Don’t put workers’ rights at risk, Labour leaders urge on day of action

All living Labour leaders are doing their bit for the Remain campaign today, as the party steps up in the final days before polling.

Jeremy Corbyn, Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Neil Kinnock, Margaret Beckett and Harriet Harman are all making the case for Britain’s membership of the EU, in a sign of the breadth of support for a Remain vote within Labour.

Corbyn will make a speech this morning at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, flanked by Labour In chair Alan Johnson and Women and Equalities Minister Kate Green, where he will claim that Thursday’s vote marks an historic moment that “will shape Britain’s future for years to come.”

The current Labour leader will put forward three questions in an appeal to Labour and left wing voters.

He is expected to ask: “For all the arguments of recent weeks, this Thursday’s decision can be boiled down to one crucial question: what’s best for jobs in Britain, rights at work and our future prosperity?

“On June 23 we are faced with a choice: do we remain to protect jobs and prosperity in Britain that depend on trade with Europe? Or do we step into an unknown future with Leave, where a Tory-led Brexit risks economic recovery and threatens a bonfire of employment rights?”

“A vote for remain is a vote to put our economy first,” he will add. “On Thursday join me in voting remain to protect jobs and rights at work.”

The speech helps kick off a major day of action for Labour In, with an intervention around the country every hour from some of the party’s biggest names. Ed Miliband will be out on the trail in Luton before joining Harriet Harman in Birmingham, Neil Kinnock is campaigning in Cardiff, Margaret Beckett in Derby, deputy leader Tom Watson in Cardiff, and Gordon Brown in Glasgow.

Tony Blair is attending a funeral today and so cannot be out on the campaign trail, but has echoed some of Corbyn’s remarks about workers’ rights in an op-ed for the Mirror today – a sure sign that the Labour campaign is focussing in on a honed message to appeal to the party’s supporters.

Writing in the left wing tabloid, Blair says that “a vote to Remain will also be a vote to stand up for the rights of everyone to be treated fairly at work.”

He writes: “This is something the Labour Party cares passionately about. It’s why when a Labour Government was elected in 1997, I, as Prime Minister, signed up to the European Social Chapter – to ensure decent terms and conditions for British workers including guaranteed paid holidays.

“It’s too easy to take these rights, which are underpinned by EU law, for granted. Never forget one thing. Many of those leading the Leave campaign opposed the Social Chapter; opposed our introduction of the minimum wage; opposed basic trade union rights.

“They believe being out of Europe gives them a chance to chip away at all of these hard won and necessary protections. Don’t let them.”

Jeremy Corbyn also made his biggest television appearance of the campaign last night, on a Sky News referendum special. He told the studio audience that he will work towards the same agenda, regardless of how the vote goes on Thursday:

“Whatever the result that is the result of the referendum, we have got to work with it. Whatever the result we have got to work with it. I would say to the EU: I want to see better working conditions across Europe. I want to see better environmental protections across Europe.

“We all suffer from these things. I want to see a trade policy that doesn’t export pollution by importing goods that have been made in a deeply pollutive way.

“I will be pursuing the exactly the same agenda on Friday morning that I put to you tonight… [but] it is much harder if we leave.”