Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown will widen Labour’s attack on banking’s “greed and recklessness” today in an attempt to create a new election divide with the Conservatives.

The Chancellor will tell the party conference in Brighton that legislation to be introduced in the next few weeks will scrap automatic year-after-year bonuses and stop executives getting payouts unless they can prove they are deserved. Bonuses will be deferred over a period so that they can be clawed back if they are not warranted by long-term performance.

In a related move to prevent bankers cashing in this Christmas, before the new laws come in, Mr Darling and Christine Lagarde, the French Finance Minister, will tell banking leaders this week that they should immediately implement rules on deferring bonuses and stopping automatic payouts that were agreed by the G20 at the weekend.

The moves come as the Prime Minister tries to turn around dismal poll ratings. A survey for today’s Independent suggests that Labour has slumped to 23 per cent and is neck and neck with the Liberal Democrats, who have been boosted by their annual conference last week. The Tories have a 15 point lead, on 38 per cent.

As the most important conference of his career began, Mr Brown said that he wouldn’t “roll over” but would fight for the future. However, the poll showed the scale of his task in overcoming the mood of defeatism that has enveloped his party. Even Mr Darling accepted yesterday that parts of it had “lost the will to live”.

Mr Brown insisted in a BBC interview that he had been convinced by evidence around the world that bankers were returning to their bad old ways. The attack is a clear attempt to exploit what he believes to be Tory reluctance to act against the banks.

It could be several months before the new Bill becomes law and ministers will urge all parties to back it in principle to send a message to the City that there should be restraint this year. Privately, however, Labour strategists will not be unhappy if the Conservatives oppose it because of the unpopularity of the banks with the public. The Tories insisted yesterday there was little new in the Labour plans and that the aims could be achieved under existing law.

Ministers admit to stepping up their rhetoric against bankers, claiming that their private polling shows that the Conservative lead on the issue of economic competence is soft. Labour is believed to be planning to target George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, on the advice of one of President Obama’s pollsters. Joel Benenson spent some of the summer working on public attitudes to the Conservatives and advised Labour to exploit the finding that they were vulnerable on the economy.

Mr Darling will tell the banks today that there will be no return to “business as usual” for them. Instead, there will be legislation “to end the reckless culture that puts short-term profits over long-term success. . . We won’t allow greed and recklessness to ever again endanger the whole global economy and the lives of millions of people. For as well as being a test of leadership for the Government, this crisis was a test of judgment for the Conservatives. It was a test they failed at every turn.”

Mr Darling will say that just as there was a choice over tackling the recession and helping the recovery, so there is on public spending. “That choice is between a Labour government which believes passionately that frontline public services are vital to support everyone to fulfil their potential and a Tory party which has reverted to type and has shown it is relishing the chance to swing the axe at the public services millions rely on.”

Mr Brown’s strategists are telling him to take every opportunity to remind voters that the Conservatives opposed the fiscal stimulus, believing that the economy and public services remain Labour’s best policy areas for staging a recovery.

In his interview with the BBC, Mr Brown said the country was emerging from recession because of the actions the Government had taken but he now had to “prove we are fighting for the future as well”. He said he would use his conference speech tomorrow to set out how he would deal with “the whole future of our economy and the whole future of our society”.

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