The coming general election will present Britain with its "biggest choice for a generation" between a Labour Party offering prosperity and hope and Conservatives who have "no hearts", Gordon Brown said today, in his last conference speech before the poll expected in the spring.

In what was billed as a make-or-break speech, Mr Brown set out a wide-ranging programme for a fourth Labour term.

This included free personal care for elderly people with the greatest needs, new measures to crack down on anti-social behaviour, a referendum on voting reform and a new power for constituents to recall misbehaving MPs.

While acknowledging once more that Labour will have to make tough choices on tax and spending after the election, Mr Brown promised that a fourth-term administration would "protect and improve" frontline services every year of the coming Parliament and will invest more money in schools.

In a slogan designed to draw clear defining lines with David Cameron's Tories, Mr Brown repeatedly promised that Labour would always choose "the change that benefits the hard-working majority, not the privileged few."

With Labour plumbing new depths in the polls - including one which this morning put them in third place behind the Liberal Democrats - Mr Brown insisted that the party was "united and determined to fight for the future".

Introduced on stage by wife Sarah as "my husband, my hero", he won immediate applause and cheers from delegates as he opened his speech by telling them that Labour were "the fighters and believers who change the world - we have changed the world before and we are going to do it again".

He told delegates he had acted "decisively and immediately" when Britain was "looking over a precipice" as banks teetered on the brink of failure last year, while Conservatives had taken decisions on the economy which were "consistently wrong".

"The Conservative Party were faced with the economic call of the century and they called it wrong," he said.

"And I say a party that makes the wrong choices on the most critical decisions it would have faced in government should not be given the chance to be in government."