ON SATURDAY I will march alongside many thousands of others: trade unionists, unemployed people, disabled people, housing campaigners, teachers, steelworkers, local library campaigners, NHS campaigners, junior doctors and many more.

What will unite people is what has sustained and continued to build the People’s Assembly Against Austerity — the inflicting of cuts to our public services, our social security system, our living standards, our employment and trade union rights and to our economy as a whole must stop.

Launched in 2013, with the backing of my union, Unite, and others, campaigning groups and individuals, the initial founding statement began with “a call to all those millions of people in Britain who face an impoverished and uncertain year as their wages, jobs, conditions and welfare provision come under renewed attack by the government.

“With some 80 per cent of austerity measures still to come, and with the government lengthening the time they expect cuts to last, we are calling a People’s Assembly Against Austerity to bring together campaigns against cuts and privatisation with trade unionists in a movement for social justice.”

Behind it lay the understanding that austerity has been a political choice — not an economic necessity — that was only going to deliver for the very wealthiest.

Amongst the signatories were then back-bench MPs Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell — as well as the Morning Star.

A few months later the first Assembly at Central Hall in Westminster spilled onto the streets as the venue teemed with those wanting to get involved in stopping the government’s policy of cuts.

We know how the story has unfolded since then. “Economic credibility” has laughingly been defined as an economic policy that has delivered neither sustainable economic growth nor improved living standards for the overwhelming majority of people.

It has even failed on their own very narrow definition of success of reducing the debt to GDP ratio.

Yet, defined it had been. While the trade unions, MPs and campaigning organisations under the umbrella of the People’s Assembly continued to provide a counterpoint to what the government was doing, “austerity economics” has dominated the political narrative. The Con-Dems were able to systematically target and scapegoat different groups in our society, slashing benefits and privatising services in their wake.

What is now breaking through this — as has been detailed in these pages before — is the election of Corbyn to the Labour leadership and his avowedly anti-austerity shadow chancellor, John McDonnell.

Taking “anti-austerity” as its starting point, we have seen the Labour Party leadership staking out a different economic policy to that being pursued first by the coalition and now with relish by the Tories alone.

By setting out a clear alternative — one that rests on driving up public investment in our creaking infrastructure, including public transport, manufacturing and building council housing — a broader discussion is taking place about what type of economy we want as a society.

It is beginning to embrace what we should invest in, and how we can tie this to the creation of decent work, how we can improve wage levels and reduce wealth and income inequality through strengthening trade unions.

It is in short a discussion about how different political choices to austerity can be made and would deliver real gains for ordinary people.

In the wake of the Panama Papers it is also a discussion that has embraced how we have a progressive tax system and ensure that everyone pays their dues.

In combination with Iain Duncan Smith’s resignation letter it has probably sounded the death knell for the phrase “we are all in it together” — it always rang hollow but never more so.

As the Tories increasingly appear on the verge of self-destruction over Europe — and there remain 10 weeks to go until the vote even takes place — and the maths of austerity increasingly outrun the politics (how do you keep cutting the size of the state when the only people left to attack are your own voters?) Labour’s polling is beginning to head in the correct upward direction.

It is starting from too low a base after a humbling election loss in 2015 and it remains a long climb to victory in 2020.

But important U-turns and delays in policies are being wrung from the government. Labour has — on steel for example — been crucial in supporting the trade unions’ ability to set the political agenda and exposed the government’s lack of leadership.

Umbrella social movements such as the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, and campaigns such as the Labour Assembly Against Austerity that brings together Labour activists on this agenda, have helped lay the foundations of the election of this Labour leadership and the concessions that have been wrung.

Concessions that make a real difference to people — the 400,000 disabled people who were to suffer further cuts in their personal independence payment after the March 2016 Budget now will not do so.

I have little doubt it is something that will have saved much despair and heartache.

There is a direct line that can be traced from the many, many thousands of people who have taken part in national marches, local demonstrations, peaceful protests such as the Disabled People Against Cuts occupation of the parliamentary lobby, petitions, leafleting, Labour door-knocking in recent years and the beating back of this government and the creation of choppy political waters for Cameron, Osborne, Goldsmith, Johnson et al.

Those who believe that those who choose to protest are only interested in protest are wrong, and I urge them to join with us on the march to oppose what this government is doing.

Protesting is one tool in our political armoury that makes clear we believe different government policies are necessary and offers solidarity to those on the receiving end of this government’s brutal austerity.

It sits alongside staking out an economic policy that is credible by the measure that should matter — that it will work and deliver for the overwhelming majority of people, not just the 1 per cent.

On the march on Saturday we can reflect how far we have come in just three years and how much further there is to go, but we are travelling in the right direction to win a Labour government in 2020.

• Steve Turner is assistant general secretary of Unite and chair of the People’s Assembly Against Austerity.
• People’s Assembly Against Austerity march for Health, Homes, Jobs and Education is on Saturday April 16, assemble Gower Street 1pm and march to Trafalgar Square.
• The Labour Assembly Against Austerity is hosting an economics seminar and Q&A on The Alternative to Austerity — investment not cuts with participants including Mick Burke (Socialist Economic bulletin), Sian Errington (Labour Assembly Against Austerity) and James Meadway (economist) on Thursday June 30 at 6.30pm at Unite House, 128 Theobalds Road, London, WC1X 8TN. For more information or to pre-register email [email protected]