Cameron urges 'vote for change'

Tory leader David Cameron has urged voters to tell Gordon Brown "enough is enough" and to "vote for change" in next month's English local elections.

He said his party could offer "more for less" and keep council tax down.

He would urge all new or re-elected councillors to "go through the books" to see if costs could be cut further.

Launching the Tories' local election campaign, he said it was voters' "last chance", before the general election to tell the PM "what you think of him".

He accused the prime minister of running the UK into the ground with "eye-watering" borrowing, presiding over social decline, and "letting our politics descend into the quagmire".

'Time for change'

"I promise you this, they cannot go on forever," he told Conservative activists.

"Change in our country will come and we can make that great day of change arrive all the sooner, if on June 4th you give this weak, useless and spineless government a message they won't forget."

He said every Conservative vote would deliver the message, "enough is enough. It is over. You are the past, it is time for change".

A total of 34 local authorities in England hold elections next month - 27 county councils, two existing unitary councils and five new unitaries.

On the same day, voters across the UK will elect 72 MEPs through a system of proportional representation.

The European poll takes place across 27 countries, with 375 million people having the right to vote.

In last year's English and Welsh local elections, Labour suffered its worst electoral performance for 40 years with a net loss of 331 seats.

Meanwhile the Conservatives gained 256 councillors and Boris Johnson won the London mayoralty from Labour's Ken Livingstone.

Mr Cameron said they had won in new areas, "proving that for the modern Conservative Party there are no, no-go areas".

For Labour, Schools Secretary Ed Balls said: "It seems a little bit premature for David Cameron to gloat - in private at least - about a 'glorious' victory at the elections.

"There is nothing 'glorious' about cutting public services and scrapping support for families in the middle of the recession; nothing 'glorious' in threatening to cut the free travel for pensioners or free TV licence for the over-75s; and nothing 'glorious' about the thousands more jobs that would have been lost if we had followed David Cameron's policy of doing nothing."

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