After Black Friday, the employers put the boot into the working class. The miners were defeated by June and six million workers suffered savage wage cuts. The working class fought a series of rear-guard actions but against the background of a recession wage cuts were carried through. The unions were severely weakened as their funds were drained away in a series of defensive struggles. However, one of the consequences of Black Friday was a deepening of the hatred, particularly by the miners, of the ‘traitor Thomas’ and increased support for the Left. In 1924 Frank Hodges was forced to resign as the secretary of the Miners’ Federation following his appointment as Civil Lord of the Admiralty in Ramsay MacDonald’s minority Labour government. He was replaced by A.J. Cook, miners’ agent for Central Rhondda in a national ballot. Cook was a giant in championing the workers’ cause, especially in comparison to the right-wing trade union leaders then and now. Fred Bramley, right-wing general secretary of the TUC until his death in September 1925, was so demented by Cook’s election that he rushed into the office of his assistant and successor, Walter Citrine, shrieking: “Have you seen who has been elected secretary to the Miners’ Federation? Cook, a raving, tearing Communist. Now the miners are in for a bad time.”1
In fact, A.J. Cook was a former member of the Communist Party. He resigned in 1921 when he was criticised for backing the disastrous agreement forced on the miners by the collapse of the Triple Alliance. He was a sincere militant and working-class fighter but although he professed to be a follower of Lenin, he did not have a rounded-out perspective or programme. His cloudy ideas on the general strike, formed by involvement in industrial struggle and the influence of syndicalism – the idea that trade union militancy and struggle was sufficient by itself to overthrow capitalism – meant that even this great class fighter was not adequately prepared for the General Strike. The hatred and fear of him by the capitalists and their shadows in the labour movement – Fabian guru Beatrice Webb described him as “an inspired idiot” 2 – was more than matched by the love and veneration of the miners and leftward moving workers for his tireless devotion and work for their cause. If he was to rise to the occasion of the General Strike and lead the miners and left in particular to a more successful outcome then this would only have been possible on the basis of positive criticism of his political inadequacies. Unfortunately, under the influence of the Communist International, the CP leaders went in for friendly diplomacy instead of politically intransigent and systematic criticism of the political shortcomings of not just Cook but of Purcell and Hicks as well who played disastrous roles in the General Strike and its aftermath. George Hicks was the leader of the Bricklayers Union while Alf Purcell, another ex-member of the Communist Party, led the Furnishing Trades Association.
French imperialism’s occupation of the Ruhr in Germany in 1923 led to protest strikes from the German miners. This in turn gave an unexpected fillip to the British coal trade, with exports increasing. Wage concessions were made by the employers and a steady drop in unemployment was manifested throughout 1923. At the same time, the working class, checked on the industrial plane, which is what Black Friday represented, swung towards the political terrain, which resulted in the coming to office of the first Labour government led by MacDonald in 1924. This was a short-lived political episode with the government evicted at the end of the year through the use during the election campaign of a red scare over the so-called ‘Zinoviev letter’. This was probably the greatest example of electoral fraud in British history. In the subsequent general election, the Baldwin-led Tory party was returned, dubbed from the outset by the trade union and labour movement as the “forgers’ government”.
MacDonald, who had unbelievably been perceived in 1922 as the standard bearer of the unions and Labour, became the complete tool of the capitalists when in power. His government confronted workers who went on strike, with one union leader, Ben Tillett, proclaiming that he had never heard from Tory or Liberal ministers “the same menacing tones or the same expressions of fear”.3 Labour historian Allen Hutt commented that MacDonald’s announcements that “major services must be maintained” and that the government “must give protection to those engaged in legal occupations” had a “clear strikebreaking ring”.4 The government even invoked at one stage the hated Emergency Powers Act, introduced by Lloyd George and later to be used in the General Strike. MacDonald had a “taste for gracious living”, which isolated him from the draughty Labour halls and trade union committee rooms; the patrician pose, which excited coy speculation amongst society grandes dames about the mysterious “nobleman”. This led to his discrediting amongst all wings of the labour movement even then. Trotsky, writing in the 1930s, comments on a newspaper photograph of MacDonald, when he no longer held power, which indicated “something of the flunky running all through him, even in his posture in talking to Mussolini”.5
This thumbnail sketch could equally apply to Blair today as he kneels before George Bush and the rich who are now the main backers of New Labour, as it would to Kinnock who preceded him. There is a striking similarity between the political position of MacDonald at that time and Blair today. The first minority Labour government counted amongst its crimes against the working class the charging of J.R. Campbell – acting editor of the Communist Party’s journal Workers’ Weekly – under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1795. This was for an “insolent article in Workers’ Weekly… [which]… had urged members of the armed forces to help the workers smash capitalism”.6 The Attorney General was forced to withdraw the prosecution, which was a signal for the Tories, supported by the Liberals to pass a motion in the House of Commons that brought down MacDonald.
At the end of this inglorious ‘experiment’ MacDonald was opposed by all wings of the labour movement, including trade union leaders like Ernest Bevin of the transport workers, who could by no means be counted as standing on the Left. He survived, much like Blair today, because of the lack of a viable alternative on either the Right or the Left. Arthur Henderson, the Gordon Brown of this period, was urged to stand against MacDonald but had already been wheeled out once, during the First World War, when MacDonald had been replaced by the Parliamentary Labour Party for his pacifist views.
The consequence was a turn once more to the industrial plane by the working class and its organisations. This coincided with a new offensive by the coal owners against the miners. This in turn arose from the changed economic situation confronting British capitalism. Terrified by the possibility of revolution in Germany in 1923, US capitalism, with the support of Britain’s Labour leaders MacDonald and Henderson, introduced the Dawes Plan, the aim of which was to stabilise German capitalism and lay the basis for an economic recovery. After the revolutionary opportunity was let slip by the German Communist Party in the autumn of 1923, the plan did succeed in rejuvenating German capitalism but at a considerable cost to British capitalism and particularly its coal industry. The British bosses in turn, in classical fashion, attempted to impose the burden of this onto the shoulders of the working class. This was summed up in the decision of the Baldwin government through the aegis of Winston Churchill, who then represented the most extreme, rabid and bitterly anti-working class wing of the government and the capitalist class, to go back to the Gold Standard in 1925. Churchill, it was, as Home Secretary, who had drafted troops into the South Wales coalfields in 1910 and it was he who, as Secretary for War, had pressed for intervention against workers’ Russia in 1920. It was this, as we have seen, which led to the setting up of the Council of Action and the threat of a general strike that was not carried through then because of the retreat of Lloyd George on this issue.
The return to the Gold Standard was an attempt on the part of British imperialism to recapture its lost position, particularly vis-à-vis American imperialism. The first aim was to enable the pound to “look the dollar in the face” and re-establish the supremacy of Sterling at a pre-war parity. It had some of the features of the present European Monetary Union, the Euro, with a rigid setting of the currency rate, irrespective of the economic circumstances in each country. The Euro has yet to break down but the lack of ‘flexibility’ – the ability to lower the value of the currency vis-à-vis others when economic circumstances dictate – means a loss of competitiveness and a worsening of the economic situation in some countries. Undoubtedly, the breakdown of the Euro, the unilateral exit from the union of countries such as Italy or Germany, could be posed in the foreseeable future. The decision of the Baldwin government to accept Churchill’s proposal to fix the pound at a level overvalued, in effect, by ten per cent and rigidly adhere to the Gold Standard had immediate consequences. Foreign buyers of British goods had to pay out ten per cent more in their own currency while British exporters were forced to accept ten per cent less in Sterling.
Red Friday
Already, British industry was under severe strain and the bosses naturally resorted to the traditional method of solving this problem by attacking the working class. Even at Sterling’s rate of 1924, British capitalism found difficulty in selling its goods in competitive overseas markets. The famous capitalist economist John Maynard Keynes attacked Churchill, saying that the working class and the miners in particular were “victims of the economic Juggernaut… They [the miners] and others to follow are the moderate sacrifice still necessary to ensure the stability of the Gold Standard. The plight of the coalminers is the first but not – unless we are very lucky – the last of the economic consequences of Mr Churchill… Mr Churchill’s policy of improving the exchange by ten per cent was sooner or later a policy of reducing everyone’s wages by two shillings in the pound.”7
The coal owners suggested a joint inquiry with the miners into the “extremely serious condition of the coal industry”. As the Ruhr mines resumed production, a consequence as we have seen of the Dawes Plan, a renewed flood of German coal poured into European markets. Coal exports from Britain plunged and unemployment in the mining industry consequently rose. The coal owners began to whine about a plunge in profits after a net profit of £59 million in 1923-24. They then declared that the agreement with the unions would end on 31 July 1925. Immediate wage reductions of between 10 and 25 per cent were proposed, combined with the abolition of the national minimum wage, which established the ratio of wages to profits. This had only been achieved in 1921 and yet the bosses now proposed to snatch it back. Some miners, under these new proposals, such as those in the Forest of Dean, would receive just four shillings and fourpence a day (22p), less than they would get on the dole!
The miners rejected the coal owners’ proposals, refusing even an “interchange of views” until the notices terminating the current agreement were withdrawn. The Miners’ Federation set in motion steps to revive a new industrial alliance. The membership of the Miners’ Federation (the forerunner of the later National Union of Mineworkers) stood at over 800,000 immediately after the war and still represented a colossal, potentially the most important, class force pitted against the government. The Triple Alliance was composed of railway workers, transport workers as well as the miners, but also including the engineers who had developed rapidly since the formation of the AEU in 1920. The Baldwin government and the mine owners were in league with each other in demanding cuts in wages not just for the miners but for all workers as Baldwin had indicated (see introduction). Later, Lord Londonderry summed up the determination of the ruling class when he declared, after the short-lived workers’ victory on Red Friday, that “Whatever it may cost in blood and treasure, we shall find that the trade unions will be smashed from top to bottom.”8
To begin with, however, the government attempted to bring the mine owners and the miners together but the latter refused to appear before the court of inquiry which was set up on 13 July 1925. The economic situation, the stance of the government and of the employers, not just the mine owners, convinced the trade union movement as a whole that the British capitalists had decided on a generalised attack on all workers in Britain, as Baldwin had indicated. The working class, for its part, also prepared for the coming battle. This was to take two forms: pressure on the official trade union leaders to back up and support the miners to the hilt and, at the same time, the creation of the National Minority Movement (NMM) in 1924. This had been preceded by the steps to organise the militants in the South Wales coalfield into a Miners’ Minority Movement. This was conceived as a counterweight to the ‘moderate’ right-wing union leaders and comprised of the most militant fighting elements in the British trade union movement.
The National Minority Movement’s first conference in August 1924 was attended by 271 delegates representing 200,000 trade unionists. At its height, however, it had between one million to one-and-a-quarter million formally behind its banner, one quarter of organised trade unionists in Britain. The first conference was presided over by Tom Mann, who had known Friedrich Engels – founder with Karl Marx of the ideas of scientific socialism – and Harry Pollitt, leading member of the Communist Party and general secretary of the NMM. The aim of the Minority Movement, correctly, was not to supplant or skip over the existing trade unions and their structures but to act as a rallying point for the Left and revolutionary elements in the trade union movement. This would naturally involve organising from below as well as using the NMM to prosecute the Left and revolutionary case, particularly in support of the miners and mass mobilisation to defeat the government and employers’ offensive. It defined its aims as “not to organise independent revolutionary trade unions, or to split revolutionary elements away from existing organisations affiliated to the TUC… but to convert the revolutionary minority within each industry into a revolutionary majority”.9 One of its weaknesses, and that of the Communist Party, which was largely indistinguishable from the Left trade union leaders, was not to propagandise and organise sufficient workers’ actively from below for the idea of factory committees linked to future councils of action. The working class was therefore politically disarmed in the face of the retreat of the trade union leaders during the General Strike. They had also not been prepared sufficient-ly to create their own independent organisations as counterweights to the TUC.
The NMM did manage to build support within all trades – engineers, transport workers, railwaymen, building workers – but it was amongst the miners that it achieved its greatest success. The Minority Movement amongst the Welsh miners was responsible for the election of A.J. Cook. He was to declare to the Minority Movement conference in 1925: “We are in danger. The united enemy is knocking at the gate… My slogan is be prepared.”10 On the other hand, there were lefts like George Hicks and Alf Purcell who associated themselves with the Minority Movement. The NMM was undoubtedly a potentially powerful force for organising and preparing the British working class for the most important struggle in its history. But this weapon was not effectively used in the critical period opening up in the run-up to the General Strike, during the General Strike and in its aftermath. However, in 1925 the working class, led by the miners, had learned from the defeat of Black Friday and prepared more seriously than the coal owners or the government, for that matter, for the coming struggle.
The Court of Inquiry on the coal industry, which reported on 28 July 1925, was largely sympathetic to the miners’ case, although the miners had boycotted its hearings. It stated that the difficulties in the mining industry could be entirely explained by “the immediate and necessary effects of the return to gold”.11 This was a criticism of Churchill and the government’s adoption of the Gold Standard, which put them on the back foot. Previously, Baldwin had tried to mediate between the owners and the miners. When he asked Herbert Smith, “What have you to give?” the reply from the blunt Yorkshire ex-prize fighter was, “Nowt, we have nowt to give.”12 The efforts to induce the miners to compromise still continued, with Cook receiving an invitation to see the King at Buckingham Palace. Cook’s response was: “Why the hell should I go to see the King?… I am going to fight these people. I believe a fight is certain. There is only one way of doing it. That is to fight.” When the right-wing Assistant General Secretary of the TUC, Citrine, urged caution, Cook replied: “Don’t forget I have something to pay back. It is just six years since they not only handcuffed me but led me in chains from one end of the train, in Swansea Station, to the other, in full view of the public. The same at Cardiff Station.”13
It gradually dawned on the government that the unions were not bluffing and therefore Baldwin turned to the employers for concessions. They were not forthcoming and Baldwin then consulted his Cabinet and urged a policy of caution and retreat, recommending a subsidy to the industry for nine months. A report to the King by Maurice Hankey, Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet, summed up the attitude of the government: “Many members of the Cabinet think that the struggle is inevitable and must come sooner or later: the PM does not share this view. The majority of the Cabinet regard the present moment as badly chosen for the fight, though the conditions would be more favourable nine months hence. Public opinion is to a considerable extent on the miners’ side… There is a strong feeling amongst some of the House of Commons Unionist [Tory] members in favour of the miners, though those same members thoroughly dislike the idea of a subsidy. Finally, a majority of the Cabinet decided on the subsidy proposal – every reasonable man would accept it and a letter from the miners to this effect was received during the Cabinet. It is true the owners will not favour a subsidy. The PM will be negotiating it through the night.” The King’s reaction was: “So, thank God! There will be no strike now. I am much relieved.”14
This incident became enshrined in the memory of the working class as the famous ‘Red Friday’, the revenge of the working class for ‘Black Friday’. The mine owners, nevertheless, were thirsting for confrontation, with the chairman of the Mine-owners’ Association, Evan Williams, actually accusing Baldwin of paying ‘Danegeld’ to the unions. (Danegeld was an English tribute raised in the ninth to eleventh centuries to pay off Viking raiders, usually led by the Danish king, to save the land from being ravaged.) Initially, the mine owners refused to withdraw the lockout notices of the miners. But with the government’s and the mine owners’ eventual retreat there was, as expected, an air of victory in the working class. However, this was tempered by the understanding on the part of the more developed layers that this was a truce, an armistice, a temporary retreat by a still powerful enemy that was going to use every day of the nine months of subsidy to prepare its forces for a “stand up, knock ’em down, drag ’em out” conclusion to this battle. The capitalist press was full of denunciations of the agreement. The charge of Danegeld levelled by the mine owners against the government was also echoed by the capitalist press during the battle in Liverpool City Council when the Thatcher government was compelled to step back and grant concessions after the mass struggles of 1983-84.
Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the Home Secretary – ‘Jix’ was his nickname – declared shortly after the agreement: “I say to you, coming straight from the Cabinet councils, the thing is not finished. The danger is not over. Sooner or later this question has to be fought out by the people of the land. Is England to be governed by Parliament and the Cabinet or by a handful of trade union leaders?”15 Churchill pitched in: “In the event of a struggle, whatever its character might be, however ugly the episodes which would mark it, I have no doubt that the State, the national State, would emerge victorious in spite of all the rough and awkward corners it might have to turn. But if you are going to embark on a struggle of this kind, be quite sure that decisive public opinion is behind you…”16
Government prepares revenge
However, not everybody, even those nominally in the Labour camp, shared the enthusiasm of the Daily Herald for what it called ‘Red Friday’. Ramsay MacDonald spoke at an Independent Labour Party (ILP) summer school as though Baldwin had personally “betrayed him”. He declared: “The government has simply handed over – the appearance, at any rate – of victory to the very forces that sane, well-considered socialism fears to be its greatest enemy. If the government had fought their policy out, we should have respected it. It just suddenly doubled up. The consequence has been to increase the power and prestige of those who do not believe in political action.”17 In other words, Red Friday had given an enormous boost to what MacDonald and his ilk described as the ‘extreme Left’, militants, combative trade unionism and socialism. Has this not been the constant theme of all Labour leaders since him? Was it not a worry for Neil Kinnock, Labour leader at the time of the miners’ strike of 1984-85, who hated the miners’ leader Arthur Scargill and feared the victory of militant trade unionism in this strike as did the majority of the right-wing General Council of the TUC? The same kind of bile was on display by Kinnock in his infamous and treacherous attack on Liverpool City Council and Militant in 1985. A fighting, militant struggle and particularly its leaders were hounded and driven from office. The capitalists, the right-wing trade union leaders and the Labour leadership were at one in seeking to achieve this.
Meanwhile, Red Friday had given a further fillip to the Left, reflected in the growth of support and enthusiasm for Russia, the first workers’ state in history. To the horror of MacDonald, the General Council of the TUC pressed for the Russian application for affiliation to the Amsterdam based International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU). In April, an Anglo-Soviet Trade Union Conference met in London to set up a joint advisory council to further the Russian application. The tensions were so great between MacDonald and his entourage and the majority of the trade unions that the Fabian leader Beatrice Webb speculated that it was only a matter of time before the unions severed their connection to the Labour Party entirely. She wrote: “The simple truth is that, owing to MacDonald’s loss of prestige, the universal distrust and disillusion of the active workers, the inner circles of the labour movement are more at cross purposes than I have ever known them.”18
This again is an echo of the situation which exists with New Labour in Britain today. There is, however, a profound difference between then and now. The Labour Party in 1925, even under MacDonald, was still what Lenin called a ‘bourgeois workers’ party’. It had a leadership pro-bourgeois in outlook and in the final analysis always with a foot in the capitalists’ camp, but with a working class base and still organically connected to the trade unions. That link with the working class no longer exists although the trade union link has not yet been formally broken. This difference between then and now is summed up by the fact that MacDonald ultimately was compelled to break from the Labour Party in 1931 to form a coalition with the Tory and Liberal enemies. This was necessary because he could not get his anti-working class, anti-trade union policies through in a party which ultimately still rested on the trade unions.
That is not the case any more with New Labour. On every issue – from the war in Iraq to privatisation, to the dismantling of the last parts of the ‘Welfare State’ – New Labour coalesces in the so-called ‘middle ground’ with the Liberal Democrats and Tories. We have, in effect, an unofficial National Government with Blair reliant on the votes of the Tories rather than his own MPs to get his neo-liberal measures through parliament. In fact, the main capitalist parties in Britain are, to all intents and purposes, three different wings of the same party, the capitalist neo-liberal party. ‘Choice’ is one of the themes of Blair and New Labour. In the interests of furthering his laudable aim, would it not be better for the capitalist parties to merge, to allow the British people a real choice? The creation of a new mass workers’ party, which is what the Labour Party was envisaged to be by its pioneers but has now been buried under a neo-liberal heap by Blair, would offer the “diversity” which all crave.
