The first edition of the British Worker declared: “General Council satisfied that miners will now get a fair deal”, while the second edition referred to the miners’ executive resolution expressing “profound admiration” for the support of the rest of the working class. It merely carried a three-line reference to the fact that the miners were staying out, a hint, but no more, of the dissatisfaction of the miners with the role of the General Council.1 Some unions, such as the Railway Clerks Association, sent letters with the headline: “Yours in victory”. Cramp of the NUR sent telegrams to members of his union falsely declaring that “there are to be no wage cuts whatever for the miners”.2
In Birmingham, the strike committee produced a special “Victory Bulletin”. And why not? The strike had been solid here, the printers and the railwaymen had remained firm. By the end of the strike all the capitalist daily Birmingham papers were being produced in a four-page format – half their normal size – solely by management and apprentice labour. However, “Shortly after one o’clock on Wednesday afternoon [12 May], the sonorous tones of John Reith [of the BBC] announced over the wireless that the General Strike had been called off… The first assumption of the union movement in Birmingham was that the announcement marked a great victory for the miners.”3 Indeed there was no reason to think otherwise. The Birmingham ranks had held fairly solid and the second line of strikers had only come out that morning. Consequently, victory arrangements were put in hand: “Plans were made for the holding of a victory rally in Summerfield Park and the printing of a special victory issue of the strike bulletin.” Workers, in other words, expected that they had won another Red Friday victory but on a huge scale. The reality, however, was that it was a serious defeat, far worse in its consequences than Black Friday.
Every serious historian, such as Symons, gives a clear picture of why the right wing of the General Council acted in the way they did. The issue of “intelligence” being received to the effect that the strike was weakening is dismissed. The “accuracy of [these reports] is not particularly relevant… if the strike was in danger of disintegration the General Council did not know it… It was not fear of a breakdown, but fear that the strike might get out of their own hands that primarily moved the most influential members of the General Council.”4 Charles Duke of the General and Municipal Workers (not a member of the General Council himself) said a few months after the General Strike: “Every day that the strike proceeded, the control and the authority of that dispute was passing out of the hands of responsible executives into the hands of men who had no authority, no control, and was wrecking the movement from one end to the other.” Symons comments: “‘The intensity of the struggle will increase’ the leaders had been told. They preferred surrender to such an intensified struggle, with its implicit threat to their own power.”5
Defeat stunned the working class. Even Islington and St Pancras, militant committees, initially thought there was cause to celebrate. Some reacted like Lenin when in August 1914 he received a copy of Vorwärts, the German social-democratic paper, which reported that the Social Democrat members of the Reichstag (parliament) had voted for war credits for German imperialism in the war. Lenin considered that it was a “forgery”. At Long Eaton, the TUC’s telegram “was thought at first to be a forgery because it came via the local police station”. But in Manchester, where the news was communicated to the strike committee by Fenner Brockway, on the Left of the ILP, the latter reported that such was the perplexity, “One delegate even suggested that I had been ‘got at’ by the other side!” The first telegram from the TUC was really just the outline of the unofficial memorandum by Samuel, which the government had made clear was not binding on them or the employers. But when the real terms of surrender became known, “We could not believe our ears,” said Brockway, “My first reaction was that the TUC General Council had become either demoralised or corrupted. With a heavy heart I sent the ‘Special’ of the British Worker onto the streets.”6 But when bundles were delivered to strikers in London “they were thrown back into [the] faces” of the TUC volunteers.7
At Oxford, there was “bitter disappointment” at the “cave-in”. In Derbyshire, “Everybody furious when settlement was known.” At Wolverhampton, “The whole of the workers stood solid and were prepared to fight to the bitter end, so that when the news came through… that the strike was over, it came as a shock.” In Hull, there was, “Alarm – fear – despair – a victorious army disarmed and handed over to its enemies.”8 Even in an area that was solid, the North-East, there was a “belief that a victory had been secured [which] was initially also held by the publishers of the Workers’ Chronicle.”9 When the BBC broadcast the end of the strike, this was considered to be black propaganda: “It is necessary to state that the British Broadcasting Company and the news agencies have been completely misrepresenting the end of the lock-out as a defeat for the General Strike. This is entirely untrue… The first general strike of modern times in Great Britain has proved a complete success.”10
End of the strike
Given that ever more workers were joining the strike, that more and more power had been gathered into their hands, it is not unexpected that this would be the reaction. It was a mixture of anger, despair and, for many, wistfully wondering what could have been. One worker wrote that the Lewisham Council of Action “collapsed into wretchedness” when the General Council informed them of the terms of surrender. He commented: “It was too early to shout that we were betrayed but privately that was the only thing of which we were certain. That for which the strike had been called had not been achieved… We kept saying to each other, in an agitated way, ‘We must keep calm’ and we handed out this wonderful phrase to enquirers and repeated it at all the public meetings. But what were we going to do on the morrow? Go back to the boring daily round after this intoxicating taste of power?”11
This fairly sums up the general mood of disappointment but it also shows that the working class, at least the most conscious organised layer, were reaching out for “power”. This gives the lie to those who argued at the time that this was just an “industrial dispute” – even those on the Left like the Communist Party went to some lengths to show it was all about “solidarity” and not a revolutionary challenge to capitalism. The dejection, however, was mixed with fury against the Right in particular on the General Council. Swansea Strike Committee forbade the distribution of the British Worker when they discovered the real position of the TUC while in Glasgow workers marched in procession carrying placards saying “Down with Thomas!”12 That mood was deepened when the British Gazette shattered whatever illusions the TUC had tried to cultivate, that the defeat was not as great as feared, when it declared: “Unconditional withdrawal of notices by TUC. Men to return forthwith. Surrender received by Premier in Downing Street.”13
Cold cruelty
This was a signal for the British ruling class to display that cold cruelty which it had used against its colonial slaves and was now deployed against its “own” working class. The boss class, freed from the nightmare of control exercised by the workers’ organisations during the strike, now attempted to impose a dictatorship of capital in the factories. As one group of workers commented: “The bosses in all trades felt, in fact, that now they had the trade union movement at their feet and all they had to do was stamp on it.”14 This was summed up by a cartoon in Punch, depicting an employer greeting his workmen with the comment, “Glad to see you back, my lad; but you’ll understand that in the circumstances we can’t run to a fatted calf.”15 The situation was compounded by the fact that the General Council, while it was careful to restrain workers coming out on strike, preferring a drawn-out battle, made no attempt to have an orderly return to work. The consequence of this was that, without a lead from above, the workers looked towards the rank-and-file leaders and organisations.
Sometimes, the revolution needs the whip of the counter-revolution, as Marx commented. The employers refused to give assurances that there would be a return to the pre-strike situation. Consequently, the leaders were singled out and either, sacked – 200 LMS carters were dismissed in Birmingham – or only gradually taken back on the employers’ terms. In some cases the ruling class used the courts to rub the noses of the working class in the dirt. In Birmingham, the Trade Union Emergency Committee members were put on trial on 14 May on a charge of “doing an act likely to cause disaffection amongst the civil population”. This was after the formal ending of the General Strike. In their defence, their lawyer pointed out that four of the defendants were Justices of the Peace and two were city councillors and, moreover, publication of the news “Government Defeat” would not cause disaffection. He added: “To some it would cause pleasure, to others disappointment.” This fell on deaf ears as Lord Ilkeston, the presiding stipendiary, found 18 of the 20 defendants guilty under the Emergency Powers Act. Oswald Mosley (later that year to win a by-election in Smethwick as a Labour candidate) intervened on the defendants’ behalf. NUR members were dismissed and a “Miss Clark, a schoolteacher… was dismissed by the Education Department because of her conviction for her part in the publication of the Birmingham Worker”. In Cadbury, every trade saw a loss of union membership and a long rearguard battle took place in the Birmingham labour movement in the years that followed to restore the pre-1926 situation.16
However, initially when the bosses tried to put the boot in, the working class in Birmingham reacted with determination and discipline. For instance, the vehicle builders in the tram depot, within a few hours of coming in, walked out again, claiming that they would not be returning until the principle of “all out, all in” was established. This set off a spontaneous movement of railwaymen and others in opposition to the bosses’ policy of divide and rule. The bosses were bluntly warned in a message to the tramways department that if they continued to refuse to recognise the unions there was a considerable possibility of “guerrilla warfare” breaking out. The result of all this was that nationally 100,000 more workers were out than at any time before on the day that the General Strike was officially terminated. “It looked as though the end of the strike might be the beginning of the revolution,” said Fenner Brockway.17
But the working class is not a tap which can be turned on and off at will. A general strike, by its very nature, has to proceed to an ever wider and larger gathering of strength and power into the hands of the working class or it stalls and falls back. The TUC generals had beheaded the workers’ army. But Baldwin was alarmed by the vindictiveness of the bosses, as were the trade union leaders. This was in no way motivated by Baldwin’s “distress” at the plight of the working class. He had a surer understanding than Churchill or Birkenhead that the bosses were going “too far”, which threatened a new wave of struggle and even worse, was placing more power and authority into the hands of rank-and-file leaders. Farman comments: “It seemed also that the dreaded day of revolution was about to dawn. All over the country strike committees were reacting to the letter if not the spirit of the Communist Party’s call for the continuation of the struggle independently of national union leaderships. In some areas, a rent strike was developing; in others, which had hitherto been peaceful, there were outbreaks of violence.” The General Council received reports that “Feeling is running frightfully high all over the North.” Even strike-breaker Thomas, together with the executives of the other rail unions, ordered their members not to resume work until previous agreements had been recognised. The General Council issued its own belated call to “Stand Together”.18
Baldwin was so worried by these developments that, notwithstanding a fear by the Tory ultras that he was showing undue magnanimity, he saw the danger of these unofficial strikes developing, led from below. He therefore made a statement in the House of Commons: “I will not countenance any attack on the part of any employers to use this present occasion for trying in any way to get reductions in wages below those in force before the strike or any increase in hours.” This was sheer hypocrisy because the whole purpose of the strike was to drive down living standards, firstly the miners, and then the rest of the working class. He was “opposed” to any attempts to destroy trade unions. The kind of trade unions the capitalists preferred, however, he spelt out: “There can be no greater disaster than that there should be anarchy in the trade union world. It would be impossible in our highly developed system of industry to carry on unless you had organisations which could speak for and bind the parties on both sides. We know that in all these great organisations there are some who are of little help. At a time like this there are some who like fishing in troubled waters. Let us get the workers calm as soon as we can.”19
In other words: ‘Don’t provide an opportunity for the Left and militants to supplant right-wing trade union leaders, who in the final analysis are props of our system!’ This is the real content of what Baldwin was trying to tell the average employer who did not possess the ‘statecraft’ of the representatives of the class as a whole, of knowing when to attack, when to conciliate and when to retreat. The British ruling class was not going to retreat after the General Strike, as events subsequently showed, but they were not prepared to push the situation immediately to the extent of provoking a further social explosion.
Hunger
But having ridden out the tide of working class revolt, all the bromides of Baldwin meant nothing in the end as the employers took revenge on the working class. The cynical bourgeois Fabian leader Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary a week after the strike that the British “governing class are as good-natured and stupid as the labour movement”.20 But this “good nature” was not very evident in the weeks, months and years after the General Strike. Some employers, it is true, did not want to immediately go “too far”. For instance, the heads of the London, Midland and Scottish and Great Western railways told the permanent secretary to the Ministry of Transport that “they did not want to destroy the unions, they only wanted power to select the men who should return after the strike so as to eliminate undesirables”!21 Unbelievably, Thomas paid tribute to the “magnanimity” of the railway employers, declaring: “If any words of mine can help, may I say to every employer: ‘Follow the example of the railway companies, do the big thing’.” However, five months later Thomas was to admit that 200,000 railwaymen were working three days a week and 45,000, probably most of the “undesirables”, were still waiting for their jobs back.22
London newspapers banned meetings of the chapels of the print unions during working hours and demanded “guarantees” against further interference with the contents of newspapers. All the employees of Outram Press in Glasgow were required to renounce their union membership and journalists were even forbidden to join union colleagues at a dinner. The Stationery Office was declared an “open” shop (i.e. open to non-union labour) and the Manchester Guardian imposed a company union. Even Bevin, with the power of the transport workers behind him, saw many workers dismissed or suspended but nevertheless claimed that “only” 1,500 workers had not been reinstated. More than 30,000 railwaymen, printers, engineers and dockers remained on strike in Hull until the 16 May in defence of 150 tramway employees who were demanding reinstatement. Similarly, 30,000 railwaymen marched through the streets of Manchester. But as Fenner Brockway wrote: “A spirit of fatalism came over the workers. The TUC had ordered them back; there was no hope of concerted resistance – so back they went… Of course a general strike must be revolutionary; it is of necessity a conflict between workers and the capitalist state. The strike of 1926 was led by a General Council who did not realise this when they reluctantly authorised the struggle. And they drew back from it as soon as they understood its full implications.”23
Fenner Brockway, however, like others on the Left of the ILP which he represented, also did not draw all the implications of the meaning of a general strike and the role that was to be played, not just by the right wing but by the Left as well. The Communist Party, whose militants and leaders were undoubtedly courageous, and in some areas, as we have seen, gave a lead to the workers in the course of the strike, suffered repression. But they were hamstrung by their faulty analysis of the role of the Lefts. John Murray, in The General Strike of 1926, remarks on the mood of the working class when the strike was betrayed and particularly their attitude to those Lefts such as Purcell, Hicks and Co: “It was against these men that most anger was directed – particularly in the mining villages where gloom, depression and hunger were settling like a deadly cloud of poisonous gas.”24 In Lewisham, mentioned before, it was reported that the Council of Action “melted away”. One of its members wrote: “Who was willing to work for it any more? The temporary unity of the local movement, a source of happiness and pride… collapsed. The right wing, for the most part silent during the struggle… were relieved to see the strike out of the way so they might continue once again the parliamentary work in which they believed.”25
Lefts called to account
There had been isolated criticism of the Lefts on the General Council by the Communist Party but this was not systematic in character. Now, such was the indignation at the role of these Lefts amongst the working class – Purcell had participated in the negotiations to end the strike – that the CP was compelled to issue a strong public condemnation of the role of the Lefts. On 13 May, the Communist Party issued an appeal to “stand by the miners”: “The General Council’s decision to call off the General Strike is the greatest crime that has ever been permitted, not only against the miners, but against the working class of Great Britain and the whole world. The British workers had aroused the astonishment and admiration of the world by the enthusiasm with which they had entered upon the fight for the miners’ standard of living… And most of the so-called Left Wing have been no better than the Right. By a policy of timid silence, by using the false pretext of loyalty to colleagues to cover up breaches of loyalty to workers, they have left a free hand to the Right Wing and thus helped to play the employers’ game.”26
This, of course, was too late, as was the call made by the party for a “national conference of delegates from strike committees”. These were in the process of being dismantled, with the return of the workers to the factories and the workplaces. In the months that followed the defeat of the General Strike, in the CP’s publications and those influenced by them, such as Labour Monthly, the criticisms of the Left and their role in the General Strike became more open, although still hesitant because of the continuation of the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee. Nevertheless, Palme Dutt, in July 1926, does criticise the Left: “It was conspicuously the case that the Left Wing which had developed an opposition tendency in the Trades Unions during the past two years, around the personalities of certain leaders of the General Council, such as Hicks, Bromley, Purcell, Tillett and others, completely failed to provide any alternative leadership during the crisis and in practice fell behind the Right Wing. This is an extremely significant fact, and it is all-important that the lesson from it should be learned. The trades union Left Wing had not yet in practice reached any basic differences from the Right.”27
Page Arnot also underlined the point when he wrote in the same month: “The left wing had never for a moment believed that the government would do otherwise than it did in July 1925, that is, grant financial aid to industry. They had never seriously contemplated the General Strike, and had talked about it for purposes of bluff. Hicks now also joined the ranks of those who attacked Cook for landing them in this ‘misfortune’.”28 Looking back on the lessons of 1925-26 he wrote: “Knowledge of the existence of this left wing was at once a stimulant and a narcotic for the masses. It gave them a rallying ground, lent confidence to their leftward mood.”29 However, no real attempt was made by the CP to lessen the impact of this “narcotic”, to warn of its effects. Criticisms of the Left were not mentioned, at least not couched in the same way as here indicated, until after the end of the strike.
It would have been totally wrong, as some small left groups on the outskirts of the labour movement today do, to attack leading Left figures in a shrill and sectarian way, accusing them of betrayal at every opportunity. This has nothing in common with the genuine Marxist approach which seeks to educate and persuade, to “patiently explain”, as Lenin said, even in radicalised or revolutionary periods, about the inadequacies in programme and tactics of those who are not rounded-out Marxists. To do this the Communist Party should have had a firm line of positive criticism and made demands that the Left take an independent position. They could not do this, saddled as they were by the Anglo-Russian Committee. Later historians of the strike, such as the official CP historian James Klugmann, argue that even these belated criticisms went “too far”. On the one side he criticises the Left and their role in the General Council: “There was (on paper) a strong ‘Left’, on paper even a majority. These were men who at one time or another played a militant role in the trade union movement. But they were far from conscious socialists; their conceptions did not in the main pass beyond the field of trade unionism, they had no science of society, no perspective of transition to socialism and so they had no power to resist the reformism of MacDonald, and whilst the strike was on it ranged from a shameful silence to open support of the Thomas line. At best they were ineffective; at worst they abetted the sell-out.”30
Nothing of this kind of criticism, couched in exceedingly mild terms, was made by Communist Party leaders or organs, we repeat, in a systematic manner, before or during the General Strike. On the contrary, we quoted earlier the comments of Palme Dutt on the need for “unity”. This is absolutely correct, especially when talking about the organisational unity of the working class. But unity should not be of the “graveyard” kind with mouths closed to the political inadequacies of temporary allies. The best way to maintain the unity of the working class in action is on the basis of clear policies which offer the prospect of victory or at least the best results for the working class in the objective circumstances that pertain. Klugmann wrote about the “wretched role of the Left” group on the General Council but at the same time is critical of “some Communist statements [which began] to exaggerate the ‘dangers of such a Left’”.31 It is the capitalists and their “labour lieutenants of capital” within the ranks of the working class, right-wing leaders of the ilk of MacDonald, who should be most energetically fought. Marxists would support all genuine steps towards the Left of those leaders who echo the spirit of opposition of ordinary workers against the Right. Yet the trade union ‘Lefts’ did have a formal majority, both within the trade unions and the Labour Party, at one stage, and they did not use this position but capitulated to the Right.
There was, undoubtedly, particularly in the criticisms made by Zinoviev and some figures of the Communist International after the termination of the strike, a sectarian strain in the criticisms of Hicks, Purcell and Co. Zinoviev had a tendency to swing violently from one extreme to another. He was the architect of the policy of conciliation of these Lefts and now, while exaggerating some features of the British General Strike, he had also lacerated the Left leaders. This, by the way, was at the same time as he strenuously opposed the breaking of the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee. In the theses on the British General Strike published by the Communist International, it came out for the “exposure of the left wing.”32 What cannot be disputed is that their role was vital in the mechanism of defeat by covering up the betrayal of the General Council. If they had clearly called during the strike for rank-and-file resistance, rejected the proposal for capitulation to the government, for a continuation of the strike, for a widening of the elements of workers’ power, then this would have met a massive response from the miners and the rest of the working class. There may have been some chance of pressurising the Lefts in a critical situation to act in this way but there was absolutely no possibility of doing so if they were left free from criticism by the revolutionary wing, their inadequacies not systematically explained before the public opinion of the working class and all the necessary organisational inferences drawn from this. This, the Communist Party did not do.
CP gains
Nevertheless, the CP did gain support during the strike and afterwards. Membership doubled between May and October 1926 to 10,000, according to the CP leaders. This was a creditable achievement but nothing compared to what would have been possible. Moreover, after the initial gains were registered a decline had set in by the following year to just over 7,000, and half that figure by 1928.33 The difficulties confronting the CP were compounded by the ultra-left mistakes made by the CP leadership under the direction of the Comintern. Trotsky, summing up the situation, was harsh but correct when he wrote in 1931: “The Minority Movement, embracing almost a million workers, seemed very promising, but it bore the germs of destruction within itself. The masses knew as the leaders of the Movement only Purcell, Hicks and Cook, whom, moreover, Moscow vouched for. These ‘Left’ friends, in a serious test, shamefully betrayed the proletariat. The revolutionary workers were thrown into confusion, sank into apathy and naturally extended their disappointment to the Communist Party itself which had only been the passive part of this whole mechanism of betrayal and perfidy. The Minority Movement was reduced to zero; the Communist Party returned to the existence of a negligible sect. In this way, thanks to a radically false conception of the party, the greatest movement of the English proletariat, which led to the General Strike, not only did not shake the apparatus of the reactionary bureaucracy, but, on the contrary, reinforced it and compromised communism in Great Britain for a long time.”34 The Minority Movement became a shadow of its former self and eventually collapsed. The working class, and particularly the miners, were those who reaped the bitter fruit of the defeat of the strike.
