Emily Thornberry calls for PM to take step back as Angela Eagle says Cameron’s input does ‘not help with Labour vote’

David Cameron should take a step back from the referendum campaign and let the remain camp prioritise new voices, the shadow defence secretary, Emily Thornberry, said, on a day of events designed to relaunch Labour’s campaign to keep Britain inside the EU.

At a Sure Start centre in Walsall, accompanied by a dozen senior female Labour MPs, Thornberry said the prime minister’s view on the EU was already widely known, and others needed to be heard. “There are plenty of good people now who can make the case; we really don’t need to keep hearing from David Cameron,” Thornberry said. “Plenty of women!”

Earlier the former prime minister Gordon Brown made a speech aimed at convincing Labour voters to turn out. He spoke of the “rows and rows of graves” at the Somme and Ypres in a passionate speech and said that Europe had been at war in every generation but ours, calling on those in any doubt about the continent’s history to reflect on the Berlin Wall and Warsaw ghetto.

EU referendum: leave takes six-point lead in Guardian/ICM polls Read more

“What sort of message can we send to the world on 23 June if we, Britain, who consider ourselves one of the most internationally minded, who consider ourselves outward-looking and engaged, decide to walk away from our nearest neighbours?

“This is not the Britain I know, this is not the Britain I believe in, this is not the Britain we should aspire to be. We should be a leader in Europe and not leaving it,” said Brown at a speech at De Montfort University in Leicester.



He admitted that globalisation had left people behind, including in Labour constituencies, but he refused to tackle specific questions about immigration, instead accusing media outlets including the Sun and BBC of having “an agenda”. Brown was heckled by one journalist calling on him to answer the question. He insisted his party was playing its role.



“Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell working with my old friend Peter Mandelson shows that something is happening,” he added.



In Walsall Angela Eagle, the shadow business secretary, said she felt the campaign was “on a knife edge” and, though unwilling to tell the prime minister directly to give way to Labour voices, Eagle said his TV appearances “do not help with the Labour vote”.

“It would be helpful. We are trying to get our messages heard above the general psychodrama of the blue-on-blue attack. This whole thing is about Tory big beasts having a battle like rutting stags, but it’s far more important, this vote, than any of that.”

Many of the MPs in the inner cities said they had an easier job convincing voters to vote to remain, but traditional Labour voters in the smaller towns like Walsall were leaning towards voting out.

“It is tough, to be honest,” said Emma Reynolds, the Wolverhampton North East MP. “The Tory argument is that staying protects the NHS, protects services, but they [voters] are seeing their services cut now, they are not feeling the economic benefits of the status quo. So they think they can now vote for change.”

Eagle said she agreed it was not just the issue of immigration which pushed voters toward a leave vote, but also a general feeling of frustration and impotence. “It’s a visceral us-and-them thing, not only immigration at all … the feeling is: ‘Why doesn’t anything change? How can we make things better?’ When you explain the figures though, then it’s different, but you can’t explain it to 65 million people.

“That’s why I said: ‘Get that lie off your bus’ [about the £350m-a-week to the EU slogan on the leave campaign bus]. It’s a lie. And it’s being done by a cabal of rightwing Thatcherites who don’t want to save the health service and don’t give much of a damn about public services in this country, so for them to campaign as if they do is fundamentally dishonest.”

The immigration pledge made by the Tories of reducing net migration to tens of thousands is a common refrain, however. “The Tories should never have made that pledge,” Reynolds said. “You do have to listen to people’s concerns about pressures on services but argue also that the government can do more to make sure they get a school place or a GP appointment.”

Taslima Rahman, a local mother canvassed by a trio of MPs at the talk, said she had been convinced to vote remain by the argument over public services. “It’s safer, I think, for jobs, for the future, I want to feel part of Europe, I think it gives us freedom,” she said.



But several other women at the centre, though happy for the MPs to build Lego models with their young children or play brightly coloured xylophones, were less keen to talk politics. A couple said they were unlikely to vote at all, citing cultural issues or lack of interest.



Though most of the MPs acknowledge a difficult generation divide, with older voters more likely to vote leave, the Birmingham Yardley MP, Jess Philips, said she believed arguments about public services were most likely to win over undecided voters in Labour heartlands.



Philips said her constituents “have lost so many services already, it’s not a doom on the horizon, it’s a reality for them. This centre will have had at least a third of its funding cut already.”



Shabana Mahmood, her fellow Birmingham MP, said families she spoke to were nervous about losing even more. “It is really mixed, yes, but the argument that cuts through is services. If the economy tanks again, they say we’ve already lost so much, what else is there left to lose?”

After boarding the red battle bus, the next stop was the headquarters of SCC, the Birmingham technology company which has offices across Europe.

In front of an audience of female employees, the founder, Steve Rigby, made a impassioned appeal for a remain vote, saying the implications of a possible Brexit had already been felt in the last two months’ trade.

“We believe we will feel the effects not just in the short term, but in the long term as well,” he said, adding that it was otherwise unprecedented for the company to make its political view known to staff.

At the lunch tables in the canteen, however, the view from female employees who chatted to the Labour MPs was far more mixed. The words on their lips were immigration, Turkish membership and the alleged £350m-a-week cost of the EU – three of the leave campaign’s core messages.

And while the company management was concerned its operations abroad would be affected if it left the EU, employees wondered if Brexit would mean those jobs in Europe could then return to British workers.