“THIS is a class war — and we need to fight back,” Cynon Valley MP Beth Winter told a Wales TUC rally to demand a new deal today.

Congress delegates held up placards in support of the June 18 We Deserve Better march as they warned the Westminster government that the movement would not lie down under its attacks.

The Tories were attacking “the right to protest, the right to vote, the right to judicial review and most recently threats to union rights to withdraw labour,” Ms Winter warned.

GMB leader Gary Smith said that it was vital the movement came together on June 18 because the workers who “performed heroics” keeping the country running through the pandemic were “not emerging into the new world they deserve — respected and properly rewarded for the jobs they do.”

Instead multimillionaires in government and the Bank of England were lecturing the low paid on pay restraint while the cost of living went through the roof, he said.

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said if there was one reason to march on June 18, it was the spectacle of P&O having illegally sacked 800 ferry workers and what that said about the poor state of workers’ rights in Britain.

“Every effort will be made to demonise us, to divide and rule working people and to remove our right to strike,” she said.

Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford contrasted the Labour administration in Cardiff to the Tories at Westminster.

A Labour Party prepared to challenge the market could beat the Tories, he said, pointing out that in this month’s local elections while the Scottish Conservative vote fell by 22 per cent and the English Conservative vote by 25 per cent, “in Wales the Tory vote collapsed by 46 per cent.”

In the first year of its current term the Welsh government had recruited 1,800 more teachers, secured a three-year £13 million funding deal for the Wales Union Learning Fund and implemented the real living wage for social care workers, he announced to applause.

New social housing projects would build homes which would “generate more heat and light than they consume,” he pledged.

This determination to serve the interests of the majority was why Labour, having won a majority across Wales in a general election for the first time 100 years ago this November, had never failed to do that since, Mr Drakeford declared.