DEPUTY Prime Minister John Prescott launched an unrestrained attack on proportional representation and coalition government yesterday - but failed to mention specifically the Lib-Lab coalition at Holyrood.

Although Mr Prescott's opposition to PR is well-known, his frank public outburst will do nothing to help Prime Minister Tony Blair cement relations with Charles Kennedy's Liberal Democrats, whom he might have to rely upon if a Labour Government ends up with a small Commons majority.

Speaking on BBC TV's On The Record, Mr Prescott seemed unabashed when he began criticising PR, joking: ''Oh, I'll get myself into a Clare Short situation here in a minute.''

Asked if moves towards PR for Westminster were dead and buried and if he would read them their last rites, he replied: ''Just let it slide away. I mean what I've seen operate wasn't certainly to the advantage of the Labour Party, was it?. . . Put it in a boat and let it slide away Yeah, along with the Lib-Labs.''

Mr Prescott, whose dislike of the third party is well-publicised, went on: ''No, but seriously - 170 majority, new kind of politics, we've said where you could get the coalition and Lib-Lab and proportional representation. I was very strongly against it. I have seen nothing that has occurred since we brought it in to convince me it's in the interest of stable government and, indeed, in the interest of the Labour Party, although I put stable government and the country's interest first.''

Asked if he was in favour of an end to the Lib-Lab Joint Consultative Committee meetings, he pointed out that the innovation had been in the New Labour manifesto in 1997 on which he had fought the General Election.

''I've actually been in a Labour government where in fact there was a kind of semi-coalition if you like under Jim Callaghan because we had a very small majority I'm not sure it was very helpful to us but, nevertheless, we were in it and I was part of not the Government but certainly part of a governing party that had that coalition.''

Later, Rhodri Morgan, First Minister in the Welsh Assembly, run by a minority Labour administration, sought to urge delegates against complacency. ''Perhaps the fuel crisis was the timely kick up the backside that we needed.''

Mr Morgan decried what he called the Tories' ''narrow English skinhead nationalism'' and insisted that it was only Labour that ''embraces the British family: multicultural, diverse in identity, united by Labour values of fairness, tolerance, compassion, democracy and social justice.''