Hilary Benn and Angela Eagle will today (Monday 6 June) take the concerns of working people to the Leave campaign and demand they come clean on which of their hard-won workers’ rights they want to scrap if Britain votes to leave the EU.

An online petition launched on the Labour In For Britain website on Friday 3 June gathered over 30,000 signatures after only one full day.

Concerns have mounted about what would happen to the rules protecting workers in the event of a vote to leave the EU.

Just a few weeks ago, Priti Patel, the Leave campaigner and Tory Employment Minister, claimed that, “if we could just halve the burdens of the EU social and employment legislation we could deliver a £4.3 billion boost to our economy and 60,000 new jobs.”

Last year, Boris Johnson said that employment regulations from Brussels were holding back growth and described Britain dropping its insistence on changes to EU employment law as “very disappointing”.

Hilary Benn MP, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, said:

“This is a pivotal moment for Britain’s workers. Make no mistake, a vote to leave will put the rights that many of us take for granted in the firing line. How do we know? Because the Leave campaign have said so. They want to use a vote to leave to strip these rights away.

“The Brexit Tories try to wrap it up in deliberately vague talk of getting rid of ‘regulation’ and 'red tape’ but what they actually mean is getting rid of vital rights that protect people at work. 

“Working people rely on this protection and they deserve the truth from the Leave campaign. Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Priti Patel need to level with the British people and spell out exactly which of their rights would go if we leave.”