Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson on the campaign trail with Keir Starmer.Today, voters across the country face a choice: do you want five more years of chaos with the Conservatives or change with Labour?
Can you afford for nothing to change on Thursday? To give these Conservatives five more years?
If you do,you’ll see more economic instability, more cronyism, and more erosion of our public services, including an education system that will continue to sell the next generation short.
The past 14 years under the Conservatives has seen opportunity for our children evaporate: rates of absence from school have sky-rocketed, an epidemic of mental ill health among our kids has gone unchecked, teachers have left classrooms in their droves and apprenticeship numbers have fallen off a cliff.
Thousands of children sit in schools cowering under steel props to stop the roof falling in – the legacy of a crumbling concrete crisis the Tories have let reach critical levels.
Staying at home or voting for smaller parties will risk you waking up on July 5 to Rishi Sunak and his party walking back into Downing Street. They will feel emboldened, with a mandate to wreak more havoc.
A vote for the Conservatives at this election isn’t just a reward for 14 years of failure: it’s a blank cheque to allow them to inflict more of the same in every aspect of our lives.
Mortgages will soar by £4,800 because of the £71 billion of unfunded spending commitments they’ve made in their manifesto. Sound familiar? That’s because the Tories have learned nothing from Liz Truss’s mini-Budget that crashed the economy – and they’ll do it again.
Strikes in the health service will continue, waiting lists will go up, NHS dentistry will disappear forever. The Tories will keep putting party before country. The merry-go-round of Prime Ministers will spin ever faster. More education ministers will come and go, leaving our children to count the cost with worse life chances.
Our country will be bogged down ever deeper in the quagmire of Tory sleaze and cronyism because they will feel they’ve got away with partygate, with doling out contracts to their mates or with their insider betting scandal.
Be in no doubt: the worst will be yet to come because the Tories will conclude that they can get away with anything.
A vote for Labour is a vote for the work of change beginning on day one – Keir Starmer has changed our party and now he is ready to change the country.
It is a vote for exactly what we have promised in this campaign: to restore economic stability, secure our borders, crack down on anti-social behaviour, deliver 40,000 extra appointments to cut NHS waiting lists and drive down energy bills with GB Energy.
And in education, we’ll begin to smash the barriers to our children seizing opportunity with both hands, starting the work from the first day to deliver 3,000 new primary school-based nurseries, free breakfast clubs in every primary school, 6,500 new expert teachers in our classrooms and more apprenticeships and training opportunities for your young people.
We don’t underestimate the scale of the challenge facing us: we don’t just have to rebuild our economy and our public services, we have to painstakingly rebuild trust in our politics and prove to you that government can change our country for the better.
That’s why our manifesto only contains promises we know we can keep and that the country can afford. With Keir and with Labour, it’s country first, party second – and it will stay that way.
Together we can stop the chaos, turn the page on 14 years, and start to rebuild Britain. That change will only come if you vote for it today. Vote Labour.
Bridget Phillipson is shadow education secretary and Labour candidate for Houghton and Sunderland South.
