If there’s one unwavering constant in Westminster life it’s almost certainly Dennis Skinner.

The so-called Beast of Bolsover — Bolsover is his parliamentary constituency — is known for his adherence to the original socialist principles of the Labour Party.

While others abandoned them along the way, enthusiastically embracing all that Labour once opposed — including war — Skinner remains committed to the party’s founding faith.

His anger against, and intolerance of, the injustice of the capitalist system burns as strongly now as it has ever done — and he is 82.

The fact that his beliefs are shared was obvious in the warmth of the reception he received at the 130th Durham Miners’ Gala last weekend.

The crowd, many thousands strong, was cheering him before he spoke a word.

His goading of the Tories and Lib Dems is legendary and he began with his latest verbal campaign against David Cameron. “He goes red when he’s lying,” said Skinner. “So I said ‘he’s going red again.’ And he did.”

He said he was on his feet 20 times in the Commons recently, trying to ask a question of the Prime Minister, but the Speaker failed to call him.

“I wanted to ask if he’d got any prison visits arranged to see Andy Coulson,” he said, referring to the imprisonment over telephone hacking of the Prime Minister’s former communications chief. “I might save it for another day.”

He spoke out against Scottish independence. He supports the Better Together campaign on the basis that “in good times and bad we are stronger together.”

Then there was the issue of strikes. Labour leader Ed Miliband opposed the July 10 walkout by two million public-sector workers. Skinner, naturally, supported the strikers.

But, he said: “In 1984-5, if we (the miners) had had the same response we had on Thursday by all those trade unions we would have opened a second front against the Tory government, Thatcher and MacGregor. 

“We would have won the dispute against pit closures if the TUC had done its job and opened a second front — we could have changed the course of history.

“It was the most honourable dispute I have participated in in my life, when a miner in his sixties in one part of the country is prepared to risk the roof over his own head to defend work for a 16-year-old in another part of the country he has never met, that is honour.”

His next attack was on the phoney “shareholding democracy” promoted by Margaret Thatcher as Britain’s publicly owned assets, including energy and water, were sold to the private sector.

“Now they are all owned abroad,” he said. Then he tore into the “casino economy” resulting from the Tories’ deregulation of Britain’s banks, leading to the 2008 economic collapse and today’s appalling policies of austerity.

But his comments were not all about looking back.

There was a swipe at government threats to impose new regulations on the holding of ballots for strike action, including a proposal to insist that 50 per cent of all members entitled to vote must be in favour.

“If we had that system in Parliament there would be only 40 MPs out of 650,” he said. “There’d be no-one in the House of Lords because they’re not elected.”

There is a future to be won he said, and he proposed his Durham Manifesto.

It meant: 

• Abolition of the wage freeze. 
• No more zero-hours contracts, where bosses call in workers when needed, and lay them off unpaid when not. 
• A living wage of £10 an hour.
• Free collective bargaining by right in the private sector.
• Abolition of laws which leave unions open to sequestration of funds.
• Abolition of private employment agencies.
• An end to the bedroom tax.
• A “massive” house-building programme.
• Renationalisation of the railways and an end to subsidies to privateers like Richard Branson.
• Renationalisation of Royal Mail and the public utilities.

“Don’t tell me it is too hard,” he said. “In 1975 Harold Wilson nationalised British Aerospace with a majority of one. People say it will be difficult to bring them back. 

“It won’t be as difficult as it was for Wilson.”

The manifesto continued with a Robin Hood Tax on financial dealings. The money raised, he said, could go to the National Health Service, with any surplus handed to local authorities whose budgets have been viciously axed by 40 per cent, hitting tens of thousands of jobs.

He told the Gala crowd that his Durham Manifesto was dedicated to Tony Benn and Bob Crow.

And he called for a revival of the “Spirit of ’45”— the Labour government which created the National Health Service and the welfare state, and launched a huge programme of council house building.

The crowd loved it.

Skinner spent one-and-a-half hours after the rally had finished signing autographs.

Skinner has been ousted from his seat on Labour’s national executive, but vowed to be back.

He will be 83 in February and will be defending his rock-solid Bolsover parliamentary seat in Derbyshire at next May’s general election.