THERE’S no better way to spend a wet Sunday afternoon than by learning about the history of English socialism.

So Jenny, Ciara and I voyaged across the Pennines last weekend to visit the People’s History Museum in Salford, a venue which charts the development of trade unions, the Suffragettes, the Levellers and all kinds of other groups who dreamed of a better world.

Rarely can a tourist attraction have been so inappropriately named. It may be called the People’s History Museum, but it was a little short of human beings when we visited. I think we encountered around 20 other people during our couple of hours there.

The Mancunian masses are missing out on a load of interesting exhibits, including some wonderful old banners and a genuine truncheon which was used to bludgeon the protestors at Peterloo.

Did you know that before 1855 newspapers were taxed so radicals would smuggle their illegal untaxed publications around in coffins? No. Well you do now, thanks to the People’s History Museum.

But the exhibitions showed that, while some things change, others remain stubbornly the same.

The thought occurred to me when I saw the museum’s temporary exhibition about Moss Side, which included a page of furious letters in the Manchester Evening News in June 1966 after Granada screened a documentary depicting the district as a crime-ridden hell-hole.

One correspondent – LH of Prestwich – wrote in to say: “Television has this fetish about depicting the north as a seamy, sooty squalid place full of tumbledown houses, dirty streets, people boozing and living on a diet of fish and chips.

“What about the new north? The new skyline in Manchester? The new breed of get-ahead young people whose hopes and dreams stretch beyond betting shops and punch-ups?

“Moss Side has every right to protest. It and Manchester has been badly let down.”

Now 46 years on it’s possible that LH is no longer with us.

But sadly those words are as true today as they were back in 1966.