RMT’s Annual General Meeting this year meets in Bournemouth, Dorset, one of the birthplaces of the trade union movement.
 
Any RMT delegates who needs a reminder this week of the great radical heritage of our movement can visit the Shelley family tomb in St Peter’s churchyard in Bournemouth.
 
Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, was born in Somers Town, St Pancras in London in 1797, near where RMT’s head office, Unity House now stands. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft died 11 days after giving birth to her and was buried in St Pancras Old Churchyard where her tomb remains, although she was later reinterred alongside her daughter in Bournemouth.
 
Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and a founder of feminism in Britain, was a revolutionary advocate for free education for working-class girls and boys.

She wrote: “Day schools, for particular ages, should be established by government, in which boys and girls might be educated together. The school for the younger children, from five to nine years of age, ought to be absolutely free and open to all classes.”
 
Her daughter Mary Shelley was buried in Bournemouth, alongside the heart of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

It is Percy’s words — written after hearing of the 1819 massacre of workers by armed cavalry at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester — that feature on so many trade union banners today:

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number —
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you —
Ye are many — they are few.”
 
Shelley’s words comforted and inspired generations of workers facing powerful class enemies and repressive forces of the state.
 
RMT stands in solidarity to all those fighting for justice, from the Tolpuddle Martyrs (six agricultural labourers deported to Australia in 1834 for swearing an oath not to undercut each other’s wages) to the Windrush survivors in 2018 (wrongfully detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and in at least 83 cases wrongly deported).

Many people of the Windrush generation lost their jobs, homes, had passports confiscated, were denied benefits and medical care they were entitled to. RMT demands justice for those people.
 
We need Shelley’s inspiration today when employers and government ooze contempt for working people. We remember the 800 workers sacked by P&O Ferries via video message to staff working on board its ships on March 17 2022 — the St Patrick’s Day Massacre.
 
One year later in March 2023, the Tory government awarded its flagship Thames Gateway freeport  — a multibillion-pound project to redevelop land, docks, and industry in the Thames estuary in a tax-exempt environment — to P&O Ferries’ parent company, DP World (owned by the Sultan of Dubai).
 
The message of the P&O debacle is that employers in Britain can break the law with impunity and “price in” a few weeks’ pay in lieu of notice as compensation for unlawful mass sackings.

During the past year, our union can take pride in leading waves of strike action against employers’ plans to serve notice on hard-won collective agreements and casualise employment contracts.
 
Also over the last year, working families have faced the fastest-rising inflation since 1989. RPI inflation hit 11.8 per cent in June 2022 and has remained in double digits ever since. Whatever excuses from this government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich, the reality is that workers’ wages in Britain continue to fall, while prices of energy, food, housing, and other basic necessities rise.
 
This week a government economic adviser called on the Bank of England to “create a recession” to cut inflation. Karen Ward, from JP Morgan Chase, the world’s largest bank by capitalisation with deposits of $3.7 trillion, told the BBC: “Workers, when they’re a little less confident about their jobs, won’t ask for a pay rise. It’s that weakness which eventually gets rid of inflation.”
 
As the Bank of England raised interest rates to 5 per cent, bank governor Andrew Bailey, who was paid £600,000 in 2022 said: “We cannot continue to have the current level of wage increases.”
 
He precisely represents the biggest banks and private corporations driving working people and small businesses into poverty to save the value of finance capital from the consequences of its own monopoly profiteering.

It is time to raise the level of class struggle. We need more strikes, more mass protests, more political demands to cut the unaccountable power of the Bank of England, the banking sector, and corporate monopolies, which are driving Britain into recession, and mass poverty.
 
The spectre at this feast of corporate greed is the almost total absence of political opposition to the Tory government’s authoritarian policies and economic bankruptcy.
 
Labour leader Keir Starmer refuses to support striking workers or say whether wages should rise in line with inflation. That the highest level of class struggle since Thatcher declared war on trade unions in the 1980s should erupt across Britain without any political representation is surprising.
 
The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill, intended, in Business Secretary Grant Shapps’s words, to “complete Margaret Thatcher’s unfinished business” by banning strikes by health, fire and rescue, education, transport, nuclear energy, and border security workers, is a moment Shelley might have recognised.
 
While the cast of the current Tory Party might have caused him to retitle his great poem as “Mask of Larceny,” his message to the people rings down over the centuries:

“Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another
Rise like Lions after slumber.”