I'm Not Asking You to Vote Simply for Labour - I'm Asking You to Vote for Yourself and Your Family

Tomorrow the polls will open and election day will finally be upon us. It has been a long campaign, but it all comes down to a simple choice: between a Labour government that puts working people first, or a Tory government that works only for the privileged few. It is the clearest choice that has been put before the British people for a generation. The stakes are so high.

Tomorrow the polls will open and election day will finally be upon us.

It has been a long campaign, but it all comes down to a simple choice: between a Labour government that puts working people first, or a Tory government that works only for the privileged few.

It is the clearest choice that has been put before the British people for a generation. The stakes are so high.

So I'm not asking you to vote simply for Labour tomorrow. I'm asking you to vote for yourself and your family, to vote to reward hard work again for everyone in our country, to vote to build a future for all our young people, to vote to rescue our NHS, and, above all, to vote for a country where we put working families first. That's what's on the ballot paper.

I'm not simply asking you to reject the Conservatives but to reject their plan to put the rich and powerful first, to reject a plan to double the cuts next years and devastate our NHS, to reject a plan for a recovery that only reaches the City of London, to reject a plan that leaves young people having a worse life than their parents.

We can't carry on as a country where there is one rule for a few and another rule for everyone else.

Labour knows that Britain only succeeds when working families succeed. Labour is the party with a better plan - for living standards, the NHS and the next generation.

In these final hours we're fighting to:

  • Reward the hard work of everyone in our country, not just those who get the six-figure bonuses, so we will raise the minimum wage to £8 an hour.
  • Get security at work, so we will ban exploitative zero-hours contracts and legislate to ensure that if you work regular hours, you will receive a regular contract.
  • Give opportunities to all our young people, with guaranteed apprenticeships if you get the grades and tuition fees reduced from £9,000 to £6,000.
  • Build homes again in our country, scrap stamp duty for first-time buyers and give the millions of renters a fair deal
  • Bring back fairness to Britain and abolish this government's cruel, indefensible Bedroom Tax.
  • Rescue our NHS, beginning with a funded plan for 20,000 more nurses, 8,000 more doctors, 5,000 more care workers and 3,000 more midwives.

Unlike other parties, I can tell you how this will be paid for: by a mansion tax on properties above £2million, a levy on tobacco companies and a crackdown on tax avoidance by the hedge funds.

We'll do something else too. We'll tackle tax avoidance right across our economy. There is no bigger symbol of the Tory-Lib Dem government's failure than its failure to deal with tax avoidance. The tax gap between the amount owed and the amount collected has gone up to £34billion in the past five years.

The scandal at HSBC has been brought to the heart of government, while the hedge funds have been given the green light to avoid paying their fair share. This means higher taxes for working people and businesses, as well as starving money from our public services.

The next Labour government will do what no government has done for 200 years. We will abolish the non-dom rule because anyone permanently resident in the UK should pay tax in the same way as everyone else.

We have come to expect to see David Cameron and Nigel Farage defending the richest and most powerful, but don't forget that Nick Clegg is defending the non-dom rule too.

There is huge risk to working families from a second-term Tory government, including one propped up by the Lib Dems. They will raid your family budget and cut your NHS, but they will continue to protect the privileged few.

That is why we need Labour's plan, which is a plan underpinned by every policy being fully funded so we cut the deficit every year and balance the books.

I've been incredibly proud of the campaign our party has run.

At the start of this campaign we were aiming to have four million conversations in four months. Last week I raised that target to five million.

I am so proud that today we will exceed that target and hit an unprecedented figure for any political party of six million, with one million more conversations by the end of tomorrow.

The Labour Party will have more members, more activists, more volunteers out on the streets tomorrow than all the main parties combined.

Our digital campaign has been breaking new records, bringing in small donations, and recruiting hundreds of volunteers every day - around half of whom are non-members.

This tells you all you need to know about where the energy lies in this election.

What have we seen from the Conservative Party over these past six weeks? A negative campaign with nothing to say to working people, nothing to offer for the future and increasingly desperate tactics as they have lost the argument.

People don't want to knock on doors for the Tories. And nor would I. But they do want to knock on doors for Labour, because they share our vision that Britain only succeeds when working families succeed.

We all know this race is going to be the closest we have ever seen. So in these final few hours, tell your friends, your family, your neighbours how important it is, that every single person in our country could make the difference.

Ed Miliband is the leader of the Labour Party and the Labour candidate for Doncaster North

This blog first appeared on Ed Miliband's official Facebook page, and can be read here

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