TODAY’S massive march against austerity in London must mark the beginning of the end for the rotten coalition government and its class war against working people.

Crowds of trade unionists, socialists, communists, Greens and others are joined by campaigners fighting to defend their communities, their livelihoods and their homes from a ruthless Westminster regime that has thrown a third of the population into poverty.

Many of those taking to the streets today under the banner of the People’s Assembly might not think of themselves as political — but have been thrust into the fightback by the need to stop a local hospital from closing, to prevent their school from being swallowed by a shady private academy chain or to stand up for a disabled relative bankrupted by the bedroom tax or shunted onto the dole by the closure of the Remploy factories.

What will bring us all together is the sense that enough is enough. That people in Britain are sick and tired of a political class that exists only to further enrich the rich at our expense, indifferent to the misery it inflicts on millions in the process.

We are ruled by a government which allows a consulting firm with private healthcare clients — McKinsey — to write legislation inviting profit-hungry parasites into our NHS. Legislation passed by a Parliament in which 220 members also have interests in private health companies.

We are taken for mugs by a regime that cuts hundreds of thousands of jobs and then demonises the unemployed as “scroungers.” By ministers who intone that we are “all in it together” while cutting taxes for the rich and tripling the cost of a university education.

This is a government with no morals and no integrity, serving a moribund capitalist system rooted in exploitation and violence and offering us a bleak future of insecure jobs on poverty wages, perennial mass unemployment and hollowed-out, underfunded public services.

A low-skill, low-wage, broken Britain where millions of children go hungry even as tax-dodging oligarchs turn our capital into a playground for the global super-rich.

To break free of this nightmare the labour movement cannot try to parry the Con-Dem cutters on their own terms. We must expose austerity for the blatant lie that it is and force the Labour Party, still wedded to the Tory narrative, to start fighting for the working people who founded it.

Britain is not “broke.” The annual Sunday Times rich list exposes just how well the wealthy are doing out of government policies, with the richest 1,000 people in the country getting £69 billion richer in the last year alone.

The financial crash of 2007-8, caused by the reckless gambling of City speculators, provided the ruling class with the excuse it needed to intensify the biggest robbery in history — the colossal transfer of wealth from working people to fat-cat corporations that has shaped Western economies since the 1970s.

The People’s Assembly was founded to bring together everyone who wants to turn the tide and put this country back on track. Bringing trade unions together with community campaigns and anti-capitalist organisations of every shape and size has created a movement far greater than the sum of its parts.

Its founding statement declares: “We have a plain and simple goal: to make the government abandon its austerity programme. If it will not it must be replaced with one that will.”

We are embarking on a summer of resistance, a summer of mass strikes and demonstrations. The ruling class is determined to win — to defeat working people and trample on our rights.

We must show equal determination. We cannot stop fighting until victory is ours.