THE second great summer celebration of organised labour, the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival this weekend, commemorates the courage of the six farm labourers transported to Australia in 1834 for their collective agreement not to work for less than 10 shillings a week.

It commemorates too the huge campaign, involving protests, petitions and marches, that forced the government to pardon them all within two years and allow their return home.

Both are relevant in a summer where a gathering storm of strike action is seeing tens of thousands of workers demand restorative pay rises — to cope with soaring inflation but also as recompense for more than a decade of real-terms decline.

The government’s response — as it was in the early 19th century with the Combination Acts banning collective bargaining and strikes — is repression. New anti-trade union laws are promised to undermine the right to strike and break railway workers trying to defend their jobs, their pay and their industry. 

The enemy is ruthless. Just as Margaret Thatcher was ready to sacrifice Britain’s energy security and force us into dependence on foreign imports by destroying the coal industry in the 1980s for the prize of crushing the miners, today’s Tories are utterly unconcerned that their plans involve permanently degrading our transport network. 

This country’s future means nothing to the spivs and speculators who call the Tory tune. 

Nor do any of the government’s own commitments, on “levelling up,” to international agreements like the Geneva Convention or on reducing carbon emissions. 

The wannabe Tory leaders’ race to promise tax cuts for the rich — who are living through what the Sunday Times Rich List has termed a “golden age,” accumulating wealth faster than ever — as the majority struggle to make ends meet illustrates how far the power of big finance has disfigured our political system. 

Polls even of Conservative members show their number one concern is the cost of living, and only a minority favour tax cuts, but Tory MPs are deaf to everyone but the hedge funds. Few other major capitalist economies are bent on such a self-destructive path. 

In Europe, Italy has cut public transport costs to help commuters; Germany has unveiled a landmark €9 (£7.60) monthly ticket allowing unlimited travel on local transport in a bid to get people out of their cars and reduce emissions. 

Even the United States has unveiled hundreds of billions in infrastructure spending, if only because Joe Biden worries “China is going to eat our lunch” if it keeps trusting the market to deliver. Over here spending just means lining the pockets of more useless speculators and watching them run our services into the ground.

If the Tory assault succeeds we will all get permanently poorer. 

Westminster and the Bank of England want us to think it is greedy or irresponsible to fight for a pay rise that matches or exceeds inflation, even while corporate profits are booming. As with the lost decade of austerity, there will be no sunlit uplands after a few years of pain, only permanent impoverishment.

If it succeeds. But it doesn’t have to. This summer is seeing workers take action on a scale not seen in years — and win big on pay in dispute after dispute.

Workers’ bargaining position is strong in an economy wracked with labour shortages. Public sympathy is with strikers as almost every household feels the pain. Even laws allowing bosses to ship in strike-breakers can be rendered powerless when unions and communities show a united front.

The law was not on the side of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. It was designed to stop workers standing together and demanding a fair wage. But the collective action of hundreds of thousands of workers broke their chains.

It is that collectivism we must look to today to turn the tide against the profiteers and build an economy that serves the interests of the many, not the few.