The Tories are laughing at you. You are facing the worst cost of living crisis in forty years, and the Tories are using our collective public resources not to help you and yours, but to cut taxes for the rich. If months of rip-off energy bills, rising rents, increasing numbers of families unable to feed their kids, and workers faced with the biggest real-terms cut in their living standards in decades hadn’t already made you angry, what are you waiting for now?

Yesterday, on the day that the UK summer officially ends, the Tories stuck two fingers up to the hundreds of thousands of working-class people who have mobilised over a summer of solidarity to support striking workers, joined protests against profiteering bosses and signed up to the Enough is Enough campaign.

Our demands are modest—a real pay rise, decent housing for everyone, affordable energy prices, and an end to food poverty, funded through a taxation regime that raises tax on the top 5%, taxes profits and wealth, and cracks down on avoidance and evasion. The urgency of the crisis we face required an emergency budget that delivered on those demands.

We needed action to slash energy bills, funded through a meaningful windfall tax on energy companies. Instead we got a ‘price guarantee’ that will see the poorest 10% of households spend 47% of their income on energy prices. We needed a plan for public ownership and urgent investment in renewable energy to avoid this happening again. Instead, ordinary people will be the ones paying for the energy companies’ £150 billion in corporate welfare—as if that will teach them!

We needed investment in decent housing, more council housing, rent controls on private rentals, and long-term investment to retrofit homes. We got cuts to stamp duty in England and Northern Ireland on homes worth up to £625,000.

Workers needed a real pay rise—one that’s in line with inflation and protects people’s living standards against the rise in the cost of living. We got was tax cuts for the rich, 50% of which benefit the top 5% of earners—and virtually nothing for the rest of us.

We needed investment in universal free school meals, community kitchens, and a reversal of the £20 cut to Universal Credit. We got nothing at all to stem the rise in hunger across our communities. Heating and eating are still off the menu for too many people this winter, while those earning over £150,000 enjoy a massive tax cut.

There is no pretence in this Tory mini-budget: this is class war. It’s neoliberalism on steroids. We’ve already got record profits, record wealth for the top 5%, and a record number of billionaires. Now we are going to have even more wealth redistributed from us to them.

The PR blitz will continue to land on people’s social media feeds as a ‘Plan for Growth’, and to be fair, that is what it is: a plan to grow shareholder dividends, bankers’ bonuses, and CEO pay, while delivering record growth in household bills and poverty for the rest of us.

Earlier this year, in the absence of a real opposition and a widening vacuum of hope and alternatives, there was no doubt that the Tories would get away with this economic vandalism imposed on the working class. But over the summer something has been unleashed in working-class communities, and it isn’t about to go back in its box.

Triggered by the RMT strikes, working-class solidarity has been growing, and it’s only getting bigger and bigger. Workers aren’t accepting pay cuts, renters aren’t accepting rent increases, households aren’t accepting rising energy bills, and football fans, so often attacked with working-class slurs, aren’t accepting that people who live in the shadows of their increasingly corporate football clubs are going hungry.

Inside Parliament, the political establishment may be embarking on their latest assault on the working class. But outside Parliament, the working class is organising.

This budget will transfer more wealth to the rich, but this time that transfer will not be permanent. Starting with the mail and rail strikes on 1 October, happening alongside the Enough is Enough’s day of action, we are going to mobilise thousands to get out on the streets, to support workers on the picket lines, and to demand a fair deal for the working class in this country. And we will win.

Working people have awoken to the reality that what we have in this country is a cost of greed crisis. We have a political, media, and CEO establishment that tells the nurses, teachers, firefighters, and postal workers that giving them a real pay rise is unaffordable and would be inflationary—but that tax cuts for the top 5%, cuts to corporation tax, and £150 billion of corporate welfare for the energy companies are necessary for the greater good. We aren’t going to stand for it anymore.

Let’s take heart from recent industrial victories and campaign wins such as Living Rent’s partial and temporary rent freeze in Scotland, and let’s keep building working-class solidarity. See you on 1 October.