Jeremy Corbynhas rallied supporters to get out to marginal seats and go “flat out” campaigning in a final day of action across the country before voters go to the polls.
TheLaborleader is on his final tour of the UK, criss-crossing the country with an event on Wednesday morning in Scotland, before heading to the Midlands and Bedford, with a last rally in London in the evening.
Senior Labor figures from the north of England, including the party chair, Ian Lavery, the shadow minister for transport, Andy McDonald, and the shadow minister for labor, Laura Pidcock, spoke to hundreds of supporters gathered in a village outside Middlesbrough.
Corbyn said: “I am utterly determined we go flat out between now and 11 tomorrow tomorrow evening to get everyone to vote, and hopefully vote Labor, and recognize in our manifesto there is hope, there is something positive. ”
Teesside and County Durham are major targets for the Tories in this election, with Labor-held Stockton South, Bishop Auckland, Darlington, Sedgefield and Redcar among the seats they hope to gain. Labor want to win back Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland which went Tory in 2017.
The Tories have already made inroads in the traditional Labor area after their candidate, Ben Houchen, was elected Tees Valley mayor in 2017.
Corbyn told campaigners: “Please do absolutely everything you can to win in Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, and all the other marginal constituencies. It is our chance tomorrow to elect a government that will be for the many not the few. ”
Pidcock, who is one of Corbyn’s most senior female shadow cabinet ministers, said in her address to the crowd that the election was still to play for as there were undecided voters even at this late stage.
She said: “Every single conversation you have had will absolutely be worth it. There are people right now who do not know who they are going to vote for and it is our job to have a conversation with every single one of those people who do not know who they are going to vote for and tell them that a better society is possible. ”
The event held in the car park of the Sporting Lodge Inn in the village of Stainton, outside Middlesbrough and in the marginal Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland seat, was attended by hundreds of supporters including firefighters, union representatives and nurses.
Corbyn also used his rally to talk of the abuse his team had had during the campaign.
He said: “We now have had 700 days of this campaign and 700 days of unbelievable levels of abuse hurled at leading figures of the Labor party, unbelievable levels of character assassinations going on against our party and our movement and I simply say this : if you wish to inhabit the gutter, that’s absolutely fine by me but I will not be joining you there. ”
Meanwhile, inan article for the Guardian, the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, described the prospect of a Johnson government as “a political dark age, dominated by extreme rightwing populism ”.
He wrote: “If Boris Johnson gains a majority tomorrow, we are at risk of entering a political dark age, dominated by extreme rightwing populism.
“We will face a Johnson government – with its establishment allies owning most of our print newspapers, with a proven ability to bully and dominate broadcast media, and a capacity to buy up dark ads across social media – that is able to manipulate our politics on a scale we have never seen in this country.
“They will claim to be ending austerity – the cuts that have resulted in more than 823 of our fellow citizens dying homeless on our streets last year, and leftsick children forced to sleep on floors in our hospitals– but that austerity is still ‘baked in’ to their spending plans, in the words of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. ”
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