With the polls closing in just over 24 hours, it is urgent that we get out the vote for Labour.

I know many people think that “they are all the same” or that voting doesn’t affect them. But in this election, more than for any election for a generation, it is important to cast your vote.

In my part of the world, Yorkshire, a vote for Labour would change people’s lives.

Under the Tories Yorkshire and Humber has suffered. Average wages are now over £2,000 a year less than they were in in 2010 in real terms. That means people are facing a huge squeeze on their living standards and finding it really difficult to make ends meet at the end of the month.

On top of this, insecure jobs and zero hour contracts have increased dramatically. There are nearly 60,000 people in Yorkshire that are on zero hour contracts which rely on a text in the morning to see if they will actually have any work that day. If you’re on one of these contracts you cannot get a mortgage, borrow money to buy a new car or plan for the future.

The Tories have built an economy based on low pay and insecure work that hits working people hard. We were told that this would cut the deficit and reduce borrowing. It hasn’t. In fact the Tories have failed on their own terms: they said the deficit would have been gone by 2015, but it’s now set to be £75 billion by then and they are borrowing over £200 billion more than they planned.

The Tories have got it wrong. We can only have a strong economy when working people across the whole of the country succeed, not just the few at the top. That’s why a Labour government will raise the minimum wage to over £8 an hour by October 2019, we will ban exploitative zero hour contracts and make it illegal to use agency workers to undercut wages of permanent employees.

That’s why a Labour vote could make all the difference to people’s lives.