Prime Minister avoids ordinary voters as he pleads for election victory

PRIME Minister Gordon Brown yesterday launched a desperate bid to try to save Labour seats in East Anglia as he campaigned in four seats which could fall to the Conservatives in Thursday’s General Election.

All three party leaders used the May Day Bank Holiday to tour key seats but in Ipswich, the Prime Minister saw few ordinary voters, not wanting a repetition of last week’s “bigotgate” disaster in Rochdale.

With opinion polls indicating that Ipswich, Waveney, Great Yarmouth and Basildon could swing to the Tories, he gave a major speech to party activists from Suffolk and north Essex in an hour-long visit to University Campus Suffolk on the Waterfront, which he said was an example of Labour’s investment in the region.

The Prime Minister insisted he was still fighting for a Labour majority and pleaded with voters not to risk letting the Conservative “wreck” public services.

He claimed David Cameron would axe thousands of jobs immediately after the election and would risk the economy recovery by savaging budgets for hospitals and schools.

The Prime Minister denied that his visit to Ipswich was because of Labour concerns that the Conservatives were about to take the scalp of Chris Mole, who has been Labour’s MP for the town since 2001.

“This has been a planned visit for some time,” said Mr Brown. “You mustn’t take final decisions on campaign visits on the basis of opinion polls.

“There are many, many people who are undecided – this is a most difficult election.

“We have been through a global financial crisis. People have the right to ask what happened and what can be done about it.

“I think they will in the end conclude that this was a Labour government that had to face this financial crisis head on and make difficult decisions, some of them not popular, which got us out of recession into recovery.

“People looking back will be surprised that we managed to come through this without the level of mortgage repossessions and the level of unemployment of past recessions.”

When told that Tory health spokesman Andrew Lansley had been to Ipswich Hospital campaigning against the removal of key services to regional centres of excellence, Mr Brown snarled: “He is the person who is going to take away the guarantee people have about specialist cancer treatment.

“I cannot understand why he is not questioned about this everywhere he goes.

“How can it be that we have built up these guarantees for cancer patients, but also for people to see their GP and also for people to get operations within 18 weeks, and the Conservatives are coming around saying they support the National Health Service but are going to remove the guarantees?”

Asked if he understood the concerns of people who had seen specialist services removed from Ipswich Hospital to regional centres such as Basildon, Cambridge and Norwich - involving journeys of 50 or more miles - Mr Brown said: “I want the best possible care for everyone.

“You know it is now possible for us to bring services closer to the community – eg diagnostic – but sometimes you need a specialist service which requires an accumulation of expertise and for people to get the best treatment, they have to go that hospital.

“We have to get the balance right but it is important to recognise that GPs and local health centres are doing far more of what was previously done in hospitals while at the same time specialist conditions.

“It may be best chances you’ve got is getting the best team of surgeons working together and a decision has to be made about where that centre is based.”

Mr Brown told party activists: “This is a fight for the future – this is not an ordinary election, these are not ordinary times.

“This is a post-global financial crisis election and I have got to get the message across in the next few days that the fight for the future is about your jobs, it’s about the prospects of young people, it is about the future of the NHS, it is about the future of child tax credits, it’s about the future of our schools, it’s about the future investment in the police and it is about the future of our country. I’m fighting for my life because I’m fighting for the future of our country. I know that if a Conservative government was elected, in the next few weeks the first casualties would be large numbers of jobs taken out in a budget they plan as an emergency budget only in June.

“They would take �6billion away from the economy.”

Mr Brown went on: “It is a Labour majority government we need.”

He told the activists that he was appointing Dragons’ Den star Duncan Bannatyne as a seaside “tsar” so he had access to the “best financial advice”.

The entrepreneur and star of the BBC show is to lead a review to identify what seaside towns can do to attract more holidaymakers and visitors.

Mr Brown earlier visited Basildon where he met staff and was shown a fleet of electric vehicles at parcel delivery firm Abby Couriers.

There, he said: “Look, I am the most optimistic man in Britain, because I have got a plan for the future.”