A MAN who threatened to form a super-association of fed-up Eastleigh residents to seize power in last year's borough elections has quit the local Labour Party - just four months after joining.

Sixty-eight-year-old retired council drainage foreman Sam Snook urged

residents' groups to join the new association in a bid to challenge high-profile Eastleigh council decisions such as the £22m town centre development scheme and the controversial move to build homes on allotments.

But four months after standing as an Independent in Eastleigh North Ward, where he failed to oust the Liberal Democrats' deputy council leader Peter Wall, Sam signed up with Labour.

Now he says he has quit because he is disillusioned with the lack of support and help he received, the inactivity of party members and a "lack of care" for voters.

He said: "I have been working now for nearly a year in North Ward, trying to do things for people and helping them, but no one else in the party is doing anything.

"They don't do enough - the people who have safe seats don't do enough to help the people who are trying to win other seats. I knocked on a person's door and she said 'You are the first Labour man I have seen in 25 years.'

"To be a councillor you have to care and I think they don't."

Mr Snook said he now intended to stand in North Ward again as an Independent.

Eastleigh council Labour group leader Peter Luffman said Mr Snook had been given full access to the Labour Party offices with a personal key and had been given all the information and help needed.

But he added: "I don't think he understands the concept of the rules and regulations of being a councillor. At the end of the day the amount of work that councillors and the local Labour Party do for the local community is there to be seen.

"I don't think Sam understands that when you are doing work you have to do it within a protocol. It is very difficult when you get somebody new who is very enthusiastic and you are trying to give him as much help as possible. When you try to explain what you can and can't do he doesn't understand."