The massive strike action by more than a million local government workers in defence of their pension rights on March 28 2006 was widely proclaimed by UNISON as the biggest strike since the 1926 General Strike.

But while the show of strength is a welcome change from the largely passive attitude of the trade unions, even the briefest look at the scale and duration of the General Strike 80 years ago shows that it represented a far more radical level of solidarity and working class militancy than we have in Britain today.

The political questions raised by the General Strike, over the extent to which reformist trade union leaders are willing or able to confront and challenge the power of the capitalist state, have not yet been resolved in the British labour movement. John Docherty and Harry Sloan sum up the issues.

Exactly eighty years ago, on the May Day of 1926, there erupted the most bitter and significant struggle in the history of the British working class. The miners were locked out on that day by employers who demanded the most enormous cuts in their wages and conditions.

On May 3, millions of workers struck in support of the miners.

The forces of the capitalist state were brought into action – and after nine days the leaders of the trade unions declared unconditional surrender. Many strikers were victimised, and after six bitter months, the miners were forced back to work, alone and defeated.

The General Strike was the culmination of an entire decade of militant struggle by the British working class. The eventual abject surrender of the union leaders after nine days pushed back the working class for a generation.

The pre-history to the strike

The crisis of British capitalism at the time reflected itself most sharply in the mining industry. All sections of the working class, despite the unwillingness of their leaders, lined up to defend the miners in July 1925 – when the Tory government capitulated – and in May 1926, when it was ready for the battle.

An important role was played by the early Communist Party and its efforts to build up a militant ‘Minority Movement’ which could challenge for leadership in the unions.

With the emergence of the wartime shop stewards movement and the flooding of workers into the newly amalgamated and centralised working class organisations in the brief period of post-war boom from 1918 to 1920, the class struggle reached a high point.

The police strikes of 1918-19, the railway strike of 1919, and many other important battles were dealt with by a combination of careful strategy on the part of the Lloyd George Coalition Govern-ment and the lack of fighting spirit of the union leaders.

Jimmie Thomas of the National Union of Railwaymen, for example, deliberately timed his 1919 struggle so as not to seek the support of those miners and transport workers who were combined with him in the ‘Triple Alliance’ and had undertaken to give full backing.

During these months, the Cabinet received regular reports from its Directorate of Intelligence about the changes in mood and activity within the working class and left wing political organisations, and discussed ‘military plans for dealing with a possible insurrection’, including how, in the event, they might take ‘private steps to secure the aid of a certain class of citizen’. (1)

In August 1920 a National Council of Action was formed by all the main organisations of the labour movement to oppose any possible intervention against the Soviet Union in the war. Meanwhile local equivalents with the same title began to prepare strikes.

The Directorate of Intelligence wrote to the Cabinet that these first Councils of Action “were taking on more the form of Soviets and in some areas (were) forming plans for the seizure of private property and the means of transport”.

But the job of heading off this enthusiasm was left to the trade union leaders, who instructed the councils that they should “not in any way usurp the functions of Trade Union Executives, especially so far as the withdrawal of labour is concerned, but to act as centres of information”. (2)

On 15th March 1921, the miners were left to fight on alone. This was ‘Black Friday’. As the Prime Minister and his Secretary observed in an exchange of notes at the time: “It is not enough to have a good cause. You must have good leaders”. (3)

The period between 1921 and 1925 saw an ebb in the class struggle. The ruling class was now armed with an Emergency Powers Act and with a range of strike-breaking machinery that was carefully preserved through the period of Labour Government in 1924.

The need for such powers grew more acute as the post-war problems of British capitalism intensified, and the markets for British goods, especially coal, contracted. The return of sterling to the gold standard at the old rate in 1925 further increased the prices of British exports and forced the reduction of living standards of those who produced for this market.

In this period Tory Prime Minister Baldwin told the miners that “All the workers in this country have got to face a reduction of wages to help put industry on its feet”. (4) It became more and more clear to the Tories, however, that they would have to enforce an exemplary show-down, preferably with the miners, in order to bring this about.

In July 1925, on ‘Red Friday’, when the Triple Alliance together with the engineers threatened to come in together to protect the miners from wage cutting, Baldwin was compelled to retreat for a time by granting a temporary subsidy to the mining industry.Strikebreaking plans

From July 1925 to May 1926, the Government carefully prepared. The country was divided into military districts, and officials were put in charge of food distribution and other tasks within each one.

The semi-official ‘Organ-isation for the Maintenance of Supplies’ recruited retired army officers, members of various extreme right-wing organisations and other disaffected sections of the middle class into a strike-breaking force

During these months the trade union leaders did nothing to prepare for the forthcoming struggle. In their heart of hearts even the most left wing of them always believed that a settlement was just around the corner.

Thus Arthur Cook, Secretary of the Miners Federation of Great Britain and in many ways a genuine militant, while publicly repeating the slogan “not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day”, in private was prepared to suggest compromises of all kinds.

The fact is that however much even the most militant union leaders were prepared to compromise, this was not good enough for the ruling class.

Baldwin and his Government negotiated right up to the last moment, in the hope that the union leaders would make major concessions. But once this became impossible, they simply seized on the pretext of the workers at the Daily Mail refusing to print a lying, strike-breaking editorial, to leave the TUC negotiators standing alone in the dark outside Downing Street faced with the task of leading an all-out struggle against the Government.

At this point the Government’s strike-breaking machinery came into operation. Telegrams were sent to all the regional civil commissioners set up under the Government’s preparations containing the single word ‘Action’. Those who received them knew what to do.

Immediately all naval and military leave was cancelled. Troop reinforcements were moved to London and the main industrial centres, and two battalions of infantry marched through Liverpool with steel helmets, rifles and full equipment.

The battleships Ramillies and Barham were recalled from the Atlantic fleet and anchored in the Mersey. Warships were also anchored in the Tyne, the Clyde and the Humber, and at Bristol, Cardiff, Swansea, Barrow, Middlesbrough and Harwich.

The military were used for various purposes. They were sent out in plain clothes to infiltrate the strikers and ‘report any evidence..... of sedition and subversion’. They were also used in enormous numbers to break the very effective picketing of the London docks.

On Friday night, May 7, scabs were moved into the docks from the river and the following morning 105 lorries moved out and armed soldiers and accompanied by a reporter from the New York World who thought that this activity was supported by “enough artillery to kill every living thing in the neighbourhood”. (5)

Over the week-end of 8-9 May, there were baton charges by police against crowds of strikers in many parts of London, in Plymouth, Swansea, Southsea, Notting-ham, Middlesborough, Hull and Newcastle, where there were 25 arrests and 41 hospital admissions.

In York the crowd tried unsuccessfully to rescue an arrested striker from jail, and there were violent scenes over four or five nights in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Early the following week many hundreds of strikers were arrested, often for nothing more than possessing copies of Communist Party literature.

However the interminable and self-deceptive efforts of Thomas and the other union leaders to achieve a ‘settlement’ ended in the pathetic sight of the leaders of the most powerful action in the history of the British working class trooping to Downing Street on May 12 to announce their unconditional surrender.

But the great mass of workers showed a great deal more courage and inventiveness than this. On May 13, there were more of them on strike than the day before, as they fought tenaciously against the efforts of their employers to victimise individuals or to deprive them of trade union conditions. In this they were largely successful, despite being abandoned by their leaders.

The failure of the union leaders to prepare for the General Strike in advance was closely linked to the methods they used to limit it once it got going. Jimmie Thomas said what he “dreaded about the struggle more than anything else” (including presumably defeat) was that power “should have got out of the hands of those who were able to exercise some control”. (6)

Charles Dukes of the G&MWU later explained to the TUC that “Every day the strike proceeded the control and the authority of that dispute was passing out of the hands of responsible Executives and into the hands of men of no authority, no control, no responsibility.” (6)

Communist Party

For a long time after 1926, it was often considered that the Communist Party had done what it could.

After all, despite the arrest of most of its leaders in 1925, and of many hundreds during the strike itself, the CP had played an active role in almost every area, been represented on numerous strike committees and councils of action, and recruited large numbers of workers, especially miners after the General Strike.

The Communist Party alone, through its press, had warned in advance of the importance of the struggle and called for the establishment of councils of action, defence squads and other necessary forms of preparation.

The early 1920s was the only time the British Communist Party tried seriously to build a revolutionary leadership in the working class movement, turning to mass work by setting up the Minority Movement in 1924 (7)

Before it finally succumbed to Stalinist degeneration, the Minority Movement represented a considerable step forward from the wartime shop stewards movement, in that it did not try to bypass the official leadership, but, in putting forward a programme, attempted to bring together the interests of all sections of the working class in a unified, revolutionary way.

By challenging the established leaders within the mass organisations, it openly proclaimed that it aimed to become a ‘majority movement’. It did much to prepare the working class for the battles that were bound to come: it is this type of political movement in the unions that is so sorely lacking today.

In the period from the collapse of the Labour Government at the end of 1924 to the great victory of ‘Red Friday’ in July 1925, the CP had made some inroads into the mass movement.

This impetus was lost as the faction around Joseph Stalin in Moscow consolidated its hold on the Communist International. The Stalinists supported a policy of alliance with sections of trade union ‘lefts’ through the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee, and this turned the British Party away from the positive, independent policies it had begun to develop.

The last Party publication before the beginning of the strike echoed the views of the union leaders, by saying that the proposed councils of action “should not take over any of the duties that ordinarily belong to the Trade Unions”, and its first statement after the strike started said, “All that it needs now is for every man to stand firm and the fight is won”.

Even the Party’s ‘official’ historian James Klugmann has conceded that the slogan ‘All Power to the [TUC] General Council’ – perhaps the most common one in the Party’s press during 1925-6 – ‘was certainly incorrect’. (7)

Alternative policies

For many years after 1926, it was very difficult to discover why such a poor lead had been given to the embattled British working class.

Only in late 1950s did Trotsky’s writings on this period become generally available, showing that there was quite a different approach in existence, one which focused on the independent mobilisation of the working class in a way that challenged the bureaucratic leadership.

In 1925 Trotsky’s pamphlet Where Is Britain Going? had outlined the need for a decisive political break from the trade union ‘left’ bureaucrats as well as the right wing, the need for an ideological struggle against Fabianism, and the decisive importance of the building of “a correct and resolute revolutionary leadership”. (8)

However the failure of anybody at all to present this type of policy meant that when they were overwhelmed by the sell-out of the General Strike there was no new road open to the working class.

Eighty years after the event, many echoes of the strength and determination of the working class have been heard in the battles of the miners, printworkers, and Liverpool dockers amongst many who have fought and been cruelly betrayed or left isolated since the 1980s – inflicting lasting defeats which still limit the confidence and militancy of the working class.

One militant who met the ‘left’ union leader Purcell just after the surrender concluded that “the mighty leader whom I had known as a fighter was cowed and beaten.... The iron man.... had feet of clay” (9)

Today’s weak and vacillating union leaders represent a continuity with those who caved in and sold out the General Strike in 1926: our task is to build on the fighting spirit of the workers who were so miserably let down – and ensure that there is an alternative, argued as widely as possible in the labour movement.

FOOTNOTES.

General accounts: C. Farman The General Strike. May 1926 (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972);

P. Renshaw The General Strike (Eyre Methuen, 1975). See also M. Woodhouse and B Pearce Essays on the History of Communism in Britain (New Park Publications, 1975).

(1) T. Jones Whitehall Diary Vol 1, ed. R. K. Middlemas (Oxford University Press, 1969) p. 99f.

(2) Form Your Councils of Action! - leaflet issued on 20th Aug 1920.

(3) Jones pp. 136, 151.

(4) Baldwin denied he actually said this, but, as Farman (p. 25) puts it, this was “hardly an exaggeration of what he meant”.

(5) J. Symons The General Strike A Historical Portrait (Cresset Press, 1957) pp. 113, 193.

(6) W. H. Crook The General Strike (University of North Carolina Press, 1931) p. 398.

(7) J. Klugmann History of the Communist Party of Great Britain vol II (Lawrence and Wishart, 1969)

(8) These writings are now given in full in L. Trotsky Collected Writings and Speeches on Britain vol II ed. R. Chappel and A. Clinton (New Park Publications, 1974).

(9) G. Hodgkinson Sent to Coventry (Maxwell, 1970) p. 99.