FOR those of us in the labour movement, July is synonymous with two glorious celebrations of trade unionism. If you can’t be at both, you certainly have to be at one. 

First comes the Durham Miners’ Gala, on the second Saturday of July, followed a week later by the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival. 

These are very different occasions, with distinct histories, but they are linked by a remembrance and respect for the power of collective struggle. There’s nothing like it. 

These major events aren’t just about heritage, even less so nostalgia. They are as much about our movement in the present and how we build it. The past we inherit, the future we build. 

There has been an annual gathering since the 1930s to mark the story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, transported to Australia in 1834 for the “swearing of a secret oath,” illegal under the Unlawful Oaths Act of 1797. 

Of course, though the legislation used against the six agricultural workers in Tolpuddle was obscure, the target was much broader. 

The punishments were designed to ward off an emerging collectivism which would eventually become what we know as modern trade unionism. It was the Establishment’s warning to “uppity” workers.

In 1834, the alarm was raised by a local magistrate and landowner, James Frampton. He wrote to the home secretary, complaining about the actions of these men, meeting as the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers. Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary, was the one who recommended the use of the obscure law on oaths. 

OK, the severity of the penalties may have changed, but there are echoes, aren’t there? Because nearly 200 years on, bosses are still attacking the material conditions of workers and governments are still trying to curtail free trade unionism. 

And that’s not the only similarity with today, because laws of the country are still being used against workers, to undermine their security, casualise their work and limit the ways in which they can fight back. 

Only this week, Tory MPs voted through plans to change the law to allow agency workers to be used as strike-breakers, a clear threat to the right to organise. 

Anti-trade union legislation has been a constant theme of governments over a 40-year period, with the Tories taking the lead, but New Labour doing little to reverse “the most restrictive union laws in the Western world.” 

It’s instructive to look at the sheer volume of laws designed to curtail solidarity action, picketing, protest and union democracy from 1980 onwards. The focus of these attacks always intensifies at times when the status quo is threatened. 

In addition to the attacks on the right to strike, as outlined by my IER colleague Keith Ewing in the Morning Star a few weeks ago, in the last year, we have seen the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act slice away at what constitutes lawful protest, investing huge amounts of power in the home secretary and the police to define what constitutes disruptive protest, giving the police new powers to deal with the public nuisance of “noisy” protest.

In addition, we recently saw the presentation of the government’s Public Order Bill, a back-door way of introducing legislation that had previously been blocked by the Lords as part of the PCSC Bill mentioned above. 

The Public Order Bill is primarily aimed at environmental protesters, creating Serious Disruption Prevention Orders but — in a volatile industrial landscape — it will undoubtedly have an effect on trade union action too. 

These restrictions on the right to protest are, of course, all part of an authoritarian response to the deep crisis of our political system, after over a decade of austerity, a pandemic that has transformed attitudes to work, and a cost-of-living crisis which has engulfed huge parts of the population. People are angry and people want change. 

So, as the trade union movement gathers in Tolpuddle, it comes against a backdrop of a new wave of industrial militancy, led from the front by the RMT. 

Mick Lynch, their general secretary, has brilliantly captured the public mood, but there are longer, underlying trends that have emerged in recent weeks: after a prolonged lockdown, the repeated scandals of fire and rehire and most recently, the sackings of 800 P&O ferry workers, it feels like something has snapped. 

There has been talk about a long, hot summer, but the truth is that this wave is likely to run right into the autumn, winter and beyond. 

Tolpuddle is about remembering that a fundamental rupture in our society still exists — between a class that wants to extract wealth from workers, while simultaneously disciplining them on one hand, and the interests of those workers in organising through their collective structures to secure better pay, terms and conditions, on the other. 

Both Durham and Tolpuddle are also about putting the trade unions centre stage, at a time when the political establishment wants to marginalise our collective voice. 

That’s why the Institute of Employment Rights (IER) always has a presence at Tolpuddle, alongside the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom (CTUF), drawing the links between legislation and the movement, historically and currently. 

This year, we are marking another anniversary — 50 years since the Pentonville Five were thrown in jail for refusing to obey a court order to stop picketing at a container depot in east London. 

But the significance of trade unionism could not be clearer in the here and now. Far from being a relic of a bygone era, as our opponents like to pigeonhole us, it is the trade unions which are voicing the concerns of ordinary, working people in this country. 

When the RMT general secretary says: “The working class is back. We refuse to be meek; we refuse to be humble, and we refuse to be poor any more,” he is speaking for a much larger constituency than his own membership. 

And he is also reaching into the history of our movement, from the Tolpuddle Martyrs onwards, when the trade union movement stood up to unaccountable power and asserted its own, democratic, collective will. 

Because we must remember that the Tolpuddle Martyrs were returned from Australia, not because of the kindness of their masters, or a change of heart from the powers that be, but because of the solidarity, activism and sheer numbers of working people who played merry hell.

Ben Sellers is director of the Institute of Employment Rights (IER).