UNIONS will confront Labour’s cuts agenda next month with a national demonstration demanding the party change course.

The People’s Assembly held a press conference today to call on the whole labour movement to march with it at the No More Austerity demonstration in London on Saturday June 7.

The march takes place days before Chancellor Rachel Reeves is to announce her first multi-year spending settlement on June 11, and is intended to maximise pressure on the government to drop Ms Reeves’ self-imposed fiscal rules, tax wealth and profits and raise spending to address funding crises across health, education, local government and many other sectors.

Labour MP Diane Abbott said the disastrous result of this month’s council elections were leading an increasing number of MPs to realise the need to stand up to Mr Starmer and change his policies, she said.

“The result of the Runcorn by-election and the council elections have had an extraordinary effect on my colleagues,” she told the Morning Star. “They can see their majorities crumbling before their eyes, and there’s nothing that concentrates the mind of an MP more than the threat of actually losing their seat and the salary that goes with it.”

More MPs had started to understand that the Starmer clique only knew how to do one thing — attack the Labour left — and was incapable of addressing the bigger challenges of government, she said.

Unite national lead officer Onay Kasab said the ongoing Birmingham bin strike was an example of what austerity meant in practice — “pay cuts of up to £8,000 a year. We’re not after more money — we’re attempting to defend what we have.”

But across local government talk about defending services was now outdated, he pointed out — it was time to talk about “rebuilding services. Some of them are completely and utterly destroyed. That’s why Unite has launched a campaign for fair funding of local authorities.”

Birmingham’s bin workers were an inspiration who reminded us that “yes, we are going to march, and it’s going to be an absolutely magnificent demonstration. But equally, we are going to have to strike. We are going to have to take necessary action, in cases industrial action.”

Public & Commercial Services union president Martin Cavanagh said the union’s members were feeling “the full brutality of the austerity measures” whether in the workplace or their daily lives. Civil servants were being asked to do more with less, with Ms Reeves announcing cuts of 15 per cent across government departments, while those working in the Department for Work & Pensions also saw the appalling damage cuts to social security would do to some of the poorest people in society.

The point was reinforced by Disabled People Against Cuts’ Paula Peters, who said that if the disability benefits bill had risen it was down to “the rise in the state pension age, the long waiting lists for NHS treatment and mental health support,” issues the government should address instead of attacking the disabled.

Alia Butt of Keep Our NHS Public savaged the government’s scapegoating of immigrants too.

“I myself am from an immigrant family, and I choose to work in a crumbling NHS at the mercy of failing government policies.”

Ministers were “driving the country into an economic crisis worse than we’ve seen for a long time … immigrants are the backbone of society, without us it isn’t just the NHS that would collapse but other major cultural, educational and civic institutions.”

Speakers derided government claims there is no money to invest in services, given the speed with which they are happy to ramp up military spending. “Welfare Not Warfare” will be one of the June 7 demo’s official themes.

The press conference was hosted by the National Education Union (NEU) at its Hamilton House headquarters, and NEU vice-president Ed Harlow said teachers were appalled that one in three children in Britain now grows up in poverty.

“That’s shameful and it’s down to political choices,” he said. “We will be out in force on June 7 to say the NEU rejects division, rejects racism, and we absolutely reject austerity 2.0.”