WITH just over a week until the election, the Conservatives have sneaked ahead in the polls, helped by a viciously partisan mass media controlled by the super-rich.

This means the rallying cry issued by trade union leaders at the Unions Together event on Monday evening does not come a moment too soon.

Five years of Con-Dem economic sabotage have seen our NHS torn open for private-sector exploitation, our Royal Mail privatised and our state education sector subjected to a dangerous marketising experiment in the form of academies and free schools.

Savage attacks on social security by the self-righteous sadist Iain Duncan Smith forced the unemployed and disabled through ever more humiliating tests, not least the cruel shambles that saw over 10,000 people die within six weeks of being declared fit for work - only for the Department of Work Pensions to stop counting more than three years ago. Who knows how many have died since?

Access to employment tribunals now depends on being able to cough up thousands in fees. The cost of university for young people has trebled. The use of zero-hours contracts has exploded, creating a low-paid and insecure workforce.

And the government has waged war on the only organisations that bring working people together to defend themselves - the trade unions.

At the moment this is the most obvious in government, where a concerted effort has been made, through withdrawing automatic check-off and other union-busting measures, to hound the Public and Commercial Services union out of the Civil Service.

But more, much more, is to come. If the Conservatives win the general election it will not merely deal a body-blow to labour movement confidence and give the green light to new deregulation and privatisation offensives against our class.

The Tory manifesto makes explicit the party's plans to effectively ban strike action across "essential" industries, disenfranchising workers and removing one of our most basic rights.

It will see secondary picketing, banned by Thatcher, changed from a civil to a criminal offence.

It will begin the final destruction of what remains of our social housing.

It will reintroduce the "divide-and-rule" strategy adopted so successfully over the past five years with poison propaganda seeking to split the working class into those in work and those out of it, the well and the unwell, those who were born in this country and those who were not.

If the Tories win, we will, in short, wake up to a nightmare on May 8 - a nightmare set to last another five years and which would leave our class weaker, poorer and more exploited than we are today.

Those who still believe that there would be no difference between a government led by Ed Miliband and one led by David Cameron should note the positive reasons to vote Labour spelled out by trade union leaders this week.

Removing non-dom status would right a historic wrong and help tackle rampant tax dodging.

Freezing energy prices and allowing the state to bid for rail contracts fall far short of the renationalisation of both sectors the public is crying out for, but they would mark a historic turning point - a step away from the market-worshipping madness that has done such damage to Britain over past decades.

A step in the right direction, one which would put us in a stronger position to take the next step.

A common fallacy states that extreme right-wing governments are more likely to provoke a progressive reaction from the working class. History shows that to be wrong. Victories, not defeats, empower working people.

A Labour-led government after May 7 will need tremendous pressure from the labour movement to force it to deliver for working people. But the alternative = and there is only one - spells disaster. For all of us.