And in contrast to Hutton's image of a union movement reduced to a public-sector rump, the bulk of the RMT's membership is actually in privatised companies.

In the face of Gordon Brown's demand that public-sector workers accept real pay cuts, many union activists look increasingly at the RMT's militancy as a source of inspiration rather than scorn.

George Binette

Camden Unison convenor

London NW1

Bob Crow and his ilk are failing the British worker as well as the noble heritage of trade unionism.

Most British people would like to see a functioning, humane, mixed economy that neither sanctioned egregious inequality nor destroyed incentive. Unionism is essential to the delivery of this, yet, thanks to Crow and his like, it remains a derided, marginalised and largely irrelevant force.

For most Londoners, the only time they will get to see, hear of or experience trade unionism is when they're unable to go about their daily business as a result of some generally obscure complaint from a set of seemingly well-remunerated workers. This is profoundly sad.

Calum Law

Cotgrave, Nottingham

The London tube workers balloted democratically for their recent strike to protect their pension rights with the collapse of Metronet, as Will Hutton rightly pointed out.

Yet your columnist went on to berate Bob Crow for being a former communist and then attack Crow and the RMT for not being more like the Chinese Communist party. Hutton praises Deng, who oversaw the Tiananmen Square massacre, as a 'visionary reformer'. Amnesty International and others have reported that human-rights abuses in China got worse under Deng Xiaoping and have kept getting worse since.

If Will Hutton really thinks this is the kind of change we need in Britain, he's 100 per cent wrong. He says we shouldn't go back to the 1980s - but the Chinese model would take this country back to the 1880s.

Duncan McFarlane

Carluke, Lanarkshire

Will Hutton once wrote in a book that the long jihad against the unions needed to come to an end. But not yet, it would seem.

Britain remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. I work for state-subsidised First Group, which is doing very nicely, so The Observer informs me. However, I am a graduate earning less money - about £225 a week - now than I was nine years ago.

Brian V Peck

Bristol

I'd hazard a guess that the members of the RMT who won 'slightly tougher assurances' (to quote Will Hutton's begrudging phrase) are likely to be feeling more full of 'vitalism' than they were when Metronet collapsed, throwing their future working conditions, rights and pension entitlements into uncertainty.

While some may remain hostile, we have seen that successful collective action by the workforce is a key element in enriching the working experience. It also has the effect of making the world seem that little bit fairer. Whether lofty wordplay about 'vitality', 'enrichment', 'good work' and 'stakeholding' from eminent professors and newspaper columnists can provide a more successful hook on which the unions can finally hang up their disputatious tendencies remains more open to doubt.

So maybe for now - and for fairness - it's still 'Come on, brothers'.

Colin Brady

Darlington, Co Durham

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