TORIES were declared the “class enemy” at the Durham Miners’ Gala on Saturday while unity among workers and their unions was flagged as the key to fighting back.

Fran Heathcote, president of Civil Service workers’ union PCS, was cheered by the huge crowd as she mounted a devastating attack on the Tory government.

But she said that opportunities for a united workers’ resistance had been lost when “solidarity was not turned into action” during the miners’ strike in 1984-85, and in 2011 when a one-day strike by more than two million public-sector workers in defence of their pensions was “betrayed.”