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This very week, it’s ten years on from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which heralded the worst financial crash since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Banks across the globe failed, including household names like RBS.

But let’s be clear the financial crash in Britain was made worse by removing regulations on our banks - and by the sheer greed of some in the City of London.

The City became a giant casino.

And here is the irony, the money pumped in to save the system through quantitative easing inflated asset prices and many of the speculators, whose reckless gambling caused the crisis, actually benefitted from the crisis.

(Image: Reuters)

But despite all the reckless gambling and the fraud, only one single senior director of a bank has been prosecuted in Britain.

Yet a decade on, families, across the length and breadth of Britain, are still suffering austerity at the hands of the Tories.

The Tories’ brutal austerity spending cuts were based on the lie that public spending in Britain somehow caused a global financial crisis.

Ordinary people here are still the paying the price due to the cuts agenda of Theresa May and Chancellor Philip Hammond.

Firefighters, police officers and other public servants have lived through years of Tory pay restraint.

(Image: REX/Shutterstock)

Today, the consequences of Tory austerity were laid bare in new research from the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies, showing that on average people’s annual wages are £800 lower, after allowing for inflation.

That same report found that people who are aged between 30 and 39 now are earning £2,100 a year less than people of the same age group in 2008.

That’s a drop of 7.2% in that particular age group and one that shows just how much worse off financially working people are under the Tories.

(Image: PA)

People will be disgusted about this dramatic slump in their wages, whilst those at the top make more than ever.

Workers have massively lost out during the years of Tory rule.

Thursday's IFS report is further proof that the Tories cannot be trusted on the economy.

The election of a Conservative-led government in 2010 meant that it wasn’t the speculators who caused the crisis who would pay for it.

(Image: Reuters)

Labour in government will halt this disastrous approach by investing across the country and introducing a £10 an hour minimum wage to stop the fall in real wages for workers.

We will also ensure that workers in the so called ‘gig economy’ get the same rights as full employees under a Labour Government.

Under the Tories millions of people are trapped in insecure work and are not entitled to sick pay, parental leave, or protections against unfair dismissal. Labour will give people basic rights at work, while investing to create jobs.

Labour will ensure that in large companies, workers will become part-owners of their company with a share ownership scheme.

With this programme, we will ensure that Labour in power will be a government for the many, not the few.

John McDonnell MP is the Shadow Chancellor.