The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' is a book I first came across way back in the mid-seventies when I started going to evening classes to study English Literature after a hard day at work. It was a book that made an immediate and lasting impression on me, not least of all due to the fact that it spoke to me about people in my position, ie, belonging to, or coming from, the impoverished working classes. That was me and my family in a nutshell.

Any book that has the singular power to help a major political party to a landslide victory in a General Election, has to be given serious consideration as a seminal piece of socially and economically important, literary art. And to that, we can add the accolade that helping the Labour Party into Government after World War One, also paved the way for the creation of a welfare state that was to become the envy of the modern, brave new, civilized world.

And if that is not recommendation enough, take note of the fact that none other than the great writer George Orwell himself appraised The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists as a wonderful book and one that everybody should read.

The book was written by the Irish nationalist and home decorator Robert Noonan, born Robert Croker, and was posthumously published under the pen name Robert Tressell. In time, the book sold one million copies and was adapted for stage, television, and radio. It has also been widely studied in schools and universities across the land.

So, what is The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists actually all about? On the surface, it is a simple tale of how an educated, working-class man called Owen, spends his life in and out of work as a home decorator for the landed classes. Whilst at work Owen attempts to enlighten his workmates about how the capitalist system is rigged against them, and how there is next to no provision by the prevailing right-wing Government for those periods when the men are out of work, or ill. Owen's colleagues are unwilling to be enlightened and see him as a subversive element within their ranks.

Reading between the lines the story is 'about exploitative employment when the only safety nets are charity, the workhouse, and the grave.' In short, it is about the impoverished lot of the working classes under an indifferent, unfeeling system of capitalism.

On reading the book I was struck by how accurately the characters in the story were drawn. These were exactly like the sort of people I had spent far too many years working alongside. These days these types of people are called working-class Tories. People who have been totally brainwashed to see the only point of view deemed valid by the powers that be and their cultural and media advocates. The sort of working-class people who have allowed themselves to be manipulated against themselves, who willingly support a system that is rigged against their better interests, like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.

For me personally, as an open-minded, avid young reader, I found the book astoundingly transformative. It spoke to me on so many different levels; emotionally, culturally, mentally, morally, psychologically, politically, and socio-economically. Above all, it enlightened me as to how the system of free market capitalism works, and most especially how it works very much against the interests of the general population, let alone the working classes.

I suppose I could say that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists led me out of the darkness and stopped me from being the working-class turkey that I was, putting on his best bib and tucker for that Thanksgiving feast, without realizing that I was at the top of the feast menu.

I became all too familiar with how the British hegemony lorded it over those who they considered to be as disposable as a used Kotex. Not for nothing was the Republican phrase "The working class can lick my ass." coined.

And it is sad to reflect, that in the UK at least, despite all of the wonderful work done by a 1945 post-war, socialist government, to provide all the health and well-being services a man could wish for during his entire life, "from the womb to the tomb," it has all been systematically dismantled by a succession of ultra right-wing Conservative Governments. And still to this day, thanks to a ruthless, immoral, dishonest, Kow-toe-ing, right-wing media, the working class vote en mass for a party that just wants to drive them into the ground, whilst robbing them blind.

If there is a legacy for The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, it is the mass enlightenment bestowed upon the people of a country who at least once, finally saw the light. It is a crying shame that over subsequent decades, those self-same working-class people have allowed the wool to be pulled over their eyes all over again, and quite possibly for many more decades to come.