to win next year if they are going to get a decent majority over Gordon Brown’s Labour and be able to push through their agenda.

They will be hoping that coming to Cheltenham sends a strong message to voters here and tips the balance when the election comes — probably in May or June 2010.

While much of the media battle being waged is purely between Gordon Brown’s Labour and the Conservatives right now, both parties know that when the big day comes they will have to do battle on two fronts.

And convincing Liberal Democrat voters to switch may hold the key to what the make up of parliament looks like.

All we’ve heard for the past few weeks is how little room there is for Labour to pump more money into the economy to fight the recession.

The increasingly popular — and confident — opposition Conservatives have gained ground by blaming Prime Minister Gordon Brown for turning the public purse into a public hearse.

But there are a few reasons to suspect that when finance minister Alistair Darling steps up to the dispatch box tomorrow, he will deliver another blockbuster life-support package.

Yes, there are inklings of a recovery out there — some experts say we have reached the bottom — but Labour has to make sure this recession is long gone before it can hope to win an election.

And it only has until mid-2010 to wait before that day of reckoning must come.

Brown might be willing to chance his arm with some big spending to reassure the public that job losses will be kept to a minimum and that Labour cares more about ordinary peoples’ lives in the here and now than it does about the budget deficit and government debt markets.

If this is the worst economic crisis for decades, then there is no easy way out of it and the best thing to do is to take whatever action is necessary to bring it to an end and worry about the consequences later.

Respected think tank the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has called for a temporary 30 billion pound stimulus aimed at stuffing employers and employees coffers with
cash.

They say the level of government debt is nowhere near where it was at the end of the Second World War and so there is no real panic about getting it back under control eventually. Yes, it may mean higher taxes and less public spending in the future, but that might be a fair price to pay to avoid mass unemployment and social unrest.

All the indications are that Labour won’t risk the ire of experts and opposition alike with another big stimulus, but the truth is they won’t get a second chance to reduce the severity of the downturn.

Besides all that, something interesting was happening in Westminster on Tuesday.

Rather than hounding the Prime Minister’s office with questions about the Budget, Britain’s press pack were jumping all over an emergency announcement on how rules governing the much-maligned MPs expenses system might be changed.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Brown has put up a smoke screen before delivering a knockout, headline-grabbing blow.

Bumper budgets are a tried and tested vote winner … but that might also be just what the economy needs.