JEREMY Corbyn returned to East Lancashire yesterday to promote his party’s ‘bold’ agenda for change to voters in marginal Pendle.

The Labour leader, who addressed a rally in Darwen Library Theatre early in the election campaign, spoke to dozens of cheering supporters in Nelson’s Market Square.

He told them: “Yes our manifesto is bold.

“It has to be bold. There is a lot of injustice and inequality to tackle.There is a lot in it because there is a lot to do.”

On the way there, Mr Corbyn spoke to the Lancashire Telegraph and defended his position of neutrality in any referendum called by a Labour government on renegotiated Brexit deal.

He said: “I’ll be the honest broker. I would appoint a negotiating team to go immediately to Brussels next week and their job would be to negotiate a credible leave option which will maintain the important trade relationship with Europe and the Good Friday agreement.

“There would be a credible choice in the referendum which we’d hold in 12 months.”

Challenged on how this would go down in Pendle where 63.2 per cent voted to leave the EU in 2016, he said: “I would prefer it that people understand why we have come to the position that we have because I don’t want to represent 48 or 52. I want to represent the whole population and our candidates are very well aware of the policy and the party as a whole is behind that policy because it does provide the final decision to be made by people of this country.”

At the rally, where supporters sang ‘I’m dreaming of a red Christmas’, he said a Labour government would invest in the NHS, education, and road and rail in the North.

Mr Corbyn said the state of Britain’s hospitals was such that the recent pictures of four-year-old Jack sleeping on coats with an oxygen mask at Leeds General Infirmary was ‘sadly not exceptional’.

He said: “We will create a properly-funded, publicly-owned and publicly-run NHS. It is under threat from the Tories.”

Mr Corbyn promised to provide proper state-funded adult care and repeated Labour’s promise to spend £58billion compensating the ‘Waspi women’ who had lost out when their pension age was raised in 2011 by the coalition government.

He urged Labour supporters to step up knocking on doors and campaigning to return Labour candidate Cllr Azhar Ali in Pendle, ahead of the Conservatives' Andrew Stephenson, the sitting MP, and a Labour government.

In his interview Mr Corbyn said: “Thursday’s election is about the future direction of this country. Do we continue with austerity and underfunding of public services or do we invest in the future? Our manifesto is very ambitious but it will make a difference in a lot of people’s lives.”

Cllr Ali said: “I am delighted Jeremy is here. We can win Pendle to win the election.”