Gordon Brown today launches a deeply personal fightback to save his premiership by drawing on his experience of overcoming near blindness and by acknowledging some people have been failed by a decade of a Labour government.

As trade union leaders gathering in Brighton on the eve of the TUC conference raised the spectre of a long winter of action that could see one million public sector workers take co-ordinated strike action over pay, the Prime Minister braced the nation for an economic struggle that would call on Britain's spirit of "cautious and practical optimism".

He heralded an autumn policy blitz with a pledge to spell out a new deal for the elderly, new support for parents and new ways of delivering public services and long-term decisions on transport, energy and climate change.

One of the biggest public sector unions, the PCS, announced that it will ballot 270,000 members in the civil service and public services for a rolling period of strike action from November to February.

The call for co-ordinated strike action over public pay has been led in a motion by the PCS which has been backed by six other big unions.

The motion, and the plan to bring potentially one million workers out on strike, carry grave echoes of the winter of discontent in 1978-79 in which trade union strikes brought down the Labour government over public sector pay policy.

While emphasising they wanted to see a change of policies rather than personalities, Brendan Barber, the TUC general-secretary, accused Mr Brown's government of having an economic strategy that left a "yawning chasm" between the super-rich and the rest of society.

Another union leader, Derek Simpson of Unite, launched a bitter attack on Foreign Secretary David Miliband, the putative Prime Minister, claiming David Cameron would make a better leader.

Mark Serwotka, PCS general- secretary said the union's ballot followed growing anger over the government's policy of trying to limit pay rises in the public sector to 2% this year.

As the trades unions opened a bitter war of words with the government, Mr Brown responded with the promise that his own personal experiences left him marked with a determination that there are no obstacles in life that cannot be overcome.

Aged 16, the Prime Minister was left blind in his left eye after being injured in a rugby game and had the vision in his right eye saved only by pioneering surgery.

In the draft foreword to this year's Labour Party conference agenda, released to the media, Mr Brown wrote: "My own response to the great challenges in my own life has been to confront them, resolute in the belief that there would always be something that could be done to overcome them. And there always has been. Now, once more, I am confident that we can come through this difficult economic time and meet these challenges a stronger, more secure, and fairer country than ever before."

In the document, which will be circulated to his cabinet colleagues today, Mr Brown stresses that fairness is at the heart of the Labour Government's agenda but he displays contrition when he accepts more must be done to reach out to people who have been passed over by the boom years.

"I know there are people who feel that modern Britain has been unfair to them. Some of them are right," admits Mr Brown and he warns that only by drawing together can Britain weather the current economic storm.

Mr Brown promises to outline new deals for families, the elderly, public services, transport, energy and climate change at the Labour conference later this month.

He says in the document: "None of us can address all the new challenges we all face on our own. We are all in this together - individuals, families, business, trades unions, civil society and government - all with our part to play. Together, in this new world of opportunity and change, there is nothing Britain cannot do."