However, the repression against the Communist Party leaders and the anthracite miners went ahead and were clearly meant to intimidate the working class as a whole. The resistance, however, to these measures produced consternation in the ranks of the ruling class. The membership of the Communist Party increased and the Communist Party and the Minority Movement did warn, in general terms, of the dangers that lay ahead. There was disquiet within the ranks of the miners, echoed by the trade union movement as a whole, on the lack of any real sense of urgency in the TUC by the General Council or the Labour Party. Cook himself began to raise the question that if the miners wanted any initiative they themselves would have to supply it. There was therefore an attempt made to revive the Industrial Alliance.
This proposal broke down because Thomas, in a quite provocative manoeuvre, proposed that membership of the alliance should be dependent on a scheme of fusing together all the unions in one industry. This, although couched in “reasonable terms”, ostensibly stood for one industrial union. But it was aimed at dragooning the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF), the train drivers union, into a larger federation against its will and this broke up the discussions.
The miners then turned back to the General Council of the TUC, upon whom, allegedly, the miners were to become “dependent”.1 It was correct to exert pressure on the General Council to organise union support for the miners but as important was the need to turn to the rank and file of the unions. The General Council, for its part, urged the miners to wait for the decisions of the Samuel Commission, on which, it must be remembered, not a single miners’ representative sat, unlike the Sankey Commission which preceded Red Friday. This commission was stuffed with establishment figures, starting with Sir Herbert Samuel himself, a top Liberal politician from a finance capital background and a former under-secretary in the Home Office. After 1919 he was British High Commissioner in Palestine. Fellow commissioners included a managing partner in a banking house, the chairman of Lloyd’s cotton firm, Sir William Beveridge – who would later become famous through his report in the Second World War into the proposals for the welfare state – but who had been a former leader writer on the Morning Post newspaper and a member of the Board of Trade. We shall see just how ‘sympathetic’ this individual and the other members of the Commission were to the miners’ case.
To go over the role of the General Council on the eve of the greatest battle between the classes in Britain, particularly in the months of late 1925 and early 1926 before the General Strike, is to reveal the breathtaking complacency, if not sabotage, of these ‘leaders’. Walter Citrine, general secretary of the TUC, admitted later in 1927 at the conference of trade union executives called to draw up the balance sheet of the strike, that “it was known [by the TUC leaders] that preparations had been made so elaborately by the government as to make the possibilities of success much less than in 1925”.2 Yet nothing was done with this knowledge to prepare the working class. This wing of the TUC, the Right, was therefore the architect of the defeat, which they believed would therefore discredit “once and forever” militant class struggle policies in the trade union movement.
A bluff?
Even Bevin probably believed that pressure from the mobilised trade union movement could repeat the “trick” of 1925 and compel the government to retreat. Essentially empirical, he therefore was undisguised in spelling out later the unpreparedness of the General Council on the eve of the battle. At the same conference where Citrine spoke, Bevin stated: “With regard to the preparations for the strike, there were no preparations until April 27 [1926] and I do not want anyone to go away from this conference under the impression that the General Council had any particular plan to run this movement. In fact, the General Council did not sit down to draft the plans until they were called together on April 27, [six days before the General Strike started] and it is better for everybody to know the task was thrown upon us from April 27 to May 1, and when that task is understood you will be able to appreciate, not the little difficulties, but the wonderful response and organisation we had.”3 The “wonderful response” had nothing to do with the abilities of the General Council but the marvellous combative fighting spirit that was unleashed amongst the working class once the General Strike had been called.
How did the Left and the Communist Party prepare in these vital months? The Workers’ Weekly is full of calls for the working class to be prepared. On 1 January 1926, the main headline on page one of the paper was “1926 – great clash coming”.4 It called for resistance to all wage cuts, to set up factory committees. It also demanded that the General Council call an all-union executive conference to prepare, demanded the setting up of a workers’ defence corps and the release of class war prisoners. It also echoed A.J. Cook’s demand of “Not a penny off the pay: not a minute on the day”. But again, the slogan of ‘All power to the General Council’ was put forward when it was clear what the right wing would do with this power in a “great clash”. Rather than just denouncing the right wing, the Communist Party, even with a small force, should have been consistently and insistently warning about what the Right was likely to do, and demanding and criticising the Left for not adopting a clearly different, fighting, active approach from the Right. Sometimes the Left were criticised but without naming names. For instance, in the Workers’ Weekly of 15 January 1926, in the report of the CP’s Executive Committee, it refers to “self-styled ‘left wingers’ who are afraid to associate with the Communists in joint effort… because Mr MacDonald and the right wing will be displeased with them will always find excuses for refusing to put up a real fight for socialism”.5 This is fair enough as it goes but it contains no definite or concrete criticisms of the TUC General Council Left for not coming out with a serious programme of opposition, of action, against the right-wing General Council.
Moreover, it still carried uncritical and favourable reports of these left wingers on international issues. For instance, a few columns away from the foregoing criticisms of ‘left wingers’ we read: “Defending the necessity of world unity, Purcell said that the European and American workers were faced with two alternatives: ‘Either they would raise the workers of the colonial countries – China, India, etc. – up to their own level or they would be forced to sink to theirs’.”6 This is the same Purcell who remained silent, as we have seen, when the Communist Party was expelled at the Liverpool conference of the Labour Party. It was the same individual who was preparing to bloc with the right wing during the General Strike.
The columns of the Workers’ Weekly also revealed the contradictions in the Communist Party’s position on this struggle, how they were torn between support for Stalin who represented the bureaucratic elite which was gradually emerging in Russia and appreciation of Trotsky’s political clarity, particularly in his analysis of the situation in Britain. We can read, for instance, in three articles by T.A. Jackson in editions of the Workers’ Weekly in February and March 1926, a laudatory defence of Trotsky’s Where is Britain Going? against the avalanche of bourgeois and reformist criticism that had met its publication. The first article was sub-headed: “Showing how Trotsky trounces the Fabians and all other Tories – making the official Labour critics to grimace and lie”. Jackson writes: “Trotsky, as a man qualified to speak by years of study, and by an all but unique practical experience of economic and social crises, examines in his book first the general trend of Britain’s development… and secondly the leadership immediately operating upon the British labour movement. He finds this latter, for reasons given, utterly inadequate to the immensity of the emergency before it.”7
What Jackson doesn’t explain is that Trotsky urged in his book and in his letters on Britain that the Communist Party should criticise not just the right-wing leadership but the Left as well. He states that Trotsky “sees salvation for Britain only in … the leadership of the struggle [given] to persons and bodies directly responsive to the struggling masses – with their consciousness sharpened and intensified as it will be by the actual practical struggle itself.”8 Jackson’s conclusion was: “We, for our part, stand by Trotsky, not merely in his main line but in every essential detail… we see in [the] evasions and misrepresentations of the [Daily] Herald and of Forward a stronger proof of the truth of Trotsky’s case than any that even he has produced.”9
R. Palme Dutt was, at this stage, perhaps the Communist Party’s leading theoretician before he later degenerated into an apologist for Stalinism. He wrote in a long, 18-page review in Labour Monthly a laudatory article about Trotsky’s book. In answer to those who criticise Trotsky for failing to understand the English situation, Palme Dutt writes: “This self-ignorance of the reformist idealist school, which is so naïvely exposed in the reviews of Trotsky and their ‘British’ repudiations of his ‘Russian’ standpoint, can be illustrated in a very simple form. A challenge may safely be issued to the critics to name a single book by a single English author or politician, bourgeois or labour leader, which is as close to the essentials of the English situation as Trotsky’s book. It cannot be done.” He concluded: “The English working class has cause to be grateful to Trotsky for his book; and to hope that he will not stay his hand at this short sketch, but will carry forward his work of interpretation, polemic and elucidation, and elaborate his analysis further, which is so much needed in England. For despite all the national Philistines, the problem of England, more than of any other country, will only be served by the united force of the whole international movement.”10
Palme Dutt would become more than a little embarrassed by his praise for Trotsky when he later learnt to bend the truth in Stalin’s school of falsification about Trotsky’s ideas and role. The trends were evident in the Workers’ Weekly in 1926 as to how the Communist Party would develop in the future, given the theoretical weaknesses precisely on the ‘international’ issues that Palme Dutt refers to. And there was no more important international issue than the struggle then under way between the bureaucratic conservative clique of Stalin and Co., and the Left Opposition, which was defending the international perspectives of the Russian Revolution as well as the programme of democracy within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and in the state. Yet on 1 January 1926, the Workers’ Weekly hailed a speech by Stalin at the Fourteenth Russian Communist Party Congress two weeks before: “The great speech by Comrade Stalin, General Secretary… lasted five hours and during the whole of the time he held the rapt attention of the 1,260 delegates present.” In this speech, according to the Workers’ Weekly, the “Congress hailed with a burst of applause Stalin’s declaration that the party would liquidate as painlessly, and with the same unanimity, as it conquered Trotskyism”, the “richer peasantry”.11 What the Workers’ Weekly fails to add is that it was the very policies of Stalin and Bukharin – with the latter urging the peasants to “get rich” – that had precisely allowed the pro-capitalist sentiments to develop in the Russian villages reflected in the rise of the rich peasants. Trotsky and the Left Opposition had warned against this. These policies of Stalin led to a virtual civil war between a state increasingly dominated by a rising bureaucratic elite and the challenge that it met from the rich peasants – ‘kulaks’ – who threatened the social foundations of the October Revolution.
These international issues were not just noises off stage, of no relevance to the burning questions in the British labour movement and particularly the General Strike. A rising bureaucratic centrist elite around Stalin and Bukharin stood for diplomacy and unprincipled compromises with the Lefts who were their allies on an international level in the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee. Trotsky, as we have seen, stood for a policy of political intransigence, of criticism and political preparation above all for the inevitable retreat of reformism. The Communist Party, through the Workers’ Weekly, could not be faulted in its criticisms of the General Council, particularly of the Right, in the run-up to 3 May. It called in its issue of 15 January for the “organisation of workers’ defence corps”. It also called for the summoning by the General Council of a conference of trade union executive committees, in accordance with the Scarborough decision. But the rider to this was for this conference once more to “give wider powers to the General Council to lead the whole workers’ industrial army”.12 This inevitably engendered illusions that the General Council, dominated by the Right, with the compliance of the erstwhile Left, was capable of seriously preparing for the collision to come.
Samuel responds
This was evident even at the Minority Movement conference of March 1926, two months before the General Strike. Present were 883 delegates representing almost one million trade unionists. Once more the NMM advanced radical demands, for instance, for the trades councils to constitute themselves as councils of action. Yet this was undermined by the call for the “concentration of trade union power in the General Council of the Trade Union Congress – [which] will prove the wisdom and far-sightedness of our policy.”13 This conference met just a few weeks after the Samuel Commission finally reported. The Commission had been set up in September 1925 and opened its proceedings to the public in the following October. The looming clash with the miners as the flashpoint dominated discussion at every level of society. So great was the interest in the Commission’s findings that its final 300-page report, originally published at one shilling (5p) a copy and then reissued at threepence (1p), sold over 100,000 copies, the official best seller of this kind of publication until then. However, Samuel soon regretted his return from the tranquillity of Lake Garda in Italy, bemoaning in private the class polarisation he witnessed: “I can do nothing, as far as I can see at present.”14
In an attempt to break the deadlock and in the well-worn tradition of the British ruling class of holding a club in one hand while at the same time uttering soothing words, he met the miners’ leaders Herbert Smith and A.J. Cook to inform them of the Commission’s recommendations. The miners had made it absolutely clear that there must be no reduction in wages and stood for the “mines for the miners”. They had approached the famous socialist historian, R.H. Tawney, who was also, coincidentally, Beveridge’s brother-in-law, and had been a member of the Sankey Commission, to prepare a scheme for nationalisation. At the same time, the Labour Research Department, under the influence of the Communist Party, prepared their own nationalisation scheme for the miners. But over an “agreeable meal” for Cook and Smith, the miners’ leaders were informed that the commissioners would not feel it right to recommend any renewal of the coal subsidy after 30 April. “Sacrifices” on the part of the miners were suggested. All of this was, of course, couched in terms of “temporary” increases in hours or a cut in wages. The commissioners complained later that Smith’s mind was like “granite” and that Cook was a “drunken dragonfly” because he repeated the “dreary rigmarole” of “not a minute off the day not a penny off the pay”.15 Yet the attitude of Smith and Cook was no less firm than that in the mining areas and amongst the working class as a whole.
Unfortunately, neither Smith nor Cook took these revelations out to the public opinion of the working class movement. Therefore, the masses were not adequately prepared for the Commission’s proposals, which rejected nationalisation (but which nevertheless repeated the Sankey Commission recommendation for the public ownership of coal royalties). The Commission went over the long-term crisis in the coal industry and even admitted that they were “not well impressed by the existing organisation of the industry”. Beveridge wrote later about the mine owners as a body: “I found myself saying harsh things about them.”16 The report admitted that many mines were old, badly designed, inefficient and badly run. In sanitised language, the report even called for “improvements” in the miners’ working conditions. As well as this they admonished the owners and called on them to discontinue charging the miners as a body with deliberate attempts to destroy the prosperity of the industry, in order to compel its nationalisation, and to stop accusing the miners of restricting output. Despite all of this, however, they rejected nationalisation: “We are not satisfied that the scheme proposed to us [by the miners, the Labour Party and the TUC] is workable or that it offers a clear social gain.”17 The Commission predated Blair by 80 years in its approach to industries ruined by the capitalists. The diagnosis is devastating, the remedy, however, is to continue as before! It took 20 more years of ruinous private ownership before the Labour government of 1945 was compelled to step in and nationalise the mining industry with, of course, overcompensation to the ex-owners.
The Samuel Commission proposed reorganisation of the industry at some indefinite date in the future but suggested immediate reductions in miners’ wages. It was not the bosses or the well-heeled but the poverty-stricken million-fold miners of Britain who had to take a temporary step down today, the commission argued in effect, in order to advance two or three steps tomorrow. Such is always the refrain of capitalism when confronted with the crisis of their system. The ‘jam tomorrow’ never really materialises. In any case, this is a system controlled by the capitalists; they should bear the burden of any ‘sacrifices’. Instead, Samuel spoke of the need to “cut costs” – i.e. decrease wages and increase the hours – of the working class, in order to boost the “inadequate profits” of the industry.
Official reaction to the report, including at the top of the labour movement, was initially restrained. Desperately hoping for some kind of class compromise, MacDonald eventually waxed lyrical about the Samuel Commission’s conclusions: “It is a conspicuous landmark in the history of political thought and is indeed one of the strongest indictments of private enterprise that has ever been issued as an official paper. The stars in their courses are fighting for us. The miners’ leaders have very wisely advised that tongues should be silent for the time being.”18 However, the miners’ tongues, particularly that of Cook, were not silent for long. The aim of the report, with the compliance of right-wing Labour and trade union leaders, was clearly to split the working class away from the miners and to picture them as “unreasonable” unless they accepted the recommendations of the commission.
However, the Labour Rights’ attempted embargo on discussion could not hold, as Arthur Cook declared in South Wales on 14 March, that there would be no wage cuts to miners’ wages “whatsoever”. The National Minority Movement and the Communist Party came out implacably against any acceptance of the main demands in the Samuel Commission report. But even then, while making many militant demands, the congress of the NMM in March 1926 still repeated that, “The real central body through which we must function is the General Council of the Trades Union Congress.”19 Yet as one historian of the strike commented later: “There could have been little doubt among Communist and Minority Movement leaders that most members of the Industrial Committee and probably also of the General Council, were determined to prevent not simply a revolutionary strike, but a large-scale strike of any kind. It was believed – or more accurately, hoped – that the left-wing trade union leaders would be able and willing to assert themselves when the time came.”20 The language of Left trade union leaders, as R.P. Dutt, editor of Labour Monthly observed optimistically after Red Friday, “is the clearest indication of the advance of the British working class to revolution”.21
No room for manoeuvre
A mood of expectation and even a certain eagerness for the coming battle developed amongst the miners and the broader working class. This put pressure on the General Council to stand firm behind the miners, particularly in view of the fact that on 19 February, before the Samuel Commission had reported, the Industrial Committee had issued a statement of support for the miners: “There was to be no reduction in wages, no increase in working hours, and no interference with the principle of national agreements. This is the position of the trade union movement today.”22 This was not whistled out of the air but reflected the overall consciousness of the workers on the railways, in engineering, etc., who clearly understood that if the miners were defeated they would be dragged down as well. The right-wing trade union leaders like Thomas attempted to renege on the February statement of solidarity with the miners by immediately declaring after the Commission had reported that it was the basis for an “equitable settlement of outstanding difficulties”. Thomas also urged the General Council not to “acquiesce in a mere slogan” by which he meant the trade union movement’s opposition to a reduction in wages.23
The miners’ leaders approached the General Council, following a crucial national delegate conference of the union, and had sought reassurances of continued support, but they were met with prevarication and pressure for further “negotiations”. The Industrial Committee of the TUC re-stated: “Its previous declarations in support of the miners’ efforts to obtain an equitable settlement of outstanding difficulties.” But it also reaffirmed that negotiations “should be continued without delay in order to obtain a clear understanding with regard to the report of the Coal Commission and to reduce points of difference to the smallest possible dimensions.”24 In reality, there were not “small points of difference” but an unbridgeable chasm which was opening up between the working class and the miners on the one side and the employers and the government on the other.
Throughout the winter of 1925-26 a gathering storm of opposition and discontent was manifest in the ranks of the working class. The huge meeting against the imprisonment of the Communist Party members and the anthracite miners in South Wales, the open preparations of the government for a showdown, the growth in the Minority Movement, and the general politicisation that had gripped British society undermined the grounds for compromise, notwithstanding all the efforts of the TUC. Wherever they went, the miners could feel the groundswell of support amongst the working class for their cause. Moreover, the government itself was not all that enthusiastic about the Samuel Commission’s proposals and declared it would only accept its recommendations if the miners and the owners also accepted. Baldwin advanced, through his Minister of Labour, who was himself a coal owner, an ultimatum to the miners. It bluntly declared: “Beyond 30 April the subsidy cannot go on.”25
At the same time as the government was preparing for an extra-parliamentary struggle, the other side, the General Council, were frantically looking for compromises, the basis for which did not exist. The working class, for their part, at least its most combative elements, through the Minority Movement, were pressing to work “vigorously and perseveringly for the full and complete rejection of the Royal Commission’s report” and demanded “nationalisation without compensation and full workers’ control” of the mining industry.26 At the same time, the mine owners decided to break national negotiations and go for wage talks at district level. When this was rejected, they posted notices at the pit heads that employment “on existing terms would cease on 30 April, the day the subsidy was to end”.27 This attack spurred even the Industrial Committee of the TUC to condemn the owners for creating “ill-feeling and suspicion at a critical time” and asked to see Baldwin. Thomas was to state baldly what was, in effect, the guiding philosophy of the summits of the TUC at this stage when he spoke in Monmouthshire on 18 April. He declared: “To talk at this stage as if, in a few days, all the workers of the country are to be called out is not only letting loose passions that might be difficult to control, but it is not rendering the best service to the miners or anyone else.” Instead of organising, mobilising, and encouraging the feeling that war was inevitable, Thomas pleaded, let them concentrate on finding a solution honourable and satisfactory to all sides.28
Rather than organising to build the strike, the right-wing trade union leaders, in cahoots with the right-wing Labour leaders like MacDonald and Henderson, were ‘organising’ for a defeat of the miners because the acceptance of the Samuel Commission report meant precisely that. They acted like the rich, selfish passengers on the Titanic, scrambling for lifeboats, kicking everyone including women and children out of the way in order to save their skins. Baldwin had met the Industrial Committee of the TUC on 13 April. He was as intransigent as ever but the TUC warned that unless the deadlock was broken, Cook and Smith would try to gain support at the following weekend’s meeting of the Miners’ International in Brussels. Baldwin was “unimpressed”; Frank Hodges, secretary of the Miners International, “had already expressed his approval of the Samuel Report and his intense dislike of Cook was no secret.” Baldwin informed the Committee that they were “mistaken… if they thought he had granted the coal subsidy out of a funk. He had granted it because he was a pacifist [!] but if a pacifist was pushed too far he could be very combative and obstinate, and the Committee were not to think that the country’s money was going to be poured out indefinitely”.29
This had the desired effect on Thomas and he met Baldwin later, who made it clear that if there was a general strike “the pressure to restrict the powers of the trade unions would become irresistible. He [Baldwin] would be driven to deal with the political levy, the strike ballot and the Trade Disputes Act, and the Labour Party’s chances of coming to power would be thrown back for years.” Thomas, in turn, flew to MacDonald “to tell him into what desperate straits the miners’ intransigence was leading them all”.30 More concerned about legal threats and parliamentary shadow boxing than the real plight of the miners and the working class, all he could see in this stubborn resistance was the leaders of the mineworkers’ “intransigence”.
This was far removed from what was happening below in the pits, the pit villages and in the working class communities. The Communist Party, through Workers’ Weekly, echoed this mood as the day of battle approached. It stated bluntly: “General Council gets cold feet – Circular refusing to call meeting on greater powers”. The last part of this, for “greater powers” was, as we have seen, a constant refrain of the CP in 1924 and 1925 and was now repeated on the eve of battle. It declared: “If ever there was a time when the trade union movement needed a strong, militant general staff provided with the fullest possible power and authority, it is now.”31 But how could a General Council, which gets “cold feet”, and had shown before the whole of the movement how pusillanimous it was, how blatant Thomas had been in trying to derail the strike, be granted more powers to betray the working class? The CP should have emphasised much more the need to prepare through the trades councils for the setting up of councils of action.
Events in the North-East of England and elsewhere were to show during the General Strike what would have been possible on this front if the policy from below had been more energetically pursued by the Communist Party. Despite its limited numbers – about 5,000 or 6,000 – it could have had a much greater effect in solid working-class areas such as South Wales, London, etc. Even when a correct call was made for councils of action, it was hedged with advice to the working class to look to above for “guidance”. Thus, Tom Mann, when he opened the conference of action organised by the Minority Movement, said: “Therefore, prepare at once. Let us perfect our relations with each other, let us have our industrial machinery ready for action. The real central body through which we must function is the General Council of the Trades Union Congress.”32 All unions should be loyal and cooperate loyally therewith. George Hardy, acting Minority Movement general secretary, wrote in Workers’ Weekly on 9 April 1926 that members “should work for the establishment of councils of action in every area but that the councils of action were to see all decisions of the General Council and the union executives were carried out.”33
But this was precisely what the bureaucratic conservative officialdom at the top and in the districts was striving for. Negotiations between the General Council, through its Industrial Committee, and the government assumed a tortuous character, with each side, like seals passing a beach ball in a circus, attempting to put responsibility for the coming conflict on the other. Even Arthur Cook was weakening in the run-up to the strike in the face of the intransigence of the government and the weak-kneed response of the General Council. He confided to one of Baldwin’s advisers, Thomas Jones: “We are economically in the weakest position we have ever been in… And while a lot of our chaps won’t agree with me, we shall have to have a national minimum not only with pluses above it, but minuses below it.”34 In other words, even the most militant trade union leader was prepared to contemplate “temporary” cuts as he stared over the abyss of what was involved in the looming conflict.
General Strike called
Unless there are rounded-out Marxists with a clear understanding of what is involved in action of this character, it is inevitable that there will be hesitation and a drawing back before the battle is joined. Indeed, on the eve of great events, such prevarication can express itself even in the most revolutionary party. In Russia on the eve of the October Revolution, Zinoviev and Kamenev, supported by Stalin behind the scenes, disagreed with the preparations for the taking of power and even went public in denouncing Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Someone like Arthur Cook, very well meaning, a good fighting militant, passionate about the cause of the miners, in a polarised situation and without a revolutionary understanding and a mass party to back him up, inevitably hesitated and even posed the need to retreat.
Whether the miners would have accepted this is another thing entirely. Yet Cook, while expressing private hesitation, still publicly declared: “We have got the whole of the trade union movement in the country pledged to defend the miners’ hours, wages and national agreements. Abroad, we have made agreements that no coal shall come into this country. The government and the owners know that we have got the organisation that can fight and win. My last word to the government is count the cost. The cost of a strike of the miners would mean the end of capitalism.”35 This once more underlined the illusions that Cook had in a strike, even a general strike, almost automatically ending capitalism. He went further in a meeting in South Wales: “Let me warn the government there is a new mentality in the police, the army, the navy, and the air force. Ninety-seven per cent of the recruits for the past two years have come from the working classes, and thousands of them miners, who will not shoot against their kith and kin when the order comes, and we shall not be afraid to advise them: this is a war to the death, and it is your death they are after.”36
But this had little effect on the government. Baldwin, if anything, hardened the terms upon which an agreement could be made to end the prospects of a strike. The mine-owners also mapped out a savage policy of retrenchment of wages to be implemented after 30 April. Shift rates were to be reduced in a whole number of coal fields and in Durham and South Wales the proposed wages were to be lower than those in 1914! The Durham miners were to lose 18 shillings and fourpence (92p) a week and their comrades in South Wales would see their weekly earnings reduced from 78 shillings (£3.90) to less than 46 shillings (£2.30)! Baldwin made no attempt to stick to the proposals of the Samuel Report for the reorganisation of the mining industry but he proposed longer hours to solve the crisis. The Samuel Report “had stressed that sacrifices were not to be asked of the miners until agreement had been reached on the means for improving the industry’s organisation and increasing its efficiency.”37 Yet the talk was exclusively of the “sacrifice” to be made by the miners. The terms offered to the miners were those of surrender and were rejected not just by the miners but compelled the TUC to call a conference of executives of affiliated unions on the day after the miners were due to meet, Wednesday 28 April. Little concerned at these developments, Baldwin, it seems, busied himself with matters concerning cricket in the days leading up to the General Strike! Fiddling away while Rome was about to burn, we are also informed that at this time, “Baldwin bought The Times, the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post.” Jones suggested that, with the coal crisis on, he should have bought the Daily Herald, “but the prime minister settled down happily with the Telegraph crossword, which he finished just as we steamed into Baker Street.”38
Baldwin met the Industrial Committee but offered no concessions, not even saying that he had pressured the coal owners to accept some of the conditions on the reorganisation of the mines recommended in the Samuel Report. Even bourgeois commentators, such as J.L. Garvin in The Observer, repelled by the brutal visage of the bosses, wrote: “The owners have been tactless and irritating to the last degree. No responsible body of men has ever seemed more lacking in the human touch… Now, as last July, if they wanted to ‘Get the men’s backs up’ and keep them up, the owners could not have gone about it better.”39 Baldwin relentlessly pushed the line in meetings with the TUC Industrial Committee that “there would be enormous unemployment” if wages are not reduced in the exporting areas. Yet the Industrial Committee “had no suggestion to make as to how the difficulty was to be overcome”.40
Thomas actually indicated in these discussions that the General Council would not oppose wage cuts if reorganisation of the mining industry was undertaken. At the conference of TUC executives, Thomas declared: “My friends, when the verbatim reports are written, I suppose my usual critics will say that Thomas was almost grovelling and it is true. In all my long experience, and I have conducted many negotiations, I say to you – and my colleagues will bear testimony to it – I have never begged or pleaded like I begged and pleaded all today, and I pleaded not alone because I believed in the case of the miners, but because I believed in my bones that my duty to my country involved it.”41
In the latter part of April, the policy of the General Council was to try and force the mineworkers’ union to accept in substance most of the Samuel Report, which involved wage reductions and a longer working day. Why they were prepared to do this is perhaps summed up by Thomas. He wrote later: “What I dreaded about this strike more than anything else was this: If by chance it should have got out of the hands of those who would be able to exercise some control, every sane man knows what would have happened… That danger, that fear, was always in our minds, because we wanted at least, even in this struggle, to direct a disciplined army.”42 The danger of an “uncontrolled” movement from below was a constant fear of the right-wing General Council in the run-up to the General Strike. Their problem was the implacable opposition of a million miners to accepting any reduction in their already pitiful living standards.
The miners’ leaders were forced to reflect this mood. On 27 March, speaking in Cardiff, A.J. Cook declared: “The government, no doubt, would consider longer hours with pleasure, but that pleasure will never be theirs. We have got to prepare ourselves for the control of this industry. I will not accept joint responsibility for private ownership. There can be no cooperation with capitalism as far as I’m personally concerned.”43 Lord Londonderry, leading Irish coal owner, writing to Baldwin on 13 April, stated: “Cook and Smith dare not take up any other attitude… They know there are many others ready and willing to take their places if they appear to falter.”44 In other words, an irresistible force existed, the determination of the miners – with the rest of the working class behind them – to defend their position. It was confronting an immovable object, the coal owners’ and the British ruling class’s equal determination to reduce living standards.
This determination of the miners and the rest of the working class compelled the right-wing General Council to preside over this coming clash. Having no alternative but to go down this road, they were equally determined to steer it into safe channels, to keep centralised control in their own hands if possible, and to betray it at the most opportune moment. Any conciliators on the government or employers’ side also came up against the irresistible pressure of the coal owners and their supporters in the Cabinet, like Churchill and Birkenhead, to cut wages and to organise a lock-out if necessary. On 21 April, Jones, after discussions with the South Wales coal owners, revealed to Baldwin their “plans to impose savage reductions”. He added that they were “spoiling for a fight. The publication of terms like these would swing public opinion to the men”.45 But in discussions with the trade union leaders in late April Baldwin himself had in effect repudiated even the Samuel Report, which had demanded “reorganisation” of the mining industry at the cost of wage cuts.
No alternative to strike
The miners had called a special delegate conference for Wednesday 28 April and the General Council convened a meeting of trade union executives for the following day. In the meantime, Thomas and the rest of the right-wing General Council tried desperately to arrive at an agreement with the government. He begged the prime minister to do something before the situation got out of hand: “For ten days we negotiated, for ten days we said to the government, ‘You force the coal owners to give us some terms, never mind what they are and however bad they are. Let us have something to go on’.” The reply to Thomas was, “No, it cannot be done.”46 Despite all the attempts to seek a compromise they came to nothing as both sides shaped up for a battle. At the special conference of trade union executives on 29 April, a decision was taken to call a general strike at midnight 3/4 May in support of the miners. The decision was agreed almost unanimously by more than three-and-a-half million votes in favour to 49,000 against. (Some trade unions abstained because they had not had time to consult their members.) Only the seamen’s union, led by its strikebreaking leader, Havelock Wilson, voted against. In the roll call of unions, the Union of Asylum Workers were the first to vote ‘yes’ but “No-one laughed. All were too deadly serious!”47
While this decision was met with acclamation, Cramp, Thomas’s principal lieutenant in the NUR, leaned over and declared: “Pure fatalism – we can’t win.”48 Thomas, his leader, was even more hysterical when speaking to Walter Citrine: “I am perfectly convinced, Walter, there is absolutely no hope. Stanley Baldwin talks to me just like a pal. There is going to be trouble and I can see no way out of it… You must remember there is a lot of Russian money in this country. The government are well informed. By God, you don’t know! When I was in the government the railway sectional strike was on – you know, Bromley’s strike. Well, do you know that I had on my desk every morning full details, photographs of letters that had passed, speeches made at private meetings – oh my God! They have tested the feelings in different parts of the country, and they have made up their minds that there will be trouble. They are going to smash it. It won’t last more than a few days. A few people will get shot, of course (indicating the General Council members and the miners), more of them will get arrested. The government will arrest the remainder and say it is a case of putting them away for their own safety. Of course, the shooting won’t be done by them direct, it will be those damned fascists and those fellows.”49
Why then did Thomas and his union vote for the strike? Because of the massive pressure amongst railwaymen on even right-wing leaders like this. If Thomas had gone against this in a crude fashion, he would almost certainly have met the fate of a later NUR leader, Sid Weighell, who refused to accept the demands of his own union on the issue of Labour Party democracy in the 1980s and was forced to resign. In his later account of what happened, Thomas said he “urged and pleaded with the NUR executive to keep out of it. Many asked me afterwards why I didn’t resign my position as leader of the railwaymen when I realised my advice would not be taken.” His answer was that he could not let the miners down and “side with the government”.50 But that is precisely what he did during the strike. His removal before the strike would have opened the floodgates to a more radical leadership at all levels of the unions and that is the reason why he remained, in order to derail the struggle of the miners, the railwaymen and the rest of the working class.
The mood at the 30 April meeting of the executives was electric, which even affected some of the less than radical trade union leaders. Bevin declared: “We look upon your yes as meaning that you have placed your all upon the altar for this great movement, and having placed it there, even if every penny goes, if every asset goes, history will ultimately write up that it was a magnificent generation that was prepared to do it rather than see the miners driven down like slaves.”51 And yet, while the cheers still rang in their ears, straight after this conference the General Council’s Industrial Committee tried to persuade the government to negotiate a way out. In fact, even in the course of the discussion at the executives’ conference, Herbert Smith, who had negotiated with Baldwin the night before, implied that he was prepared to negotiate further and even suggested that “the miners might accept wage cuts in return for reorganisation”. This was too much for Arthur Cook who sprang up and shouted that “his president ‘had gone too far’”.52
Ramsey MacDonald expressed the fears of the parliamentarians and hoped for a settlement even after the decision had been taken for a strike. He still held out hopes that in the next week, “something will happen… which will enable us to go about our work cheerily and heartily and hopefully”.53 The Right on the General Council certainly took steps to fulfil MacDonald’s “hopes”. Just before the vote on the General Council’s scheme for action, the chairman of the conference of trade union executives, Pugh, stated: “The scheme requires that the Miners’ Federation hand over to the General Council the conduct of this dispute.”54 The miners’ leaders welcomed the support of the General Council but clearly understood that they would be fully involved with the negotiations and obviously with the expectation, naively as it turned out, that the General Council would remain firm.
Immediately the conference was out of the way, the General Council began to move every muscle to try and avert the strike by negotiations with the government. Delegates had left London, including crucially most of the miners’ delegates, with the exception of A.J. Cook. Citrine wrote to Baldwin, in the name of the General Council, stating that all the unions, including the miners, had decided to hand over the conduct of the dispute to the General Council, and that the General Council was ready for any further discussion with the government. There was much to-ing and fro-ing by the trade union leaders to Downing Street. Eventually, a formula was accepted, which A.J. Cook, who knew nothing about it at the time, said “meant a reduction in wages and district agreements – conditions against which the TUC had themselves declared”.55 The General Council were prepared to betray before battle was joined, figuratively at one minute to midnight.
In the discussions with the government, Birkenhead, a government minister, had drawn up a formula which read: “We, the TUC, would urge the miners to authorise us to enter upon discussions with the understanding that they and we accept the [Samuel] Report as a basis of settlement and we approach it with the knowledge that it may involve some reduction in wages.” Despite the “could”, the clear intention was to accept the cut in wages which the government and mine-owners stood for throughout. So eager was Thomas to get out of the commitment to a strike that he declared: “Never mind what the miners or anybody else say, we accept it.” By “we”, he meant the TUC. Pugh, at least, stated that they could not take a decision without the miners, while Swales, an alleged Left, who “might have been expected to protest against the formula, was the least vocal”.56
When this was presented to the Cabinet, the “violence of its reaction against the formula was so great” that Hankey confessed “he had never witnessed a scene like it”. All who were “not present when it was agreed reacted in the same way against it, and felt that it would be read by the whole country as a capitulation on the part of the government to the threat of a general strike.”57 It was clear that the ‘hawks’ in the government were spoiling for a fight with the working class. As an excuse to call off negotiations, they pointed to the telegrams from the TUC, calling for the strike, which had already been sent out. The government then declared: “Since the discussions which took place last night between ministers and members of the Trade Union Committee, it has come to the knowledge of the government that specific instructions have been sent under the authority of the Trade Union Congress directing their members in several of the most vital industries and services in the country to carry out a general strike on Tuesday next. Such action would involve a challenge to the constitutional rights and freedom of the nation. The government must therefore require from the Trade Union Committee an unconditional withdrawal of this threat before it can continue negotiations.”58
To have accepted this ultimatum would have been “total and abject surrender”, which even the right wing of the General Council could not accept, given the mobilisation that had taken place. Nevertheless, they still attempted to negotiate with the government on the basis of cuts for the miners. As Kingsley Martin, editor of New Statesman, admitted subsequently: “The TUC stood as a combatant in a war which had been forced upon it and which it feared to win. The forces of labour were commanded by socialist reformists and the forces of the government by class-conscious believers in the inevitable conflict.”5
