LABOUR told us there would be change. They told us there would be decency, stability, and a bit of breathing room at the end of the month.

But if you live a working-class life, you know the truth in your bones: the logos on the lecterns have changed, the language has softened, the spreadsheets are slicker, yet the squeeze is the same.

You can dress austerity in any colour you like and knot it neatly under a red tie, but when it lands on our streets, our hospitals, our schools and our pay packets, it still means cuts, charges and closures.

We can’t sit quietly while another Budget is primed to make the rich richer and tells the rest of us to wait our turn.

We’re being sold a story that starts with “fiscal rules” and ends with “sorry, there’s no money.” That tidy tagline always seems to appear just before the axe falls on a service we use, and just after there’s been a quiet tax break, subsidy, or sweetheart scheme for those who already have plenty. When a Chancellor says there’s no money, they mean there’s no money for you: not for the A&E that keeps you alive, not for the bus route that gets you to work, not for the council that holds your community together.

Somehow, there’s always money for consultancies that swallow public cash, for private profiteers who turn our needs into their dividends, for ever-growing military budgets and new weapons programmes, and for the City to be soothed with promises that nothing essential will change. Every extra pound poured into warfare is a pound stripped from welfare and the services that keep us alive and dignified; we should be clear: we demand welfare, not warfare.

Let’s be honest about the politics of this. If you promise transformation but hold yourself hostage to rules designed to placate markets, you’re not transforming, you’re administering the same failing model with a kinder press release.

Labour said the manifesto would repair the public realm. What we see instead is a Budget being assembled to satisfy the same old interests: those who walked off with the gains of the last 15 years, and a financial sector that treats public services as cost centres to be trimmed, not lifelines to be funded.

We are expected to swallow this with gratitude because it’s being done in sensible tones by familiar faces. That’s not change; that’s management of decline.

I don’t need another lecture about “prudence” from people who’ve never had to choose between topping up the leccy or buying school shoes.

Prudence is a nurse who has worked a double shift and is still skint after rent, energy and food. Prudence is a carer trying to keep a council service afloat while budgets collapse. Prudence is millions of us stretching every pound until it screams.

The real recklessness is refusing to tax wealth at a serious level, refusing to crack down on profiteering, refusing to invest at the scale required to rebuild the NHS, social care, schools and local government. The real irresponsibility is pretending a country can cut its way to a healthier economy, as if closing libraries and sacking teaching assistants magically produces growth.

And don’t tell me to be “realistic.”

Realistic is recognising that every ambulance stuck outside A&E is a human being in pain. Realistic is knowing that a school with a leaking roof cannot deliver “levelling up,” no matter how many slogans you paint on a podium.

Realistic is a mum in a cold house, opening the prepayment meter with dread. The numbers in the Red Box are not neutral; they are moral choices. If you protect the assets of the already wealthy while “finding savings” in the lives of the many, you’ve chosen a side.

So here is our answer, and it’s simple: we won’t accept it.

We won’t be sweet-talked into another turn of the austerity screw and told it’s for our own good. We won’t be patted on the head and asked for “one more winter of restraint” while the well-connected collect theirs today.

And we certainly won’t swallow a Budget that punts real change into the long grass because someone in a boardroom might frown.

That’s why the People’s Assembly is calling an Eve of Budget protest on Monday November 25 at 6pm, Downing Street, after work, because the costs of this model land after work: at the kitchen table, on the bus stop where your route used to be.

Join the Eve of Budget Protest November 25, 6pm — Downing Street. Be there with your friends, your union branch, your neighbours and your noise.

We’ll be joined by voices who know exactly what’s at stake: Zarah Sultana MP, PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote, NEU general secretary Daniel Kebede, Paula Peters of DPAC and more.

Our demands are not radical. They are common sense with a backbone:

Tax wealth, not work. Close the loopholes. Stop pretending that taxing extreme wealth is a fantasy. It’s a decision.

Fund the services that hold our lives together. Put real money into the NHS, social care, councils and education, not token top-ups that leave waiting lists and waiting rooms bursting.

End profiteering in essentials. Take energy, water and public transport out of the hands of those who treat them like cash machines, and run them for need, not greed.

A real green jobs programme. Cut bills, cut carbon and create unionised, secure work through public investment at scale.

Dignity at work. Raise the floor on pay and rights and strengthen collective bargaining, so workers share in the wealth we create.

To anyone in Labour who says they “wish they could” but their hands are tied: untie them. You tied them yourselves with rules no-one can eat, heat or ride to work on.

If you’re unwilling to challenge hoarding at the top, don’t ask us to accept hunger at the bottom. If you won’t use political capital to save lives and livelihoods, don’t ask us for patience while you spend it reassuring the rich.

People will say protests don’t change anything. That’s a lie we’re told to keep us quiet. Protests set the terms of debate.

They stiffen spines and create room for the very policies the cautious insist are impossible. When we show up the night before the Budget and make ourselves heard, we’re doing more than making noise; we’re making choices visible. We’re telling this government, and any government that comes after this: you will not balance your books on our backs without a fight.

I’m proud to be working class and unafraid to say what so many are thinking: we didn’t vote for managed decline with nicer manners.

We voted for a country that works for the many. If Labour won’t deliver it from inside Parliament, we’ll demand it from outside, loudly, persistently, together.

So clock off, and clock in to the street. Eve of Budget, Monday November 25, 6pm, Downing Street.

Bring your branch banner, your whistle, your placard and your voice. Bring the anger you’ve had to swallow and the hope you refuse to lose. Let’s show them what realism looks like when it’s organised: people before profit, services before surplus, and a Budget that finally serves the country that pays for it.

Ramona McCartney is national secretary of the People’s Assembly.