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Jeremy Corbyn will resist pressure to back a draconian clampdown on immigration tomorrow as he launches Labour’s fightback against UKIP.

The Labour chief will seek to re-boot his stuttering leadership with a major speech on Brexit in Peterborough.

But he will face down the growing pressure from his own MPs to back tough new limits on the number of workers moving here from Europe.

Instead Mr Corbyn will insist the best way to cut migrants numbers is a clampdown on shameless bosses who use foreign workers to undercut local wages, and an attack on UK job agencies which recruit exclusively from abroad.

“Interventions in the labour market will be centre stage,” a source said.

“We are talking about intervening in the jobs market in a way that hasn’t happened for a very long time.”

Deputy Leader Tom Watson yesterday became the most high-profile Labour figure so far to warn that Labour will lose the next election if it does not take a harder line on immigration.

“I think for the Labour Party, what we can’t say is the status quo,” he told Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday show.

(Image: AFP)

Mr Watson said the Brexit deal must give Britain “control over its own borders” and “a convincing fair solution to people’s genuine concerns about immigration.”

And he warned: “That is one of the challenges Labour will have in its manifesto.

“If we don’t address that issue, then Labour won’t win that election, I’m very clear about that.”

He was backed by Labour’s former shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn, who now chairs the Commons Brexit committee.

“I think there clearly are going to be controls on free movement, and I think that’s something Labour should support,” Mr Benn told BBC Radio Five’s Pienaar’s Politics.

And writing in the Observer, backbench MPs Stephen Kinnock and Emma Reynolds warned that “mixed messages” from Labour on immigration were “deeply corrosive” of voters’ trust.

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But Mr Corbyn will insist that maintaining full access to the EU’s lucrative single market must remain the priority over an immigration clampdown in the looming Brexit talks.

Party strategists told the Mirror they are preparing a new year blitz on Labour heartlands in response to the election of working class Scouser Paul Nuttall as Ukip leader.

Northern MPs in marginal seats fear Mr Nuttall’s election could be a “game changer” for Ukip in Labour’s heartland areas and see the purple party take seats off labour for the first time.

(Image: Getty)

A shadow cabinet source told the Mirror: “We know we have to respond, and we know how we’re going to do it.”

Shadow cabinet figures with strong working class backgrounds will be chosen as unofficial ‘Northern spokesmen’ to deliver Labour’s anti-austerity message in heartland areas.

Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner, shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth and shadow cabinet office minister Andrew Gwynne will be among those deployed.

Separately Labour’s elections guru Jon Trickett - a former leader of Leeds City Council - will make a series of speeches demanding the Government do more to support the Northern economy.

The party will also target what they believe to be Mr Nuttall’s crucial weak spot among Labour supporters - past statements suggesting the NHS should be replaced with a private healthcare system.

Mr Corbyn told the Mirror last month: “I will challenge UKIP on the basis that UKIP attacks minorities who run our health service, offers to privatise the health service but doesn’t offer to build any houses, doesn’t offer to deal with the issues facing communities, and doesn’t do anything to challenge the appalling underfunding of local government, particularly in the poorest areas.”