THE building blocks for strengthening working-class power are housing, public ownership and wages, left MP Rebecca Long-Bailey told a Morning Star fringe today.

“We stand at a very perilous moment in history,” the former shadow cabinet minister told the meeting at the TUC Congress.

“We know that after 14 years of austerity under the previous government, life expectancy started to fall in this country to the point where now we’ve got people living in abject poverty.

“And that austerity, of course, didn’t happen by itself. It came on the back of 40 years of neoliberalist economic dogma, [and] deindustrialisation.”

Ms Long-Bailey said people were angry with wealth being “sucked up at the very top,” council houses being sold off and public utilities “sold off to the highest bidder.”

“They’re angry that they can see a tiny percentage of society doing extremely well while the rest suffer and are constantly told ‘there’s no money,’ ‘we can't pay you any more wages,’ and you ‘can’t have a home because there’s no resources’,” she said.

“We have to change that narrative.

“If we don't show people that we will make sure, as a labour movement, that every passing generation sees a better quality of life than the last, then our future is looking quite bleak.”

Ms Long-Bailey highlighted a need for building social housing quickly, but added that it was also important to tackle the “marketisation of our housing sector,” especially in the private sector, through rent controls.

She said the second building block is tackling the cost-of-living crisis by ending privatisation, from the water to energy industries, and the third is to secure good wages through investment, along with strong trade union rights.

The meeting also heard from union leaders, including PCS’s Fran Heathcote, TSSA’s Maryam Eslamdoust, and POA’s Steve Gillian.