Prime Minister Boris Johnson will tour Labour Leave heartlands to woo traditionally left-wing voters, urging them to stop Jeremy Corbyn’s “great betrayal” of Brexit.
The prime minister is set to tour England and Wales in the last three days before the December 12th election and will target Labour Leavers in the North East, East Anglia, North Wales, and West Yorkshire.
On Monday, Mr Johnson will make a speech in Sunderland, which voted 61 per cent in favour of Leave in the June 2016 referendum and is one of 12 seats in the Labour-held Tyne and Wear, where he will condemn the Remainer parliament for frustrating Brexit.
“It’s now been 1,264 days since Sunderland’s roar was heard on the night of June 23rd, 2016. Parliament has bent every rule and broken every convention as it has delayed, diluted, and denied Brexit,” he will say, according to prepared comments seen by The Telegraph.
He will attack Labour for going back on its 2017 pledge to respect the result of the referendum, saying the party “has let you down most of all. Under Jeremy Corbyn, they promised to honour the result of the referendum – before voting against Brexit every chance they had. They won their seats on a false prospectus and then stuck two fingers up to the public.”
Reiterating that the socialist plans to expand the voting franchise to EU nationals residing in the UK to fix a possible second referendum, the prime minister will warn: “Now they are proposing another referendum – this time rigging the result by extending the franchise to two million EU citizens. It’s been the great betrayal, orchestrated from Islington by politicians who sneer at your values and ignore your votes.”
Labour had pledged that not only will it extend the vote to EU citizens for a second referendum, but that once in government, it will extend the voting franchise to all foreign residents as well as 16- and 17-year-olds, forever altering the democratic fabric of the United Kingdom.
Speaking to The Times, one former Labour MP said she was concerned about a backlash from traditional Labour voters in working-class areas.
Gloria de Piero said: “It’s tough out there — people are pissed off with us. Some of it’s leadership, some of it’s Brexit. These are people who voted for Jeremy last time, and there are too many don’t knows. The soul of our party is at stake.
“These seats are our heartland because they are the places of our heart — they are the reason we exist. We were founded to represent these communities. The break with our traditional voters has been in the post for at least a decade, and we have not got on to that. It’s a disgrace.”
Mr Corbyn has been under renewed criticism for his handling of antisemitism in the Labour Party. Last week, 70 current and former Labour staff provided testimony to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) investigation into antisemitism in the party and whether complaints about racism against Jewish people were handled appropriately.
Some of the testimony alleges that Mr Corbyn’s office interfered in investigations into antisemitism, including Corbyn’s staff insisting on seeing copies of complaints and giving recommendations on disciplinary actions.
Breitbart London reported on Sunday that the Simon Wiesenthal Center put the Labour Party at the top of its antisemitism list. The centre determined: “No-one has done more to mainstream antisemitism into the political and social life of a democracy than the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party.”
“Members and staff who have dared to speak out against the hate were purged, but not those who declared ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘F*** the Jews,” it added.
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