ON OCTOBER 1 1931, in an era of mass unemployment and poverty, 10,000 unemployed men and women marched to Salford Town Hall at Bexley Square and were met with awful police violence. 

They were trying to highlight the desperate situations they found themselves in and to hand in a petition protesting against means-tested benefits and unemployment.  

The famous Salfordian author Walter Greenwood was there, and in his novel Love on the Dole he said: “Mounted police appeared at the trot, and, on a sudden, a swarm of plain-clothes men descended from nowhere and began to snatch the placards from the hands of the demonstrators, flinging the posters to the ground and trampling them underfoot … truncheons descending on heads with sickening thuds; men going down and being dragged off, unceremoniously, to the cells.”

This became known as the Battle of Bexley Square, and one of the plaques on the front of the town hall commemorates it. 

Ninety years on I would love to be honouring those brave people in triumph that each generation that came after them managed to carve a better life for all of us, an irreversible shift of economic power from the hands of the few to the hands of the many. 

But sadly, despite the hard-won gains made by the labour movement since, in the 1980s began the destruction of the progress made towards economic and social justice and now we are witnessing a government here to finish the job — at a pace so fast and in a manner so pernicious, so blatant, that even Margaret Thatcher would have had to sit down and catch her breath.

And now we have a fuel crisis, an energy crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, a care crisis and the Covid crisis. 

We have government that pushed herd immunity and limited “economic disruption” in the early stages of the pandemic.

Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost and countless sick patients were discharged into care homes full of vulnerable people at the instruction of government, where staff had no PPE to protect themselves and residents.

It wasn’t just the government’s dereliction of duty to protect us during Covid that caused this — it was also a decade of cuts and a deliberate erosion of workers’ rights, trade union rights and living standards that created a legacy of poor health and inequalities that left much of our population more vulnerable to the disease. 

We’ve all lost people we love, good people, and the very threads of human life have been threatened by this government on a scale almost unimaginable to us 10 years ago.

And it’s not just its handling of Covid that has put lives at risk.

Years on from the Grenfell tragedy, thousands still live in unsafe buildings, going to sleep each night in fear that they may never wake up. 

Millions live in housing that’s too poor, damp and cold — the slums we thought were consigned to the history books are back with a bang. 

If you need healthcare treatment, well forget it, as NHS waiting times have reached a record high and at the same time the government is trying to push through legislation that will fast-track its plans to destabilise and privatise our NHS.

And of course, there’s climate change — a crisis so vast that if we don’t take bold action now, we simply will not exist at all in years to come.

The five evils that William Beveridge spoke of all those years ago are well and truly back and as we see further cuts to universal credit, redundancies caused by the end of furlough, energy price hikes, a worsening social care crisis and pay and pensions driven even further down as inflation soars, life expectancy will drop even further.

The Bexley Square protesters might have been fighting for a better quality of life, full of hope for a better world — now we have to fight for the very basis of human existence, our right to even live at all.

We face one of the biggest economic and health crises we have ever seen, but we must use this moment to instigate economic change to build the economy and society people deserve. 

And we already have the ideas like a Green New Deal, a national care service, public ownership of rail, mail, energy water and broadband, universal public services, mass council housebuilding, universal basic income, a workers’ plan that delivers job security, trade union representation, at least a real living wage, statutory sick pay at the real living wage and a ban on zero-hours contracts and fire and rehire. And so much more besides. 

So as we remember those giants of Bexley Square, let’s pledge to honour their legacy and finish the battle they started, let’s unite our communities around our vision. 

It will be ferocious, it will require our movement to unite, to organise, to strategise — and it will require a strength in all of us like never before. 

And as the late great Bob Marley once said: “You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.” Strong is our only choice.

Rebecca Long Bailey is Labour MP for Salford and Eccles.