Tue 14 Jul 2020, 09:01 AM | Posted by editor
LETTER from Mark Langabeer, Newton Abbot Labour member
Next weekend would have been the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival, organised by the Southwest TUC. Thousands of labour movement activists normally join a march through the village and listen to leading figures within the movement giving speeches. The purpose of the festival is to celebrate the struggle of workers to form trade unions in the past, despite bitter opposition from our ‘masters’, landowners and industrialists. As with many other activities of the labour movement, it has been unfortunately had to be cancelled because of the pandemic.
However, we can still celebrate the Martyrs struggle, and more importantly, learn some of the lessons. In 1834, six farm labourers from the Dorset village of Tolpuddle were sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia. There, they were put to hard labour in prison-like conditions. Yet their only crime had been to swear an ‘illegal’ oath to join a trade union.
The magistrates of the day were more often than not landowners or industrialists themselves and they imposed the harshest-possible sentences to punish those who dared to organise themselves to improve their pay and working conditions. The attempt to teach the unions a lesson backfired, however, as a mass campaign was launched to free the Tolpuddle Six.
It was as a result of the outright vindictiveness of the sitting magistrates, that poor relief was even refused to the families of the six workers, but the wider trade union movement formed a relief committee that collected funds on their behalf. Following mass demonstrations and the issue even being raised in parliament, the sentences of seven years were to three. Rather than being weakened, the unions ended up being strengthened by this punitive action.
One of the most important lessons of the Tolpuddle events was that it showed the need for the establishment of a political party, based upon the trade unions, to represent working class people. The Tories, who in the main represented landowners and the Whig Party, (later morphing into the Liberals) who represented industrialists were united in opposing trade unions and it took another seventy years before a working class party was established.
It is painful today to hear workers who believe that politics has ‘nothing to do with them’. The Tories today intend to remove the right to strike for public transport workers. It will be through bitter experience that the idea of ‘non-political’ trade unionism will be proved hollow. As one of the Tolpuddle Martyrs wrote, “The rich and great would never act to relieve poverty and the labouring class must do it themselves, or it will forever left undone.”
