The totalitarians at Tolpuddle
This year I attended the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival in Dorset for the very first time. It was on the bucket list for a Canadian friend and as I’d never been before, I thought — why not? For those who’ve never heard of it, the festival is an annual event held to mark the repression suffered by pioneering British trade unionists in the nineteenth century. The sleepy village of Tolpuddle has a little museum and a few small businesses that trade off its legacy, for example The Martyrs’ Inn. This was the first year since 2019 that the festival could go ahead in person. The Tolpuddle festival is no...