A hundred years on, the general strike of 1926 remains a mythical event – in the face of relatively low levels of class struggles in recent decades, many today look upon it with the rose-tinted glasses of misplaced nostalgia. Arguably the largest industrial dispute in Britain's history, it lasted only ten days (nine if counting from 4 May) before being called off by the union leadership. Grasping the lessons of 1926 means understanding why it concluded the way it did: with dashed hopes and failure to accomplish its aims.

Post-War Britain

We were told that this was 'the war to end war' and some of us at least believed it. It may sound extraordinarily naïve, but I think one had to believe it. All the mud, blood and bestiality only made sense on the assumption that it was the last time civilised man would ever have to suffer it. I could not believe that anyone who had been through it could ever allow it to happen again. I thought that the ordinary man on both sides would rise up as one and kick any politician in the teeth who even mentioned the possibility of war.

Lieutenant John Nettleton, Rifle Brigade, quoted in: Peter Hart, 1918: A Very British Victory, 2009

Four years of generalised war left deep scars on European society. Revolutions brought down the Russian and German Empires, new independent states were formed, borders shifted repeatedly and new territorial disputes flared up. Britain, the oldest capitalist state, managed to avoid some of the turmoil seen on the continent and, despite the Easter Rising in Ireland and the Home Rule movement in India, largely preserved its Empire abroad.

Nevertheless, major changes within British society had taken place. The war put a dampener on the growing wave of workers' strikes which characterised the period of the Great Unrest.⁽¹⁾ The British economy was reoriented towards war production and patriotism became the highest civic duty. Industrial action in the war industries was made illegal under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914, which also gave the government the power to prosecute anybody deemed to be jeopardising the war effort (nevertheless, strikes still took place, as did other social struggles, for example opposing rent hikes or resisting conscription). Tendencies towards greater state intervention in the economy were exacerbated and links between the unions and the state were strengthened. With men being mobilised, labour shortages were filled by integrating women into the workforce on an unprecedented scale.

The signing of the Treaty of Versailles ostensibly meant a return to normality. However, the British ruling class recognised things could not remain quite as they were, not with the threat of revolution hanging over Europe after the events of October 1917. To this end, demobilised soldiers were promised a "land fit for heroes". By extending the vote to all men over the age of 21 and all women over the age 30 the government hoped to make workers feel like they had a stake in the system. The introduction of some basic insurance and welfare policies aimed to relieve poverty and ease people into the labour market. This however was not enough. What many soldiers found upon return was unemployment, homelessness and inflation. It took time for the British economy to readjust to post-war realities and in the meantime workers were expected to bear the costs. No surprise then that some significant workers' struggles broke out first in 1919 and then again in 1921. Miners played a key role here and it was their dispute that precipitated the general strike of 1926.

The Miners

Because of the war, the government began to take over the ownership of mines towards the end of 1916, in order to ensure they could supply the country with enough energy. Miners were given pay rises to prevent strikes and maintain the workforce (many were enlisting in order to escape the terrible working conditions). With the end of the war, demand for coal sharply fell. What's more, under the Treaty of Versailles, the allies forced Germany to pay reparations, which included coal provisions. European markets were now flooded, with the price of coal plummeting as a result. This had a detrimental effect on the UK coal industry – inevitably, attacks on miners' working conditions were seen as the solution. In March 1921, the mines returned to their private owners, who immediately forced lower pay and longer hours on the miners. Miners who refused to accept the new conditions were met by lock-outs lasting three months. And then on 15 April 1921 the rail and transport unions refused to support the miners, essentially breaking the so-called "Triple Alliance" established between those unions back in 1914. Reflecting the dour mood of betrayal, the day was henceforth dubbed "Black Friday". The miners were effectively starved back into work, worse was yet to come.

Then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill's decision to return to the gold standard in 1925, after it had been abandoned at the start of the war, led to further appreciation of the pound and again upset the export of coal and steel. So instead of any post-war prosperity, further pay cuts for the miners were announced in June 1925. Unlike four years earlier, this time the response of the other unions was more pro-active. In order to avoid the possibility of a general strike in the immediate term, the government granted a subsidy to stave off the pay cuts in the mines. However, this was understood by all sides to be a temporary measure, only delaying the inevitable. While trade union leaders prevaricated, the ruling class used this as an opportunity to gather forces. The police, the army and the navy were put on standby, and the right-wing Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS) was absorbed by the government to assemble volunteers for strike-breaking (these mainly came from layers of the middle class: various professionals, retired army officers, young men working in finance, and university students).

Finally, on 10 March 1926, a royal commission set up by Stanley Baldwin, then Conservative Prime Minister, recommended the end of the subsidy and pay cuts of 13.5%. Negotiations with the union broke down on 1 May, and the employers locked-out the miners again. The Trades Union Congress (TUC), which took upon itself the responsibility to lead the dispute for the miners, wanted to avoid a general strike and tried to reopen the talks, but their options were now increasingly limited, and finally a "coordinated industrial action" in support of the miners was announced to begin on 3 May.

The General Strike

The general strike is a challenge to the parliament and is the road to anarchy and ruin.

Baldwin, British Gazette, 6 May 1926

On 3 May, at one minute to midnight, the general strike officially began. The call-out proved popular, and between 1.5 and 2 million workers joined the miners. The majority of these were in transport, heavy industry, and energy sectors as well as the printing and building trades, but the TUC had them walk out in staggered waves. As a result, public transport was nearly at a standstill, and national newspapers could not be printed (the government had to transmit most of its announcements over radio). For the purpose of keeping control over the movement that had been unleashed, the General Council of the TUC set up sub-committees to direct the strike centrally (eventually coalescing into the Strike Organisation Committee headed by Ernest Bevin of the Labour Party). However, it was existing Trades Councils or the emerging Councils of Action which actually organised things on the ground. The distinction between these bodies was not always clear-cut:

The controlling body in each town had various names. Often the trades council transformed itself into a council of action (at Ilford an 'action committee'), and a central, or joint, strike committee sometimes would work in harmony (or otherwise) with it. In Basingstoke there was a vigilance committee, elsewhere there were generally separate strike committees for each industry – sometimes not accepting any joint control. ... These committees or councils remained local in character, and were not federated or regionally controlled, except at Merseyside, Dartford (a divisional council) and in Northumberland and Durham (a general council).

Raymond Postgate, The Workers' History of the Great Strike, 1927

The operation of these Councils of Action, essentially strike committees, was far from smooth. Although a few were formed already by the end of 1925, most came into existence only after the strike had started. Some were in competition with each other and others only represented the narrow interests of a particular trade union. And, though not all central directives were always followed, ultimately they never freed themselves from the stifling influence of the TUC. But at their best, they allowed for the coordination of the strike beyond sectoral and trade divisions, produced their own strike bulletins, organised mass picketing, provided canteens for strikers and their families, and in some cities even managed to enforce some control over the movement of people and goods.

As the strike proceeded, there were confrontations across the country. Workers tried to physically stop traffic and got into altercations with strike-breakers. Police attempted to disperse pickets by force, raided the offices of unions and political parties, and arrested workers for as little as just distributing a strike bulletin. There were acts of sabotage to stop the trains or buses from running. Some Councils of Action formed their own Workers' Defence Corps and Special Pickets' Corps to maintain order.

On 6 May, Baldwin declared that "constitutional government is being attacked" by the unions. The next day the government informed the armed forces that any actions they take to "aid the civil power" will receive its full support. The TUC responded by clarifying it is "not seeking to substitute unconstitutional government", nor is it "desirous of undermining our Parliamentary institutions." Despite all these threats and intimidations, the strike movement was only growing stronger. The OMS, responsible for procuring volunteers and seen by some as "fascist" stormtroopers, could not neutralise it either: most volunteers lacked the experience to carry out the jobs of the striking workers properly and there was of course no question of them going down the mines.

Yet on 12 May the General Council of the TUC met with the government at Downing Street and – without consulting the striking workers, with no guarantees of any deal for the miners, nor assurance that there wouldn't be any victimisation – the trade union leaders suddenly called off the strike. This decision was initially met with disbelief and confusion. The Workers' Chronicle, issued by the Newcastle Trades Council of Action, did not mince its words: "Never in the history of the working-class struggle – with the exception of the treachery of our leaders in 1914 – has there been such a calculated betrayal of working-class interests as has overtaken us this week."⁽²⁾ On 13 May more joined the strike than on any previous day, showing there was still real appetite for the fight. But the movement didn't continue beyond that as the unions and the state, hand in hand, were successful in getting workers back to work.

The miners, now on their own, still refused to accept the pay cuts and remained locked-out until November. Though local relief funds were set up and some donations were received from the USSR, hunger and poverty finally forced them to surrender.

All the way through to November it was a jug of soup a day; twice we got half a crown from the money which the Russians sent, and once or twice we got eight shillings a shift for shovelling coal gum which the hospitals were allowed to have for fuel. And that was all. I was in lodgings at £2 a week and had to pay every penny back afterwards. If you were married it was worse; you had to sell your furniture; if they gave you parish relief, it was, 'You don't need that carpet; why do you want those fancy curtains?'

John Campbell, a Scottish miner, quoted in: R.A. Leeson, Strike: A Live History, 1973

The defeat of the strike also had wider consequences. Trade union membership fell and lethargy set in. Defenders of the capitalist system, including on the left, were jubilant, and thought it would be the nail in the coffin for the idea that strike action could accomplish anything. And to cement their victory, the government passed the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act 1927 which banned sympathy strikes and put restrictions on mass picketing (it was repealed in 1946 but then reincarnated under Thatcher).

The Political Actors

The Labour Party was founded in 1900, at a conference sponsored by the TUC, as a political representation committee for the trade unions in Parliament. By 1926, it had its first stint in government with the short-lived Ramsay MacDonald ministry of 1924 (when it lost a vote of no confidence, Baldwin came back to power). Although clinging to socialist rhetoric, MacDonald quickly revealed which side of the class war he was on: his government refused to back the railway workers in their dispute and then invoked the Emergency Powers Act 1920 in response to strikes on the docks and the London Underground. No surprise then that workers could not rely on Labour, the party of the capitalist left, to take their side in 1926. There was also the Independent Labour Party (ILP), ostensibly more socialist in character but essentially a pressure group inside Labour, with members double carding (all the way to the top: MacDonald was himself in the ILP). So although the ILP expressed support for the strike, it advocated a policy of moderation and did not put forward any revolutionary strategy.

Workers with a more militant mindset could turn to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which in the months leading up to the strike took the need for practical preparation of the struggle more seriously. In fact, this process of radicalisation was anticipated both by Labour (which pre-emptively excluded members of the CPGB from its ranks) and the Conservative government (which pre-emptively had leading members of the CPGB arrested).

In 1924 the CPGB set up the National Minority Movement, headed by Tom Mann, in order to widen its influence among the working class and the trade unions. It was this organisation which took up the initiative of creating Councils of Action – though the CPGB leadership warned "there should be no rival body to the Trades Council".⁽³⁾ And this is what characterised the contradictory perspectives of the CPGB – on the one hand, the party advocated extending the strike and making it a powerful weapon of struggle; on the other hand, the party did everything to shackle the movement within the boundaries of the official "Labour Movement". The reasons for this go back to the botched process of the formation of the CPGB in 1920 and the political directives now coming from Moscow. Due to the failure of the revolutionary wave in Europe and the isolation of the USSR, the Third International was increasingly imposing policies on its affiliated communist parties which tended towards appeasement with the capitalist world instead of world revolution – in the UK, this was for example indicated by the formation of the Anglo-Russian Committee in 1925, essentially an attempt at a "united front" between the bureaucracy of the British and Soviet trade unions. So despite the fact many CPGB members played a significant role in the movement, the party as a whole failed to serve as a reliable revolutionary reference point.

The policy of the "united front" locked the CPGB into treating the TUC leadership and the Labour Party as possible allies. When the general strike ended in defeat, there were some internal disputes within the party as to whether it did enough to denounce the "treachery" of the General Council of the TUC, but the problem went further. The CPGB fundamentally did not understand the structural role the TUC played as an organ of mediation between workers and bosses. The leaders of the TUC did not "betray" the workers, so much as they fulfilled the function they were always meant to. The CPGB limited its analysis to a failure of leadership:

This strike was broken not by the power of the capitalist class, but by the failure of the Right Wing leadership. The failure of the Right Wing leadership is not a temporary failure of courage or judgement, but a failure of the entire policy which they have pursued.

CPGB Executive Committee, "Why the Strike Failed", Workers' Weekly, 4 June 1926

Of course the sentiment being expressed here is that communists should have been in positions of leadership instead. But the dangers of this were evident already a few years earlier – in 1921, Robert Williams, the president of the National Transport Workers' Federation who took the infamous decision not to support the miners on "Black Friday", was himself actually a member of the CPGB. He was expelled from the party for it and re-joined Labour; however, episodes like that should have raised wider political questions about whether it's the communist who changes the leadership of the union bureaucracy, or whether it's the union bureaucracy that changes the communist. As if this weren't enough, to challenge the "Right Wing leadership" the CPGB demanded... more power to the General Council of the TUC and further entanglement in the compromised Labour Party!

A trade union re-organisation campaign for ⁽¹⁾ 100 per cent trade unionism, ⁽²⁾ the granting of greater power to the General Council, ⁽³⁾ the strengthening of local centres of working-class solidarity by the creation of more powerful factory committees and trades councils. ... The development of a left-wing policy and leadership in the Labour Party, around a programme of working-class demands which will challenge capitalism in a fundamental fashion and the co-ordination of parliamentary activity with the mass movement outside.

CPGB Executive Committee, "Why the Strike Failed", Workers' Weekly, 4 June 1926

In other words, in 1926 militant workers lacked a political organisation independent of the Labour Party and its trade unions. Groups like the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB), Sylvia Pankhurst's Communist Workers' Party (CWP), or Guy Aldred's Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation (APCF), had by then either dissolved, been reduced to a rump local existence, or failed to make any significant intervention in the movement. The APCF rightly countered the CPGB slogan "All Power to the General Council" with "NO Power to the General Council" and "ALL POWER to Labour through its Strike Committees and Mass Meetings"⁽⁴⁾ – however, the special issue of the paper in which these slogans were put forward was published four days after the strike had already been called off. The SPGB also commented on the strike after it ended, summing up that the main lesson was "Trust and ye shall be betrayed" and that "the same 'leaders' were entrusted with power, and acted along the same lines as before"⁽⁵⁾, but did not propose any alternative course of action that the workers could take in their struggle.

The Lessons

While it lasted, though, it was good; an organised way of life, based on not working. It was as good as a university course. We had speakers down, like Tommy Jackson, the Marxist lecturer, and we gave them good audiences. Harnessed audiences, in fact, for we were not going anywhere. So we used the time to learn; you can learn something even out of a defeat. And you must remember that all the great battles of those days were rearguard actions that we fought and lost – 1921, 1925, 1926.

John Collinson, a Durham miner, quoted in: R.A. Leeson, Strike: A Live History, 1973

Ever since 1926, much of the British left has been simply repeating the CPGB line that the defeat of the general strike was due to a failure of leadership. And every time there's any sign of increased industrial action, as most recently during the 2022/3 strike wave,⁽⁶⁾ the same calls for the TUC to declare a general strike are heard. In other words, the lessons of 1926 have not been learned.

In contrast, fifty years ago the newly founded Communist Workers' Organisation (CWO) wrote:

One valuable lesson to come out of the general strike was to show quite clearly the nature of the unions. In criticising the role of the unions we must make quite clear that it is not simply a question of bad or stupid or reactionary leaders but that the unions themselves are part and parcel of the capitalist state. We do not seek to reform the unions but rather to abolish them along with all the other aspects of capitalism. That the unions were closely bound up with the capitalist state became obvious to many in 1914 when they stood solid in their support for the imperialist war. But for many workers the realisation of the new role of the unions as part of the state was not to come till the general strike. ... For the unions the general strike was a break from their previous role of parliamentarism, a syndicalist misadventure never to be repeated. ... For the class the general strike can never be the way forward. Imposed as it is by the unions acting to contain the struggle for the capitalist state, it only reflects weakness and demoralisation of a defeated working class. Today, as the working class continues to fight the attacks of capital, any generalised strike activity will not be the result of a union bureaucrats call for 'action', but the response by the working class to deepen and generalise their own movement in order to take it into a higher level. However, this will not be a general strike as in 1926, but a mass strike produced by the need to unify the struggles of the class against the state.

CWO, Workers' Voice, no. 18, April/May 1976

In 1926, both the ruling class and the false friends in the Labour Party and the union bureaucracy were afraid of the same thing: the organised power of the working class. J. R. Clynes, member of the General Council, said it right there and then at the 1925 congress of the TUC: "I am not in fear of the capitalist class. The only class I fear is our own."⁽⁷⁾

Today, just as a century ago, it is the historical task of workers to rediscover that power which has the potential to shake the foundations of the capitalist world order, and save humanity from a future of endless wars, economic crises, and environmental destruction.

Notes:

(1) The Great Unrest 1910-1914: When the Working Class Shook Britain's Capitalist Foundations

(2) Newcastle Trades Council of Action, Workers' Chronicle, 14 May 1926

(3) J. T. Murphy, "A Dangerous Situation: Confusion About Councils of Action", Workers' Weekly, 16 October 1925

(4) APCF, The Commune Special Anti-Parliamentary Communist Gazette, 16 May 1926

(5) SPGB, "The Result of "Trust": A Lesson of the Great Strike", Socialist Standard, June 1926

(6) Notes on the UK Strike Wave

(7) J. R. Clynes, quoted in J. Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Vol. 2, 1969