THE squire of Tolpuddle stamped down the Earth as James Hammett’s coffin was laid into the ground.

The gang of hired heavies who circled the churchyard were there to do his express bidding: to ensure that no trade union speeches were delivered, or wreaths laid, to mark the passing of the last of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, in November 1891.

Forgotten by the movement that he had helped to forge, and with no old-age pension to fall back upon and his eyesight failing, Hammett had slipped away, quietly, into the workhouse so not to burden his family or to drag them further into poverty.

Those features which had marked his life — the harsh conditions governing rural labour, the iron hands of parson, squire, and county police upon village life, and the criminalisation of poverty through the New Poor Law — attended upon his death. As the folksong had it, “Pity the poor labourers that follow the plough.”

The ploughs have long since vanished from the countryside but the balance between deference and discontent — the self-entitled “haves” and the hard working — continues to be played out in the politics and economic strategies of the present.

GMB is a general union: organising and campaigning around the concerns of all working people. As a consequence, an injury to one remains an injury to all, and the all-too-often hidden scourge of rural poverty and the depredations of the gangmasters and people traffickers need to challenged and banished from the land for once and all.

The unions — and, perhaps, the unions alone — possess the tenacity, the fighting spirit, and the moral authority in order to do this. As a result, the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival is not just an event on the calendar, or an old cause to be acknowledged and respected; but a living, breathing, call to arms in the fight for a just and equitable society.

This call is possible because, in spite of the hatred of the Establishment, our movement did not allow Hammett and his five comrades to be forgotten. The defeat of the General Strike of 1926 and the shattering betrayal of the labour movement in 1931 — when Ramsay MacDonald split the Parliamentary Labour Party and formed a national government with the Conservatives — posed an existential threat to the unions. Confidence needed to be rebuilt, rallying calls sounded, and traditions created. As a result, JR Clynes (the president and power broker in what would become the GMB union) moved a motion at the 1932 TUC Congress that there should be a national demonstration held at Tolpuddle in memory of the martyrs.

Their story was already well known through the pages of Sidney and Beatrice Webbs’ seminal History of the Trade Union Movement that had become required reading for activists.

In 1912, the gasworkers’ union gave a donation towards the building of a memorial arch outside the village’s Methodist Chapel and Will Thorne had been photographed standing beside it for an article in the union’s journal. What Clynes then did — less as a trade unionist than as a representative of the Labour Party’s right wing — was to reframe the martyrs’ struggle and to stage Tolpuddle as the founding act of the British labour movement.

This made good political sense given the imposition of the means test and assaults on trade union freedom, but for bad history. It detached the Dorset labourers from their involvement in the Swing Rising and downplayed the proto-revolutionary events of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, the Merthyr Rising in 1831, and the wave of industrial unrest that shook the Sheffield cutlery trades in the 1860s.

Indeed, had he shown more self-confidence, Thorne might have pointed out to Clynes that the victories of the new unions — the gas and transport workers, whose legacy today are the GMB and Unite unions — in 1889, might have stood as well for the founding of the modern labour movement.

As it was, Clynes suggested — with little grounding in historical veracity — that the martyrs had been “simple” workmen, “eager to keep within the law.” Yet, far more importantly, from the first TUC sponsored event — held in the centenary year of 1934 — onwards, the festival developed its own distinct character and has consistently celebrated the fight of the “Six Men of Dorset” as part of the fight to defend the right to combine and organise freely and legally.

This matters as much today as it ever did: with our present government’s threats to our own right to organise, march, and make work better. This government’s knee-jerk reaction to any trade union advances, as witnessed recently in regards to the RMT’s industrial action, is to threaten ever more draconian legal restrictions.

Our reaction, as the organised labour movement, should be to demand and campaign for the right to organise as a fundamental human right. This, together with the repeal of all anti-union legislation, was granted to us by Attlee’s government in 1945, and our baseline should be no different today.

Tolpuddle stands for this enduring battle to secure our trade union freedoms, which cannot be divorced from a wider discussion of human rights. Only when these are secured will our movement begin to come into its own again. We have done it before and we will do it again.

On a cold, wet morning in February 1872, the agricultural workers in Warwickshire — inspired by the Tolpuddle Martyrs — began to stir again. They beat a path to the door of a local carpenter, Joseph Arch, and began to speak of forming a union. His response was unequivocal: “They are raising their voices at last! The day is at hand!”

Let us come together at Tolpuddle this weekend in comradeship and solidarity to celebrate the past and organise in the present, so that we win in the future and make sure that, at last, the day really is ours.

Gary Smith is general secretary of the GMB union.