Jeremy Corbyn has used his new year message to accuse Theresa May’s government of plunging the country into crisis by making a “mess” of Brexit.

The Labour leader said that the prime minister’s efforts to force through her withdrawal agreement in a crunch Commons vote next month, were “letting people down all across the country, whether they voted Leave or Remain”.

In the message, released on social media on Monday morning, he said that the UK was full of talent which was being held back by the economic system and Conservative rule.

He committed Labour to uniting a “divided” country by creating “a society where the talent of everyone is unleashed”.

“There’s so much talent across Britain but we’re being held back by a system that for far too long has only served a privileged few,” said Mr Corbyn.

“And now the Conservatives have plunged the country into crisis over the complete mess they’ve made of Brexit, trying to drive through a bad deal and letting people down all across the country whether they voted Leave or Remain.

“Eight years of damaging Tory failure has left us with a divided country where millions are struggling to make ends meet, where so many can’t afford a home to call their own, where older people are deprived of the dignity they deserve and far too many are working in low paid and insecure jobs.”

Britain before Brexit: Wales Show all 16 1 /16 Britain before Brexit: Wales Britain before Brexit: Wales Swansea A giant anonymous message calls after a shopper leaving the town centre, his bags full with advent calendars and Christmas wrapping paper, reminding him of the non-material he’s lacking. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Wrexham Two notices occupy the same wall, both white, both prohibitive. Yet the distance between them goes further than the grey bricks: they are separated by political and everyday concerns, by enmity and what’s simply not allowed. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Cardiff Another tent pitched in a British town centre, adding to those I saw in Coventry and Margate and Great Yarmouth and elsewhere. It looks so out of place, so unadapted, and I can almost hear the bitter scrape of a tent peg on concrete, unable to penetrate, unable to settle in and secure. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Swansea It’s jarring to see the sanitised whiteness of the hospital on the high street. Its clinical, no frills description is at odds with the puns and the slogans of big-name brands. Yet it’s more mysterious too: the crucial details are absent, only its origin is laid bare as a clue. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Merthyr Tydfil The site of the former police station, now demolished, the ground bare behind bars. The sign hangs like an historical artefact, revealing not only what once was, but how the public and the law were divided. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Aberystwyth Thank you notes to God are displayed in St. Michael’s Church. I’m interested in how people interpret His role in their lives and how they express gratitude. I try to ignore innuendo when I see this note, and consider the vague completeness of God’s contribution. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Port Talbot A view of the Tata Steelworks from an underpass by the M4. It flanks the southern side of the motorway, facing the hills to the north and the town between and below. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Swansea A disused road sign, first in Welsh, then in English, propped up against a tanning shop. The surface of the body designed to sell the product has been satirised with graffiti in Arabic: “Oh, fire of my heart!” I read the message as a subversive play on heat and attraction in our society, counterposing the superficial, sexualised burning of the body’s exterior (tanning) with the purer, warmer image of the interior fire of love. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Aberystwyth The university Geography Society beats the History Society in a drinking competition. Participants turn glasses over above their heads to prove that they’re empty. Student supporters cheer from the balconies in drunken delirium. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Port Talbot A distinctly twenty-first-century British hieroglyphic. A symbol conveying an obsession with virility, with its tendency to tarnish and spoil, to reduce everything it touches to an insignificant canvas for its power. I would say it has something to do with Port Talbot’s phallic steelworks and their daily emission, if I hadn’t seen it so much elsewhere in Britain. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Merthyr Tydfil Children imagine the future of the town, and in so doing transform the present, from something static and fixed to a place of becoming, where “now” is simply a transitional phase, pregnant with the utopian possibilities of “Las Tydfil”, a place combining two of Britain’s strongest currents: environmentalism and gambling. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Cardiff The Welsh Dragon is printed on plastic bags probably because the company thinks it can sell more products by tapping into the country’s niche patriotism. Yet, it also means that the Welsh Dragon is being treated as rubbish, thrown to the gutter, trashed in landfill, left as litter in a mess of detritus. Richard Morgan Britain before Brexit: Wales Cardiff Black Friday on Queen Street. The street is lined with commercial exclamations - of sales and deals and time running out - that sometimes appear better as ironic parodies of the fate of the capital’s rough sleepers than notices of the products and bargains they promote. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Swansea An anarchist imperative opposite the prison wall, suggesting to the residential area that fundamental, wholesale social change cannot come about through participating in the democratic political process, but only by rejecting it, confronting it, and rising against it. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Merthyr Tydfil Investment cut in half. The promise of a sale broken. Once an announcement, now discarded to the street, visible only to those looking down, more meaningful now than ever before, in the company of rotting autumn. Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain before Brexit: Wales Wrexham The town has a similar accent to the Liverpudlian one. There are hints that it shares an undercurrent of resentment towards The Sun newspaper too. Richard Morgan/The Independent

Mr Corbyn said: “We cannot go on like this. Labour is ready to deliver a radical alternative to rebuild and transform our country.”

He promised: “We’ll stand up to the powerful few so that the wealth you create is shared fairly not hoarded by a privileged elite.

“We’ll work to create a society where the talent of everyone is unleashed. That’s how we’ll unite our country.”