RMT President

that cheerfully excludes consideration of the “common” people who merely serve as a convenient backdrop to the lives of the rich and famous. Hunt’s pop-history status gives a self- interested tinge to his attempt to make hay from the fact that “like many a Marxist scholar” both Noonan and Owen disliked popular culture’s effects upon the working class. The book, he argues, is suffused with a “cold anger towards the working class refusing to appreciate its revolutionary duty”. To criticize such beliefs as part of an elitist form of socialism seems to ignore, or be ignorant of, such well-established socialist concepts as false consciousness and the lumpenproletariat. For Hunt, Noonan’s elitist sin was his belief that better education holds the key to improving working people’s lives. The worst sort of elitist is in fact the disingenuous educator who preaches to a class he knows nothing about. Elitism is now a dirty word. Despite the media’s privileged potential position as a powerful counterweight, however, more often than not, it is part of the elitist problem not the solution. The result is that Tristram has a platform unavailable to Noonan (since his work remained unpublished in his life time) to reverse engineer the term elitist in order to denigrate the content of a trade union’s reading list. Hunt’s article was followed, soon after, with one by Martin Kettle. This too was critical of Noonan’s book and Kettle told Guardian readers we should all be reading Henry David Thoreau’s work instead. Thoreau was a Harvard graduate who was famous for isolating himself in a remote log cabin by a pond and praising individualism – not an option really available to a sink estate single mum too busy smoking herself to death on the advice of Dr John Reid. So to summarise, in opposition to Noonan we have a Tristram accusing him of elitism and a journalist promoting a back to the woods philosophy normally advocated by people like the Una-bomber, US neo-nazi militia groups, and most recently two on-the-run suspected murderers. I’ll end with Noonan’s own words from the preface to The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist: “… not only are the majority of people opposed to Socialism, but a very brief conversation with an average anti-socialist is sufficient to show that he does not know what Socialism means … but I believe [the book] will be acknowledged as true by most of those who are compelled to spend their lives amid the surroundings it describes.” R EADERS OF The Guardian may have noticed an article on August 7 by a gentleman by the name of Tristram Hunt about Robert Tressell’s classic socialist novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Mr Hunt sneeringly referred to our AGM decision to promote classic working-class literature to help encourage a better and wider understanding of the labour movement, its roots and its traditions. After wading through Mr Hunt’s side-swipes at RMT and some guff about how Tressell was a middle-class elitist and hated workers as much as he hated capitalism, a little footnote at the end of his article informed me that Mr Hunt had written the introduction to the new Penguin Classic edition of the Philanthropists. I felt moved to write to The Guardian, not least to correct the mistaken impression given by Mr Hunt that the idea of promoting labour-movement literature was an edict handed down by the RMT executive when, in fact, it was agreed unanimously by delegates at our union’s parliament – the AGM. It is also shocking that someone so hostile to Tressell can write the introduction of such a great work. The history and literature of our movement are important for a whole range of reasons, not least because understanding and discussing our past helps us to fight the bread-and-butter battles of today and prepare for those of tomorrow. One of today’s key battles is over our pension rights. A secure and happy life in retirement should be a basic entitlement to working men and women after a lifetime’s toil. This fundamentally important right was not handed down to us by benevolent employers or any other ‘social partner’. It was won following centuries of bitter struggle, but now decent pension provision is under attack as never before. Commentators often talk about how complex the pensions issue is, and how there is a pensions crisis or time-bomb. Let us be clear: there is no pension crisis, only lame excuses put forward by employers and government to attack working people’s living standards, even in retirement. B RITAIN is the fourth richest country in the world, yet one quarter of the population owns three quarters of the wealth. There is no talk of a pensions crisis for the lucky few, such as those employers who, having enjoyed long contributions ‘holidays’ from their workforces’ pension schemes when the markets were buoyant, only to decide that they were too expensive to maintain when the markets took a dive. Nor is there any crisis for MPs, who enjoy a splendid final-salary pension scheme – but who have failed to restore the link between the state pension and average earnings, or to take meaningful action to prevent occupational schemes going under. Meanwhile, Britain has stumped up at least £10 billion on the illegal war in Iraq and twice that amount on the outdated Typhoon Euro ‘defence’ fighter aircraft that has yet to even get off the ground. Things do not have to be this way. RMT has shown what can be done by successfully defending decent pension provision at Network Rail recently. This victory was won despite a torrent of abuse from a vehemently hostile media – one industry magazine even described us as ‘lunatics’ for even thinking that the final salary scheme could be re-opened to new members. We have yet to hear their thoughts on us now that it has been re-opened following the threat of strike action – funny, that. There can be no doubt that a national campaign is also required, involving young and old, to create the political will to defend and expand decent state pension provision. So, the next time you hear anyone attacking the RMT simply for defending pension rights or promoting a book that dares to criticise capitalist exploitation and argue for political change, just ask yourself ‘which side are they on?’ TONY DONAGHEY Learning from history, not from the media 25