Red Rope: A Socialist Walking and Climbing Club

Stressed out with work and activism? Want to get away from it all, but without quite leaving your politics behind? Barbara Segal says that Red Rope may be what you’re looking for.

Socialist walkers? You’ve got to be joking!  That’s the response we sometimes get from walkers and climbers we meet on the hill or the crag. But in fact Red Rope is a well-established club, known and respected by many on the outdoor scene. The heady days of the 70s spawned all sorts of left-wing groups outside of the political organisations – film clubs, local community papers, professional associations. Red rope is one of the few that has survived, long outliving its sister organisation Red Spoke (a cycling club). Today we have around 300 members, spread across 14 regional groups in England and Scotland.

Unusually for an outdoor club, our membership is a mix of walkers, climbers and mountaineers. Some members participate in all three activities, others in only one or two. Our activities range from easy day-walks in the country to weekend and week-long trips to the hills – North Wales, the Lakes, the Peak District and Scotland – where we usually stay in climbing huts, which offer communal facilities at low rates, often in staggeringly beautiful locations. Some regions also organise social activities. 

So what’s socialist about that? Well, activist ramblers and climbers are not new. From the campaigns for access to the Peak District, culminating in the mass trespass to Kinder Scout led by communist and trade unionist Benny Rothman in 1932, to the climbers active in some of the more recent occupations against road building schemes, left-wingers have participated, and in some cases led, struggles for access to and preservation of our countryside. Red Rope’s membership covers the spectrum from far-left activists through the left of the Labour Party to the vaguely sympathetic. But most Red Ropers share a commitment to social justice (though we wouldn’t all define it in the same way!) and to green issues. If you look hard you may well find a small Red Rope contingent, complete with banner, on the big national anti-cuts demonstrations. In the company of Red Ropers, most socialists find a fair bit of common political ground, even if arguments are sometimes heated. We aim to be an inclusive club, offering something for people with different abilities and experience of walking and climbing, and apart from the women-only clubs, Red Rope is probably the only outdoor club with more than 50% women members. Everything is collectively organised, with shared transport and an emphasis on skill-sharing; on trips we always cook and eat together.

But for me the big thing that makes Red Rope so special, and very definitely of the left, is the way that activities are funded.  No minor concessionary rates for us! Charges for membership and trips are on a sliding scale related to income, with a differential of 4 to 1. So members on the highest incomes pay four times as much as those on the lowest incomes, with 6 other charging bands in between, ensuring that no-one should be barred from participating on financial grounds. The job of trip treasurer is not one for the mathematically challenged!

Red Rope is active in the British and Scottish Mountaineering Councils and the Ramblers. The current chair of the BMC in the South-West is a Red Rope member and Red Rope managed to get a motion through last year’s Ramblers National Council opposing the Ramblers’ partnership with BUPA. 

Culture and leisure have played an important part in most radical left-wing movements and it’s great to see that the Left Unity project has incorporated a Culture section into the web-site and is being supported by a number of prominent cultural figures. But we also need grass-roots initiatives in these areas. Public support for cultural and leisure activities has been in decline over successive governments and the current austerity drive threatens to kill it off entirely. It is more important than ever that we create and support self-managed socialist alternatives.

For more information about Red Rope, visit our web-site: www.redrope.org.uk or email info@redrope.org.

For the Benny Rothman archive, and the archive of the Clarion socialist cycling club, visit the Working Class Movement Library in Salford: www.wcml.org.uk.