JUSTICE secretary Michael Gove insisted leaving the EU could create jobs rather than destroy them as he made an eve-of-poll visit to Bournemouth.

Mr Gove took a whistle-stop tour of Bournemouth Pier and seafront with armed forces minister and fellow Vote Leave campaigner Penny Mordaunt, stopping en route to buy sticks of rock.

He rejected the concerns of major local employers such as J.P. Morgan, Barclays, Siemens, Sunseeker and Lush about a Brexit vote.

Mr Gove said: “Our economy will be stronger if we leave the European Union because we’ll be free to forge trade deals with countries like Canada, China, India and Japan.

“The European Union doesn’t have trade deals with China, India and Japan at the moment and the estimate is that we could have across the country something like 300,000 new jobs if we leave the EU and get these new deals which we can’t while we’re still inside the EU.

He added: “Overwhelmingly, small and medium sized businesses who are the principal creators of new jobs think that we’d be better off outside, there’s be less bureaucracy, less red tape and more opportunities.”

He said leaving the EU would mean “less red tape, higher wages and more jobs”.

Penny Mordaunt said: “I would say that not only is the EU preventing us from trading with the rest of the world as we would like but also it’s closed off opportunities to our services sector, our financial services in particular which is really important in this part of the world.

“Germany has yet to open up itself to our services sector. We can buy its cars but our insurance companies can’t go and compete over there.

“I would say that jobs are not contingent on any kind of bureaucracy. What they’re contingent on are our entrepreneurs, our wealth creators, particularly our small and medium sized businesses who are disproportionately clobbered by Brussels. They can’t lobby, they’ve got to put up with 100 per cent of the regulations whether [or not] they apply to them and whether they export to the continent.”

Earlier in the day, Mr Gove had apologised after comparing the warnings of economic experts about Brexit to the Nazis smearing Albert Einstein in the 1930s.

The analogy prompted David Cameron to say the ‘leave’ campaign had “lost it”.

Asked if he was happy about the tone of the debate about immigration, Mr Gove said: “One of the great things about being in a democracy is that you’ve got a robust tradition of free speech and of course there are all sorts of things that are said, not just in the course of the campaigns but in the course of our big national debate, that I don’t agree with.

“But I think it’s just important to respect individuals’ rights to express themselves and I think that trying to suggest that people who simply want to make our country more democratic are somehow narrow-minded for doing so is, I think, wrong.”