I’VE got bags full of T-shirts from campaigns, marches and pickets over the years. Some could undoubtedly be considered crimes against fashion, but terrorism? Not yet, anyway.

This week, screenwriter Paul Laverty was added to the long list of people arrested for wearing the wrong kind of T-shirt while protesting against another person, Moira McFarlane, being arrested for the same offence.

Terrorists around the world I’m sure quake at the thought of being caught out wandering the streets of Britain wearing a T-shirt stating their affiliations as they sit in the semi-darkness of dawn choosing their day’s threads.

That’ll show ’em.

It’s easy to laugh at the sheer spectacle of people being arrested for having Morph’s calls for Plasticine Action emblazoned across their chests, and so we should. There’s nothing authority hates more than being mocked, even if it seems to have spent centuries honing the skills required to invite it.

Some will say it's a sign of creeping authoritarianism, but creepy as he may be, the Prime Minister is more of a Lurch.

A few weeks back he proudly told the world of his intention to arrest, detain and deport “illegal” people from our shores, having deprived them of their rights to claim asylum, and it brought to mind a politician of character, Tony Benn.

“The way the government treats refugees is very instructive because it shows you how they would treat the rest of us if they thought they could get away with it”, he once said.

Too true. Without status, without means, without a vote, they are the perfect guinea-pigs for the kind of institutionalised, performative sadism that became a little too awkward to inflict on most of us.

This weekend socialists, trade unionists and anyone else with a sense of our moment will stand together to remember that in a quiet little burial ground hidden behind the tenements of Calton in Glasgow’s East End.

Faced in the summer of 1787 with a 20 per cent cut in their wages, the Calton weavers began Scotland’s first major industrial dispute when, as people without property or a vote, they realised the power of withdrawing their labour.

It wasn’t just a stoppage though. With forces of commerce and state ranged against them, they cut the webs on scabs’ looms, raided warehouses and burned the contents in the street — the kinds of attacks on property to fight a manifest wrong that got Palestine Action proscribed and pensioners carrying placards of support carted off in a riot van.

I’ve no doubt they’d be regarded as terrorists today, but no such word existed back then for this kind of rebellion; instead on September 3 1787 the brave magistrates of Glasgow called in the 39th Regiment to read the Riot Act and shoot them down. Three were killed at the scene and another three would go on to die of their wounds.

Even in rewarding those who would kill workers striving for enough to eat, the class system loomed large.

The thankful city fathers awarded the man who gave the order to launch the musket volley, Lieutenant Colonel Willam Kellett and his lackey Major Vere Poulett with the highest honour they could bestow — the freedom of the city — while other officers enjoyed a banquet, and the troops who killed on their behalf were treated to new shoes and stockings.

It is long overdue that these honours be rescinded. Those who willingly participated in this slaughter belong in a rogues’ gallery, not in Glasgow’s pantheon.

Some might dismiss this sort of thing as gesture politics, but the act of honouring such behaviour was as clear a gesture itself, a despicable one that.

Merely robbing workers of the fruits of their labour, or their very lives, could never be enough. The city fathers had to send a message loud and clear to the city — and to every worker across the land — whose interests they served.

“That’ll show ’em,” they must have thought.

As the decades rolled by, there would be many more martyrs to the cause of labour, some remembered, some lost with the never-ending efforts to erase working-class history and cleaving us from knowledge of ourselves.

In ebbs and flows though, progress has come. The vote, council housing, health and education have all had to be dragged out of the grasping hands of Kellett’s and his bosses’ successors. The grasping never stopped — nor should we.

In recent decades we cannot deny that the tide has gone out on worker power, the attacks came thick and fast, loading workers with debt to buy things they don’t need, using that debt to replace wage growth, and the steady carving-up of the services so long fought for to starve the needy and feed the greedy.

Without a fraction of the organisation muscle trade unions can offer today and without a vote, workers in Calton fought like lions for what was theirs, just as a century-and-a-half later the women of Red Clydeside did in their rent strikes.

The latter won concessions which paved the way not just for rent controls, but arguably for mass building of council housing too.

Too often we look to these examples, and countless more, remembering our brave comrades who won and lost, but always fought as distant, a source of story-telling or as rhetorical fodder. The are real. The are the living, breathing embodiment of all that is worth cherishing about humanity.

Solidarity makes the world go round; not money, not guns, not greed.

The Prime Minister, and his opposite number in Reform, choose not to engage with this for fear of putting their sinecures, past present and future, in jeopardy. Cowards don’t just flinch, they deflect, they point, they bully and they’d see others die in a dinghy, under the rubble of Gaza, or on a hospital trolley to send their own message.

The message, as ever, is one of toughness, beggar thy neighbour, and playing to the very worst instincts that roam this earth.

Sir Keir and his class may have looked aghast at last year’s race riots, but only because it risked breaking through their liberal cognitive dissonance. Their lack of reaction to more recent events outside hotels housing people seeking sanctuary here has been more telling.

People are angry all right, that cannot be denied. They are right to be too.

They should be angry that government after government has let them down for decades, that their living standards have gone backwards, that their children’s schools don’t have enough teachers, that the best they can hope for for their children is a lifetime of precarious work and paying a landlord’s mortgage, that the elderly are still dying of cold, that their communities have become reliant on charity to eat.

Dealing with these material realities involves effort though. It involves taking on the forces that have had it all their own way for too long, it involves a plan that goes beyond a week-long media grid, it involves telling the truth.

Sir Keir is about as capable of these things as Farage is, but the left doesn’t get off the hook so easily either.

Some standing at those hotels will be fascists. Most are not. Most are people crying out to be heard, whose material needs have been met with finger-pointing rather than action.

From the quiet intervention on the bus, to the chat in the workplace, from picket line to Post Office queue, it falls to socialists to engage with the material world and dispel the demagogues’ grim fairy stories — no-one else will.

We can hold the line when we need to with boots on the ground, but our job must be to take that golden thread of our history and weave it once more into the fabric of every community in the land.