Tolpuddle Martyrs

For the historian it sometimes seems that too damn much of social injustice is familiar. Maybe it's why so many of us are also activists of the left. But one doesn't need to be historian to hear the familiar in this:

re the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the British TUC describing ruling class alarm at their collectivising:

< http://www.tuc.org.uk/the_tuc/index.cfm?mins=75&minors=75  >

1834 six Dorset agricultural labourers, united together to - …

form the Tolpuddle Lodge of the Agricultural Labourers Friendly Society. Enraged local magistrate and landowner James Frampton who wrote to the Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne, that labourers were being induced to "enter into combinations of a dangerous and alarming kind, to which they are bound by oaths".

Torydom 19C style, and the ongoing rattle of Right-wing governments (Howard, Thatcher, Cameron, Harper, Sarkovsy, plus Abbott in waiting). Blink and they return.