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Labour is about more than just hope…

The party under Corbyn offers the chance of stepping towards brighter futures for working-class people like me and you, says BERNADETTE HORTON

HOPE. It’s a simple, but totally inadequate word to describe what a Corbyn-led Labour government will offer the working class of Britain. 

For many of us, it feels like a long journey since Jeremy Corbyn was first elected leader and we are desperate to finally see him standing outside No 10, laying down some much wanted genuine socialism at the Establishment front door.

Some might say this seems overly dramatic. But not from where I’m standing. 

In this bleakest of bleak general election midwinters, we know it will be intolerable to impose five years of Tory Narnia and austerity on the most vulnerable in society. 

Corbyn holds no magic wand to correct overnight nine years of the harshest austerity seen since Dickensian times. 

But Labour under Corbyn offers the chance of stepping towards brighter futures for working-class people like me and you.

One of the less publicised Labour policies is the move to upgrade carer’s allowance to the same rate as jobseeker’s allowance, which for too long has been ignored by the Tories. 

For too many years carers working 35 hours a week or more doing the back-breaking, 24/7 jobs of looking after disabled relatives have been scorned by Boris Johnson and his barbarous crew of predecessors. 

No value is placed on unseen carers saving the public purse millions, yet they are treated worse and receive less than the unemployed. 

Labour under Corbyn recognises that and will make an immediate start to rectify the difference by uprating carer’s allowance immediately. 

There are many Labour voters who voted to leave the EU, especially in the north and also in Wales. 

Corbyn recognises these voters. As a class, for the first time in many years we have a Labour leader who recognises our class struggle and listens, rather than preaches at us. 

He knows just how deep rooted our feelings are in our communities when we see lack of investment, massive public housing waiting lists, homelessness, our kids being taught in schools with scant resources and agonising waits for appointments with GPs and hospital consultants. 

In short, Corbyn understands our pain. And in our pain, we lash out at Europe, instead of focusing on the Tory government who in reality are the real culprits. 

Austerity, comrades, is a political choice. In recent days we have seen Boris Johnson push away the picture of a child with pneumonia sleeping on a British hospital floor, because he didn’t want to see the reality of life in broken Tory Britain. 

His bunch of middle-class hypocritical MPs parade around their local foodbanks lauding our generosity because we do not want to see the workers and children in our communities going without at Christmas and the rest of the year. 

Unlike them, we donate in good faith, not hamming it up like pantomime dames for some publicity photoshoot to enhance our own self-serving careers. 

It is us trying to help our homeless with sleeping bag and coat donations, running soup kitchens, donating toiletries, while Johnson quaffs the claret with his hedge fund banker Etonian chums, laughing at how they have managed to convince the working class that they and Jacob Rees-Mogg and co are the answer to our prayers.

Johnson and his privileged coterie couldn’t give a toss about the likes of us. Their mothers will not wait for hip operations, their children’s medicine will not be restricted in a no-deal Brexit apocalypse, they can afford private health insurance so won’t be bothered when our NHS is sold off to Donald Trump and private health insurance companies in the US will be charging us £20 a visit to see our GPs. 

Johnson will be “all right, Jack” — the Tories just feather their own nests and will continue to do so if significant numbers of working-class people vote for them.

So tomorrow we need to ignore the right-wing media, ignore the “Jeremy Corbyn is a child-eating Stalinist, Marxist, terrorist” headlines, as the Daily Mail and co all go into a frenzied overdrive. 

They do so because they are protecting their own, for fear of what a socialist Labour government could achieve. 

When Winston Churchill was voted out of office after the war, Clement Attlee went on to build thousands of council houses and Aneurin Bevan built the NHS. 

Corbyn can do so much to alleviate the suffering of our vulnerable, the scandal of zero-hours contracts, our homeless epidemic, our lack of social care and our market-led universities that plunge young people into a lifetime of debt. 

He, and Labour, are our last hope for real change and that feeling is very palpable out there in our real world of scrimping and scraping to get by.

Corbyn values the working class. He listens. He empathises and he passionately wants to deliver on policies we care about. Johnson laughs, demeans, ignores and pokes fun at us. He refuses to meet and engage with us on his campaign trail.

Tomorrow, we vote for more than hope. We vote for a revolution of radical socialist change. We vote for the party of the working class. We vote Labour.

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