AN UPBEAT room of activists heard from the Labour hopeful for Barrow in this months’s general election.

Along with a number of other speakers, Chris Altree, the Labour Party’s parliamentary candidate for Barrow and Furness addressed a room of supporters at the Forum in Barrow as the party looked ahead to a tense final week of one of the most open-ended general election campaigns in living memory.

The speakers talked attendees through Labour’s much-examined manifesto, which is estimated to cost over £90 billion to implement - dwarfing the Conservative Party’s spending pledges. However, a number of commentators elsewhere have pointed to a £70-billion 'black hole' in uncosted Conservative spending promises.

Labour’s key manifesto pledges include free full-fibre broadband coverage for the whole of the UK by 2030, scrapping tuition fees, an ambitious Green New Deal that would see the UK aim for carbon neutrality by 2030, a 4.3 per cent annual increase in NHS spending and a social housing programme to build one million new homes over the course of the next decade.

Commenting on the turnout yesterday, Mr Altree said: “The support we are receiving has been amazing. There is such a buzz in the air, with so many Labour members getting involved. I couldn’t ask for more.”

Shaun Blezard, Labour’s campaign organiser for the December poll and councillor for Dalton South, said: “This campaign has just been getting better by the day, we have had more people out canvassing than we have had in years.

“They are coming because they believe in Chris and what he is saying. They are coming because they believe in the Labour manifesto and want to save the NHS from the Tories, they want to end the suffering from Tory austerity and want to live in a fairer more just society.”

Mr Altree is up against Simon Fell of the Conservative Party (who lost out on the seat by just 209 votes in 2017’s snap general election), Ged McGrath representing Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, Chris Loynes running again for the Green Party and Loraine Birchall as the candidate for the Liberal Democrats.