The General Election presents a chance to change the page - Sir Keir Starmer

So, if you’ve spent the last 14 years volunteering to keep your park clean, your library open, for children to have opportunities.

If you’ve been breaking your back to keep trading, steering your business through the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, the challenge of Brexit and the chaos of Westminster. If you’ve been serving our country, whether in scrubs or the uniform of your regiment, and what you want now is a politics that serves you - then make no mistake, this is your year.

The opportunity to shape our country’s future rests in your hands.

And that is a new year's message of hope. The hope of democracy. The power of the vote. The potential for national renewal. The chance, finally, to turn the page, lift the weight off our shoulders, unite as a country, and get our future back.

Four years, I’ve been working for this. Four years, working for the chance to tilt this country, firmly and decisively, back towards the interests of working people.

It’s been a long, hard slog, and I won’t lie, I’ve hated the futility of opposition.

The powerlessness and yes, the pain, that comes from watching the Tories drive the country I love into the rocks of decline.

I didn’t come into politics for that. I didn’t expect a front row seat on this Tory performance art, a song and dance for your political attention, because they find performing so much easier than the hard graft of practical achievement.

No. I came into politics to serve, to get things done, to strive, each and every day, to make a difference to the lives of working people, that’s what gets me up in the morning.

And if you can put aside the reality of Westminster just for a moment, it’s why I still believe in politics.

I had a long career before this: at the Crown Prosecution Service, as a human rights lawyer, in my work with the Police Service of Northern Ireland. I’ve looked into the eyes of people I’ve served and represented, and I have seen reflected back the knowledge that government can make or break a life.

Literally, when it comes to work I’ve done with people on death row. Life and death decisions, in your hands.

Now there’s pressure that comes with that, of course there is. But that’s the responsibility of justice and public service, and it’s the responsibility of a serious government.

This isn’t a game. Politics shouldn’t be a hobby – a pastime for people who enjoy the feeling of power. And nor should it be a sermon from on high, a self-regarding lecture, vanity dressed up as virtue.

No, it should be a higher calling. The power of the vote.

The hope of change and renewal, married to the responsibility of service, that’s what I believe in.

An adbridged version of the New Year speech by Sir Keir Starmer MP, Leader of the Labour Party.