Labour can kill off austerity, Corbyn set to tell voters on tour of marginals

Jeremy Corbyn will tell voters that Britain can “ditch austerity” when he travels to Scotland for a week of campaigning.

The Labour leader will follow up his visit to Wales on Saturday with a tour of key marginals in Scotland, where his supporters have always thought his opposition to sweeping cuts would help the party to regain lost ground.

Corbyn is due to visit Glasgow – where Labour reclaimed the city’s north east seat at the general election – as well as several constituencies where the SNP’s majority looks vulnerable.

“I will be travelling from Govan to Stornoway in the Western Isles, which is now a Labour target seat. I will be setting out our message of hope and our plans to meet the aspirations of the Scottish people,” he wrote in the Sunday Mail, the Labour-supporting sister newspaper of the Daily Record.

Analysis carried out for LabourList earlier this month showed that Labour’s top 22 target seats in Scotland are all held by the nationalists.

Scotland has been held back by the “conveyor belt” of austerity, Corbyn said yesterday, in a reference to how the SNP administration has passed on Tory spending cuts from Westminster.

“Scotland has suffered as much as anywhere from the way our government and economy are run. Hope has been dashed by the cruelty of Tory cuts and failure, delivered via the austerity conveyor belt in Holyrood”, Corbyn also said in his article.

“Labour’s message in the general election was that things don’t have to be this way, and our manifesto put the disastrous growth of inequality centre stage.

“We showed how we can ditch austerity, investing in the jobs and industries of the future, while ending tax giveaways to the rich and rebuilding our public services.

“We can and must transform our society to give hope to everyone – for the many, not the few. ”

Corbyn is expected to face questions over his stance on Trident. Labour’s general election manifesto included a pledge to retain the deterrent but Corbyn has been a longstanding opponent of nuclear weapons.