The 1926 General Strike is undoubtedly the most important event in the history of the British working class. Not since the days of Chartism in the first half of the nineteenth century had the British ruling class been so shaken. Only the colossal miners’ strike of 1984-85 comes near to the 1926 strike in its effects. It had many features of that strike, particularly that element of civil war in society and the coalfields.1 But even the 1984-85 strike involved mainly the miners, whereas in the titanic nine days of 3-12 May 1926 the organised working class came out in their millions in a generalised stoppage which posed all the fundamental issues of power before the British working class.
Out of five-and-a-half million workers organised in trade unions, an estimated four million took strike action in waves or ‘stages’ and a million miners locked out at any one time. They were confronting the Tory government of Stanley Baldwin which included in its ranks figures like Winston Churchill and Lord Birkenhead. They were determined to crush the strikers in the hope that this would defeat the working class as a whole. At the head of the million-fold ‘workers’ army’ stood the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC).
The right-wing of this body, which today would be described as ‘moderate’, was represented by trade union leaders like J.H. Thomas of the rail workers’ union (NUR), Walter Citrine, general secretary of the TUC, and the transport workers’ union leader, Ernest Bevin. These figures in general stood for a policy of ‘class compromise’, which they believed could be achieved through negotiation with the employers and the government. Strike action was considered as a very last resort.
In 1926, however, their approach was totally ineffective. The gulf between the classes – in reality, a yawning chasm – was too great. The mine owners – with the Tory government at their back – were determined to inflict savage reductions in wages and conditions. The systematic attacks on workers in the whole preceding period prior to the General Strike had radicalised significant sections of the working class which, in turn, was reflected in a shift to the left in the unions. This led to the emergence of left-wing trade union leaders like A.J. (Arthur) Cook of the mineworkers, Alf Purcell of the furniture trades union and A.B. Swales of the Engineers union (AEU). The right-wing trade union leaders were dragged reluctantly into the General Strike but were forced to do so because of the monumental pressure from below.
The working class on the one hand placed great faith and confidence in the left union leaders to energetically fight for them in the coming battle. When the strike began, the response of the working class was immediate and massive. The wheels of industry ground to a halt. The arteries of Britain – its roads and railways – were choked and silent. All the carefully laid plans of the government to defeat the strike lay in ruins as the working class, kept in the dirt by capitalism, rose as in Shelley’s poem – “rise like lions” – in a magnificent display of working-class power. They created a network of ‘Councils of Action’ or ‘Strike Committees’. In significant parts of the country, these bodies began to assume the role of a rival workers’ ‘government’ to Baldwin and his local representatives – cars and lorries carried notices “with the permission of the TUC”. This terrified the ruling class and the right-wing trade union leaders, particularly as with each day the enthusiasm of the strikers, the numbers coming out on strike and those clamouring to do so grew with an irresistible force.
The capitalists, through the Baldwin Tory government, were determined to unload all the burdens of the crisis which afflicted British capitalism onto the shoulders of the working class, beginning with the miners. Baldwin had spelt this out in 1925 in an interview with union leaders when he stated: “I mean all the workers of this country have got to take reduction of wages to help put industry on its feet.”2 This met with furious opposition from the working class and a determination to back the miners to the hilt. However, faced with a powerful and embattled working class and unprepared for a showdown in 1925, the Tory government bought time by proposing a nine-month subsidy to the coal industry. Like the retreat of Thatcher in 1981, who then took on the miners in 1984-85 when the Tory government was prepared, so the ruling class also then temporarily backtracked while they organised to crush the miners and thereby the working class.
The role of the young Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in these events is also an important aspect of this book. The Communist Party was a small but important party in 1926. As the British section of the Communist International (Comintern), its membership drew most of its support from workers who defended the Russian workers’ state and who considered themselves as revolutionaries. However, the CPGB became defenders of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union and, with the collapse of that regime and its satellites in Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, the Communist Party itself disintegrated. Only fragments now remain, with little influence inside the British labour movement.
Why go over once more perhaps the most discussed subject in the history of the British working class? One reason is in order to acquaint the new generation with these events, which are in danger of fading from the memory, given that it is 80 years in 2006 since the General Strike. In addition to this, while on the surface British society may appear to be decisively separated from the events of the General Strike, the underlying difficulties of British capitalism in this neo-liberal, globalised era point towards a mighty collision between the classes at some stage in the foreseeable future. Also, the issue of the ‘general strike’ – in the first instance, for one day – has come back onto the agenda of the workers’ movement today.
When local government workers went on strike on 28 March 2006, union leaders warned that it “would be the biggest since the General Strike”, indicating that 1926 is still an important reference point for the British labour movement.
Relevance today
Throughout the 1990s, a ‘boom’ period, there was stubborn resistance on the part of the working class to the neo-liberal agenda – privatisation, ‘flexibility’, downsizing, etc. – which was relentlessly pursued by the bosses. In the early part of that decade there was significant workers’ resistance to the neo-liberal agenda of the capitalists, particularly the attacks on the public sector: the mass movement of the miners in Britain in 1992; the Belgian public sector strikes; the anti-Juppé public sector strikes in France in 1995, which laid the basis for the downfall of that country’s then right-wing government. Similarly, in 1994, the four-hour strike of the Italian workers led to the collapse of the first Berlusconi government.
This resistance appeared to subside in the latter part of the decade because of the grip exercised by the right-wing trade union leaders and the political disenchantment which followed in the wake of the decisive shift towards the right of the leaders of the ex-workers’ parties in Europe. Now, however, the continued and more brutal capitalist offensive, particularly in the public sector, has provoked fury in the ranks of the working class. From the poorest countries in Europe – Greece and Portugal – to the twin props of ‘Old Europe’ – Germany and France – as well as the ‘intermediate’ countries of Spain and Italy, reaction to these attacks is to take to the streets and strike. Britain has joined in with the threat of a five million worker public-sector strike in answer to the Blair New Labour government’s offensive on pensions.
The mere threat of a one-day public-sector strike compelled the government to retreat, partly because this came just before the 2005 general election. They returned to the offensive after the election but yet again they partially retreated in the teeth of public sector workers’ and their trade unions’ resistance to the plans of the government. This was not a complete victory because the unions conceded the raising of the retirement age for ‘new starters’, which was a retreat from the previous arrangements. The reason for this is to be found in the right-wing character of the majority of trade union leaders in Britain today.
With the exception of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), which has a Left majority on its National Executive Committee – in which Socialist Party members play a decisive role – as well as unions like the Rail and Maritime union (RMT) and the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), the majority of trade union leaders’ initial reaction to any attack by the bosses or the government is to seek ‘compromise’, which in plain language is a tacit acceptance of the need for ‘concessions’ to the employers. If the whole of the trade union movement was of the same character as the PCS then it would have been possible to maintain the status quo on pensions through the threat and, if needs be, the actual implementation of a 24-hour public sector strike.
However, given the prevarication, in reality acquiescence, of right-wing trade union leaders, to even force the government to maintain the same pension arrangements for existing staff was an achievement in the circumstances. The task now remains for the trade unions to fight for the same conditions for ‘new starters’, as well as a determination to maintain the present pension arrangements for existing staff. (At the time of writing it is not certain that local government workers will enjoy the same pension rights as others in the public sector, which has resulted in strike action.) This could be repeated if the employers and the government do not relent.
In the partial retreat of the Blair government on public sector pensions, there is the fear on the part of the capitalists – of which he is the representative par excellence – of anything which smacks of strike action of a generalised character. In this it seems that the British ruling class are “different”. Their counterparts in parts of Europe at least view one-day strikes if not with equanimity but as ‘inevitable’, as a means of ventilating the anger of the masses at the attacks of big business. Italy, Greece, Spain, France, Austria and other countries have all experienced either a one-day general strike, a partial strike or a public sector strike. Even in Germany, with its rotten right-wing trade union leadership, such was the opposition to Schröder, the Social Democratic Chancellor before the present government, moving down the same neo-liberal path as Blair that the issue of a one-day general strike came onto the agenda of the workers’ movement.
In Britain, however, almost alone in Western Europe, there has been no experience of a complete one-day general strike. It has come close to the edge on many occasions, such as following the jailing of the Pentonville Five dockers in 1972, which unleashed a wave of solidarity action by other workers with the dockers. On that occasion the then general secretary of the TUC, the late Vic Feather, threatened a general strike but only because he was assured that he would never be forced to act on his threat because the ‘Official Solicitor’, a government-appointed lawyer, was already in the process of freeing the dockers from jail! In this incident is revealed the tendency of the British ruling class and right-wing union leaders on many occasions to go to the brink of an all-out conflict only to withdraw at the last moment.
They have been allowed to do this partly because British capitalism in the past had sufficient stored-up fat that it has been able to make economic concessions whenever it was faced with a decisive challenge from the working class. But an additional factor has undoubtedly been the shadow cast over the present by the events of 80 years ago. This shook to their foundations the British ruling class and its echoes within the labour movement, the right-wing trade union leadership. “Never again” was their duet in the aftermath of the General Strike and it has remained so until the present. They have succeeded in avoiding the kind of set-piece confrontation which unfolded in May 1926. This is no guarantee that they will be able to maintain this stance in the stormy economic and social period which is about to open up in Britain, Europe and worldwide.
Baldwin in 1925-26 proclaimed his devotion to ‘industrial peace’. Right-wing trade union leaders like Jimmy Thomas of the National Union of Railwaymen or Walter Citrine, general secretary of the TUC, desperately sought to avoid the confrontation of 1926. They failed and their counterparts of today will be unable to conjure away the colossal social collisions which are coming. Of course, British society has also changed since 1926, as has the labour movement with, for instance, the decisive transformation of the Labour Party into a capitalist party along the lines of the Democratic Party in the USA. The trade unions, and particularly the weight of different sectors such as the industrial unions, have changed. The social and political outlook of the British people has changed, in some ways in quite a dramatic fashion. Deference by those at the bottom to those at the top has gone. Nevertheless, the fundamental character of capitalism as a system of crises and the conflict between the classes which this engenders remains the same. So does the preparedness of the ruling class to seek a way out by attacking the past gains of the working class. Moreover, the fear of the tops of the labour movement, particularly in the trade unions, for the battles that loom, are the same – more intense, if anything – as they were in the period up to 1926.
Why did the general strike take place when it did? How effective was it and did the government defeat it through its strikebreaking organisation? What was the political outlook of the majority of the working class in the strike? If it had gone on for longer than the nine days, would it have succeeded? Why did the trade union leaders call it off when the strike was growing? These and many other questions we hope to answer in the following pages.
We hope to trace out, if only in outline, the fundamental features of this period, the outlook of the contending classes. The actions of the leaders of the trade unions, both of the Right but particularly the Left, are examined. So is the potential that existed for the young and weak Communist Party to transform itself into a much more powerful force, which in turn could have shaped the development of subsequent events. History is important, not in itself but in order that socialists and workers today can learn from and absorb the lessons of both victories and defeats, and in this way prepare for the battles to come. We do not live in the past but we seek to learn from it.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the following for their efforts in helping to ensure the publication of this book:
Kevin Parslow for his Herculean efforts in researching important documents, typing and checking the facts. He has made a big contribution to the publication of this book.
Hugh Caffrey for valuable research in Manchester. Tony Saunois, Clare Doyle, Bob Labi, Lynn Walsh, Hannah Sell and Ken Smith for reading the manuscript and making valuable suggestions. Ken also assisted with proofreading. Per-Åke Westerlund provided the information on the Swedish General Strike. Manny Thain also helped with the typing, Alison Hill searched for photographs and Dennis Rudd laid out the book.
Peter Taaffe
Editors note to the 2022 online edition: This text has been taken from the 2006 print proof, and every effort has been made to ensure that this text follows that edition. Please report any errors to the editors.
8/9/22
