Union leaders today vowed to continue campaigning against the Government's spending cuts amid mounting anger at the trouble makers who clashed with police and damaged stores and other buildings during a huge TUC demonstration.

Organisers of a huge protest against the Government's public spending cuts tonight hailed the demonstration a "fantastic success" after hundreds of thousands of people joined the biggest event of its kind for over 20 years.

Protesters from Aberystwyth to Aberdeen and from Penzance to Perth will travel to central London today for the biggest demonstration in Britain since the anti-Iraq war marches eight years ago.

Roy Jackson, the former Assistant General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, was widely respected throughout the movement as one of the leading movers in building up a nationwide system of trade union education. Over 30,000 trade unionists a year would complete the courses he instituted.

The Government was tonight facing the threat of a summer of industrial strife by millions of public sector workers after unions warned that radical changes to public sector pensions could "light the blue touch paper" for strikes.

The generous pensions enjoyed by public sector workers are "not tenable" for taxpayers in the long term, a government-ordered inquiry will report today.

A record 5.26 million people worked unpaid overtime last year, clocking up an average of more than seven hours a week without pay, according to a new study.

More than 50,000 posts are to be shed across the NHS, including doctors, nurses and midwives, as managers hunt for efficiency savings, trade union leaders warned last night. The scale of the job losses being forecast dwarfs the previous predictions of redundancies in the health service.

Ministers are drawing up plans to deal with a wave of co-ordinated public sector strikes across the country this summer. A special unit of civil servants has been set up in the Cabinet Office to "war game" areas of vulnerability in key services and infrastructure. They are also investigating how they can draft in private-sector "strike breakers" to cross picket lines.

The Government today launched a review into the sickness absence system, saying it wanted to tackle the "staggering" £100 billion cost to the economy every year.

David Cameron today unveiled details of the Government’s long-awaited and controversial plan to reform Britain’s £200 billion benefits system.

The Government was tonight facing growing calls to tackle youth unemployment, which has reached a record high of almost a million, amid warnings that the UK's jobs recovery has gone into reverse.