The most immediate concern for big sections of the working class is the rising cost of living. The new prime minister, Andy Burnham, will be acutely aware of the challenge of trying not to end up like Starmer and the Tories before him. Both are hated for their role overseeing falling living standards and attacks on the working class.

Burnham will also be acutely aware of the demands from the capitalist class to carry out further austerity. Their chopping list includes pensions and disability benefits. The bosses also insist that it is not possible to afford fully funded public services, that they should be left crumbling.

The National Shop Stewards Network conference, which took place on 27 June, brought together fighting trade union activists to draw up a list of demands to address the cost-of-living squeeze. Activists are taking these demands into their trade union branches and other bodies.

Clear demands from the trade unions, and a strategy to fight for them, is an essential working-class counter-pressure on the new Labour Prime Minister and cabinet – much more than to simply ‘give him time’ and ‘wait and see’.

The NSSN will take these demands to a lobby of the Trades Union Congress in Brighton on 13 September. It will raise the demand for a national union-led demonstration against Labour austerity – a policy agreed at last year’s Congress.

Get your trade union body to support the Action Programme and to send delegates to the TUC lobby.

‘We’re not paying for the bosses’ crisis’

• Above-inflation pay rises for workers – automatic rises in pay as inflation increases. In the public sector, for these to be fully funded by central government
• Scrap all age exemptions on pay, including the national minimum wage. For the immediate implementation of the TUC demand of a £15-an-hour minimum wage for all as a step towards a real living wage, without exemptions
• Stop the profiteering: nationalise the energy and water companies
• Freeze rents and energy and utility bills
• Demand that councils refuse to implement cuts, and instead pass no-cuts needs budgets
• Oppose disability benefit cuts and attacks on pensions and campaign for a fully resourced, supportive social security system to meet the needs of working-class people
• Demand that the TUC enact Congress 2025 policy by calling an Autumn national demo against Labour austerity. If not, for a trade union ‘coalition of the willing’ to step in to organise such a demonstration
• Support the NSSN lobby of the TUC Congress in Brighton from 1pm on Sunday 13th September, in the Holiday Inn Hotel
• Strike together: co-ordinate the fight on national public sector pay – unite workers across the public and private sectors
• Repeal all the Tory anti-union laws – immediate scrapping of the undemocratic 50% strike ballot threshold
• Restore the right to strike to the POA
• Workers unity to face down Reform and the far-right: for the unions to implement 2018 TUC Congress policy ‘to launch a campaign of Jobs and homes not racism’
• Launch the discussion for a Workers’ Charter, and how we can fight for it, against the attack on our living standards

NSSN lobby of the TUC Congress in Brighton from 1pm on Sunday 13 September, in the Holiday Inn Hotel