THE gala in Durham has a huge historical resonance, the unity and defiance of the mining communities standing for their right to decent safe working conditions, public ownership and a society that took responsibility for all.

The solidarity of communities held during the desperate days after the 1926 general strike and during the Great Depression.

It helped to bring about a Labour government in 1945 and with it public ownership, the welfare state, the National Health Service and a view of society that was the antithesis of everything Tory Britain in the 1930s had stood for.

The Tory aggression of the late 1970s culminating in Thatcher’s election in 1979 heralded something truly awful. The dismantling of the welfare state, wholesale privatisation of state assets and attacking all workers’ right to organise.

The 1984-5 strike was long, brutal and desperate as the National Union of Mineworkers was systematically attacked and ultimately the whole coal industry destroyed, with what little remained privatised. Thatcher’s Tory government was more interested in destroying the union and working-class solidarity than any rational energy policy.

We are still paying the price of that defeat with depression, poverty and social dislocation in many former mining communities.

Labour from 1997 onwards did invest in communities and the NHS but did not do enough, when we had the chance to do it.A Tory government is now back in office with a majority. We saw their true face this week.

George Osborne’s Budget was like a throwback to 1996 and delivered with an overweening arrogance and confidence.

As with previous Budgets, within hours the headlines began to unravel.

His “living wage,” claimed to be a huge step forward, is a great con as it is planned to be little more than what the national minimum wage would have been. When accompanied by benefit cuts it actually amounts to less. Actually a robbery of the poorest.

The attack on young people and children is the most striking. All grants to university for the poorest become loans and thus every young person who works and studies hard — and we all benefit from their efforts — will be loaded with a debt for decades to come.

The policy on tax credits is alarming and flies in the face of any decent rational thinking. Support for children is limited to the first two in a family. The rest get nothing, thus impoverishing many families and punishing children for the order in which they were born. 

Even Thatcher, who did sign the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, did not go this far, but for Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith there seems to be no place they will not go in slashing the welfare budget.

The £12 billion in cuts will hit the poorest and most vulnerable. That is clear but is also being accompanied by a debate about the benefit cap — currently limited to £26,000 but set to be reduced to £20,000, £23,000 in London, and then even lower. The Tories and some lazy journalists present this as if it is a huge payment to an individual family. 

The reality is that this could not be further from the truth as most of it goes directly to private-sector landlords and the families concerned see none of it. The effects in areas of high rents has been social cleansing of poorer families, many of whom are in work, as they simply get priced out. Now it affects London and south-east England, but the principle applied nationally will have then same effect in every city.

The only really sensible way forward is to address the housing crisis by building more council housing, halting the sale of existing properties, halting the sale of housing association properties and regulating the private rented sector, including the levels of rents charged.

The Budget, however, has none of this. The only thing the Tories understand is selling public assets with no thought for the current or next generation of people that need decent homes, with stability and security.As if all the benefit cuts and attacks on the poorest are not enough, the Budget also plans to continue the attack on public-sector workers through the wage freeze and job losses. 

Public-sector employees have borne the brunt of the austerity over the past five years and many who were delivering valuable services in the public sector now find themselves on zero-hours contracts in the private sector with no security for the future.

Osborne’s claim that there will be a budget surplus by 2018 is hardly believable. It assumes a rate of growth that is unlikely given low investment and low wages. He is however very keen on shrinking the state. 

This year alone £30 billion of public assets will be sold, ranging from the remaining shares in Royal Mail to the huge Kings Cross development in London and shares in all the major banks bought in 2009. Their disposal at a loss will give a temporary boost to the balance sheet, but short-change all of us in the future. The public paid for bank bailouts, quantitative easing and are now selling the shares at a loss to the very same banking community who created the mess in the first place.

A government first elected with David Cameron hugging a husky and showing faux concern about the natural world is now selling the Green Investment Bank and axing crucial rail electrification plans for Leeds to Manchester and Midland main lines while funding a 1970s-style road programme.

These issues all throw down the gauntlet before the labour movement. Are we to continue with an austerity-lite economic policy and accept that there must be an arbitrary date for a budget surplus and all the brutal inequality it creates? Or can we offer something different?

We need to set the priorities for our society — ending homelessness, reducing inequality, freeing our young people to pursue their ambitions rather than be loaded with debt and investing in growing productive and sustainable industries.

The generations before us who founded unions in the teeth of the opposition of the landed gentry and industrialists of the 19th century essentially gave us the National Health Service, welfare state, equalities and human rights. We defend all those things and recognise the needs of today — to stand for a different and better society based on human values and human worth, not greed and self.

The economy and community have changed, but the huge support for the Durham Gala shows that those values, that solidarity are what really endures.

In welcoming speakers and supporters from all over the world we demonstrate our thirst for peace and economic justice the world over.

Nobody should ever underestimate the power of unity!

• Jeremy Corbyn is Labour MP for Islington North and a candidate for the leadership of the Labour Party. He writes a weekly column for the Morning Star.