Share :

Download PDF :

10.06.2016
BBC

Leaving the European Union would lead to an emergency budget, further cuts in public spending and tax rises, senior Labour figures will claim.

Party deputy leader Tom Watson and shadow cabinet colleagues will make the warning on Friday.

Shadow home secretary Andy Burnham has said the Remain campaign faces the "very real prospect" of defeat.

But Labour MP John Mann has declared his support for Brexit, suggesting a "people's revolution is under way".

Labour veteran Dennis Skinner has also come out in favour of the UK leaving the EU.

Meanwhile, in other referendum campaign developments:

Writing in the Telegraph, security minister and Leave campaigner John Hayes said Britain is better placed to fight terrorism outside the EU
The extended deadline for people to register to vote in the forthcoming European Union referendum has passed UKIP leader and Leave campaigner Nigel Farage will be grilled by Andrew Neil at 19:30 on BBC One, as part of his series of interviews with leading campaigners on both sides of debate.

Later on Friday, Mr Watson and other Labour party figures will be presenting figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, suggesting £18bn of spending cuts and tax rises would be in the pipeline in the event of the UK leaving the EU.

The UK votes in a referendum on 23 June on whether or not to remain in the EU.

Mr Burnham said leaving could lead to social "fragmentation" and the break-up of the UK.

He said the party had failed to reach out to traditional Labour voters.

"We have definitely been far too much Hampstead and not enough Hull in recent times and we need to change that. Here we are two weeks away from the very real prospect that Britain will vote for isolation," he told BBC Two's Newsnight.

"I think it would have a profound effect on our national life - the fragmentation that will come, the fear and the division.

"Those are all the things that the terrorists couldn't create with their bombs and yet we will have a situation where society becomes more divided."

Later he tweeted that his comments were not intended as a criticism of the referendum campaign - but as a comment on Labour over the last two decades.

Former leader Ed Miliband will separately warn that the Conservatives would move to the right in the event of a Brexit, and reduce workers' rights.

In a speech in London, Mr Miliband will say: "Let's be clear what the Leave agenda would mean for working people.

"They want out of Europe so we can be out of the social chapter, as Boris Johnson said... in 2012. Their competitiveness strategy for Britain is deregulation and the erosion of rights of working people."

A Vote Leave spokesman said: "As support drains away from the Remain campaign, they are getting ever more desperate and hysterical with their fanciful Leave predictions."

BBC political correspondent Iain Watson says senior Labour figures are very worried because by talking with election agents around the country, they have been discovering that far more of their supporters are backing Brexit than they had anticipated.

Mr Mann, MP for Bassetlaw in Nottinghamshire, told the Sun many Labour councillors would "shock" Westminster with their referendum vote.

"And it shouldn't come as a shock how many Labour voters will vote," he said. "Because a people's revolution is under way. This is about returning power to the people."

Mr Skinner, MP for Bolsover in Derbyshire, told the Morning Star that "fighting capitalism state-by-state" was "even harder when you're fighting it on the basis of eight states, 10 states and now 28".