{"id":286,"date":"2026-08-09T11:03:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T11:03:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/?p=286"},"modified":"2026-08-09T11:03:21","modified_gmt":"2026-08-09T11:03:21","slug":"the-general-strike-may-1926-a-review-of-a-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/2026\/08\/09\/the-general-strike-may-1926-a-review-of-a-review\/","title":{"rendered":"The General Strike, May 1926 – a review of a review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The review article by Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite replicated below appears in the current issue of New Left Review.\u00a0 <\/em>I think that it\u2019s one of the best pieces I have read this year on the General Strike, the centenary of which was commemorated in May.\u00a0 The reviewer rightly identifies the railway workers’ union leader Jimmy Thomas as both stupid and indeed malign.\u00a0 Thomas did nothing to protect his members after the strike (eg Raymond Williams\u2019 dad was a signalman who was sacked for coming out in solidarity with the miners), and his behaviour in 1931 and as an early member of the National Government attracted general contempt (his supposed matiness with the King and Queen earned him a peerage \u2013 God knows what George V and Mary really thought of him).\u00a0 Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite in effect recognises Baldwin as the brilliant political operator he was, his ruthlessness in 1926 (eg his refusal to let the Archbishop of Canterbury broadcast an appeal for compromise on a BBC which John Reith ensured was unequivocally pro-government, as well as the PM’s uncompromising control over an ultra-combative Churchill) confirmed by his brutal if constitutionally correct treatment of Edward VIII in December 1936 and his crushing of Mosley, \u2018a wrong \u2019un\u2019, earlier that year (the nation should be forever in Baldwin\u2019s debt).\u00a0 Despite Philip Williamson\u2019s scholarly efforts in the 1990s to restate Baldwin\u2019s centrality to interwar politics and his claim to be one of the last century\u2019s most significant PMs (courtesy of a very long and detailed biography that didn\u2019t cut through as a revisionist argument in the way that David Marquand\u2019s reassessment of Ramsay MacDonald had done in the late \u2019seventies), the long shadow of appeasement still dictates how we perceive one of the Conservative Party\u2019s most successful leaders \u2013 even more so of course for Neville Chamberlain.\u00a0 The writer could have stressed that Baldwin\u2019s party was a long way from Bonar Law\u2019s pre-1914 flirting with rebellious Ulster Unionists, but she does recognise the Tory leadership\u2019s increasingly obvious collusion with Labour in the 1920s to squeeze the Liberal vote and restore two-party politics (Lloyd George\u2019s radical proto-Keynesian programme in May 1929 thereby biting the dust).\u00a0 The latter highlights the curious absence of Ramsay MacDonald from the article, not least as there is a readiness to compare and contrast with later events and an obvious parallel is Neil Kinnock in 1984.\u00a0 Ramsay Mac doesn\u2019t emerge well from May 1926, but it didn\u2019t do him any great harm given his success at the polls in May 1929 (there\u2019s a parallel with Keir Starmer as MacDonald\u2019s reputation in the late 1920s rested on his success as a diplomat, articulating \u2018the spirit of Geneva\u2019 and discreetly encouraging calls for him to receive the Nobel peace prize).\u00a0 Arguably, the protagonist who learned most from the strike, and whose reputation soared despite being a member of the TUC delegation treated so disdainfully by a triumphant but never vengeful Baldwin, was Ernest Bevin.\u00a0 Bevin\u2019s dominance of the Labour movement dates from 1926, his TGWU power base consolidated by the leadership he displayed throughout the crisis.\u00a0 If Baldwin is the pivotal figure in interwar Britain then Bevin, already immensely powerful prewar (eg his defenestration of George Lansbury, and the orchestrated expulsion of Bevan and Cripps for endorsing a UK-style popular front with the CP), is the pivotal figure in 1940s Britain as Minister of Labour in the first half of the decade and as Foreign Secretary in the second half.\u00a0 As Ernie sat next to Churchill and then Attlee at the cabinet table the struggles, tensions and antagonism of May 1926 must have seemed curiously distant and yet at the same time keeningly formative…<\/p>\n

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite \u00b7 An \u2019ell of an \u2019eadache: The General Strike<\/strong><\/p>\n

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite<\/a><\/p>\n

[NLR 13\/8\/2026]<\/p>\n

The general strike\u200b of\u00a01926\u00a0poses three conundrums. Neither of the opposing parties \u2013 Britain\u2019s mine-owners and Stanley Baldwin\u2019s Tory government on one side, the miners and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) on the other \u2013 wanted a strike at the start of the year, and only the mine-owners had changed their minds three months later. So why did the strike happen at all? Once begun, it was astonishingly successful: between 4 and 12 May, nearly three million workers \u2013 20 per cent of the adult population \u2013 downed tools, and 162 million working days were lost. The British trade union movement was the strongest in the world. So why did the strike end with its unconditional surrender? And why did unconditional surrender turn out to be only a temporary reverse for the labour movement? Monumental mobilisation and crushing defeat produced perplexingly medium-sized consequences.<\/p>\n

The hundredth anniversary has produced a crop of new accounts. Activists from different points on the Marxist-communist-anarcho-syndicalist spectrum \u2013 Callum Cant and Matthew Lee, Edd Mustill \u2013 want to draw lessons and inspiration from the strike. Their books focus mainly on the unions, taking it for granted that the establishment wanted to dominate the working classes. Studies by two academics, David Torrance and Jonathan Schneer, are aimed at a popular audience. Torrance focuses on high politics and elites, on the dubious basis that politicians and the middle classes are \u2018more inclined to record their experiences than striking railwaymen, printers and bus drivers\u2019. Only Schneer is interested in all the protagonists. He tells the story of the strike as Greek tragedy, with the doomed heroes of the labour movement marching towards a \u2018fatal\u2019 d\u00e9nouement, guided by high ideals and hubris. His study is not only deeply researched but captures the \u2018drama and suspense\u2019 of the events unspooling across the country, unlike the best academic monograph published on the strike\u2019s fiftieth anniversary,\u00a0G.A.\u00a0Phillips\u2019s dry, London-centric account.<\/p>\n

The crisis started in the coal industry, which had powered industrialisation, empire and the First World War, but after 1918 lurched from crisis to crisis. Coal could hardly be called a single industry: in 1926 there were nearly 2500 collieries, producing different grades of coal under different conditions, using different processes. Most mines were lamentably under-mechanised; \u2018abnormal\u2019 seams were appallingly hard to work. All were dangerous: in the early 1920s, three miners were killed every 24 hours. Different coalfields served different customers. Those in the middle of England sold to the more stable domestic market, but older fields like those in the Welsh Valleys, Scotland and the North-East of England, which produced coal for export, were struggling. Their woes were exacerbated in 1925 by the Tory government\u2019s decision to return the pound to the gold standard at a delusionary rate set by national vanity and the desire to make London the financial capital of the world again. British coal became even more difficult to sell abroad.<\/p>\n

Since the mid-19th\u00a0century, the miners had used their collective bargaining power to improve pay, and had won legislation enshrining minimum wages and a seven-hour working day. In 1912, the Miners\u2019 Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) converted to the cause of nationalisation. During the First World War, the state took control of the industry. To the miners, it seemed like proof of concept, but the mine-owners disagreed. Their association argued that, after government control ended in 1921, wages must be cut and negotiated on a district by district basis to restore profitability. Since the 1880s, the British trade union movement had been changing: sectional craft unions were joined by \u2018new unions\u2019 organising unskilled and semi-skilled workers; smaller unions began to amalgamate and unions began to co-operate more, via individual compacts and the\u00a0TUC. Now the miners called on their allies in the Triple Alliance \u2013 the large unions representing railwaymen and transport workers \u2013 for support. But in its first test, the alliance failed. On Black Friday, 15 April 1921, the other unions backed out. The miners went on strike for three months and lost. The owners slashed wages.<\/p>\n

Four years later, the owners were on the offensive again. But this time the Triple Alliance, shamed by Black Friday, issued strike notices. The government, as Baldwin acknowledged, was \u2018not ready\u2019, and had to come up with what one minister admitted was a \u2018bribe\u2019 to \u2018[buy] off the attack\u2019. The government would subsidise miners\u2019 wages (at a final cost of \u00a327 million) for nine months while a committee drew up recommendations for the future of the industry. On Red Friday, 31 July 1925, the strike was cancelled. The Triple Alliance had redeemed itself. But as one of the miners\u2019 leaders recognised, Red Friday was \u2018an affair of outposts\u00a0…\u00a0a mere skirmish\u2019. The \u2018main battle\u2019 was still to come. The government had used the same tactic before, just after the war, when miners demanded change. A commission had been convened and then ministers had ignored any recommendations they didn\u2019t like.<\/p>\n

The new inquiry was led by Sir Herbert Samuel, a Liberal politician. He proposed the nationalisation of coal royalties (unearned payments to the owners of the land on which collieries stood) and government leadership on the reorganisation of the industry \u2013 closing uneconomic pits, amalgamating and mechanising the more promising operations. The seven-hour day and the requirement for national pay negotiations would remain, but temporary wage cuts would tide the industry over until the reorganisation improved profitability. Unfortunately, the Liberal talent for compromise was no longer effective in the interwar period. Baldwin accepted the report, safe in the knowledge that neither the miners nor the owners would do the same.<\/p>\n

The miners said that if some pits really were uneconomic, they should shut. The owners wanted to make all pits profitable again by squeezing the workers. The president of the owners\u2019 association freely acknowledged that in mines producing for export, wages would fall to levels that he \u2018did not shrink from describing as miserable\u2019. The owners were willing to take collective action to achieve their goals, and announced a lockout to begin on 3 May 1926. The miners\u2019 slogan was \u2018not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day\u2019. Their general secretary, Arthur Cook, was described by Beatrice Webb as \u2018a quivering mass of emotions, a mediumistic magnetic sort of creature\u2019 who embodied \u2018the burning expression\u2019 of the miners\u2019 \u2018anger at the iniquities they were suffering\u2019. He would not agree to \u2018miserable\u2019 wages. The government and the\u00a0TUC\u00a0found themselves in a difficult position. One minister,\u00a0F.E.\u00a0Smith, Lord Birkenhead, remarked that \u2018it would be possible to say without exaggeration of the miners\u2019 leaders that they were the stupidest men in England if we had not had frequent occasion to meet the owners.\u2019 But despite their irritation, ministers were, as one civil servant put it, \u2018at ease with\u2019 the owners \u2013 they were \u2018friends\u2019 and the government would back them in the end. The miners meanwhile called on their friends in the\u00a0TUC\u00a0to strike in their support. Memories of the two Fridays would profoundly shape the response to this call.<\/p>\n

Jimmy Thomas, the general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), saw a general strike as a dangerous \u2018whirlpool\u2019. Many workers would lose wages, rack up debts and be unable to pay their rent; unions would deplete their funds; failure could lead to the victimisation of activists and smash confidence in collective action. It would put the unions on a collision course with the state, which had a monopoly on legitimate violence. The\u00a0TUC-MFGB\u00a0relationship was structurally dysfunctional: the\u00a0TUC\u00a0had yoked itself to the miners\u2019 cause, yet was unable to make their leaders agree to a deal. The miners\u2019 leaders were a little more flexible than their reputation suggests and, as Schneer argues, seemed on the verge of compromise in the final days before the lockout. But the clock was ticking and the union movement couldn\u2019t countenance the shame of another Black Friday. On May Day, a meeting of\u00a0TUC\u00a0delegates in London voted overwhelmingly for a general strike to begin at midnight on 3 May unless the lockout was cancelled.<\/p>\n

As events sped up, meeting after meeting was held to try to avert a strike, but the government and\u00a0TUC\u00a0both also ramped up their preparations, with each side becoming increasingly twitchy. As one government minister said, \u2018when the armies are mobilised and the machinery of war is ready\u2019 fighting becomes practically \u2018inevitable\u2019. On 2 May, the\u00a0TUC\u00a0leadership learned that almost all the miners\u2019 leaders had returned to the coalfields to prepare for the lockout, leaving no one to sign off on any compromise agreement, if one were negotiated. Then Baldwin, who seemed exhausted, got wind of an unofficial stoppage by the printers at the\u00a0Daily Mail<\/em>\u00a0and, in the early hours of 3 May, used this as a pretext to terminate talks. He went to bed. The strike was on. Baldwin and the\u00a0TUC\u00a0had worked hard to avoid it, but their commitments to friends and allies, their beliefs, anxieties and prejudices, and the frantic manoeuvring of late April and early May sucked them all into the vortex.<\/p>\n

The government had used the nine months of the Samuel inquiry to prepare for this eventuality, recruiting special constables and setting up committees to organise volunteer strikebreakers. Unofficial groups, like the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies and the Fascisti, also made plans for volunteer strikebreaking. Once the strike seemed imminent, the government declared a state of emergency, giving itself sweeping powers. The unions, by contrast, had not been preparing and now scrambled to do so. A\u00a0TUC\u00a0subcommittee to plan the strike met for the first time on 28 April. Ernest Bevin, general secretary of the massive Transport and General Workers Union, emerged as the dominant figure; his strategy was to call workers out in waves, with the first line comprising men (and they were almost all men) in the heavy chemical, iron and steel, power, construction, transport and printing industries.<\/p>\n

The stoppage on 4 May was immensely impressive. Less than 5 per cent of passenger rail services ran, and very few trams and buses. Commuters walked and rode bicycles or tried to get a lift. Docks were shuttered and practically no freight trains moved. Trades councils convened to co-ordinate efforts across the country, and the dedicated activists of the small Communist Party of Great Britain sprang into action. In places there was an \u2018effervescent spirit\u2019 among the strikers, with mass meetings and musical entertainments. Afterwards the strike was mythologised as a peculiarly British affair, uniquely pacific and replete with common sense. This myth was sustained by the example of a football match played between strikers and police in Plymouth later in the strike (the strikers won); but there were also reports of \u2018mobs\u2019 and \u2018considerable disturbances\u2019 in the town that same day. Across the country violence was \u2018local and spontaneous\u2019, according to the military, but it was widespread, and involved both strikers and supporters, including plenty of women and children. Despite\u00a0TUCexhortations to remain peaceful, there were rowdy mass pickets, attacks on blacklegs, rioting in the streets, even the derailing of the\u00a0Flying Scotsman<\/em>\u00a0in Northumberland on 10 May.<\/p>\n

The strike demonstrated the\u00a0TUC\u2019s power. But its leaders didn\u2019t want to starve the general public and offered to work with the government to keep the distribution of essential supplies going. The government thought this \u2018impertinent\u2019 and didn\u2019t reply. This put the\u00a0TUC\u00a0in a tricky position. It ordered a total embargo on the movement of food, before immediately backing down: the leaders of the working-class movement didn\u2019t want to \u2018starve ourselves out\u2019. Unilateral attempts to issue travel permits foundered: many employers refused to engage, and many tried to move non-essential goods, or even blacklegs, in vans marked \u2018food only\u2019 or \u2018TUC\u2019. It was chaos.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile,\u200b the government\u2019s operation swung into action. The policing of the strike was heavy-handed, with many arrests and punitive sentences. The Communist Party tried to sow dissension in the armed forces, whose refusal to take on the strikers would have transformed the balance of power, but all that happened was that many communists (one in five members of the\u00a0CPGB\u00a0by the end of the strike) were imprisoned. By contrast, Oswald Mosley, still a Labour politician in 1926, was \u2018extremely annoyed\u2019 when he \u2018presented himself for arrest\u2019 and was \u2018refused\u2019. The army, navy and air force all mobilised (the\u00a0RAFdropped copies of the government\u2019s strike newspaper, the\u00a0British Gazette<\/em>, onto \u2018red\u2019 towns). Firearms were not to be used against \u2018passive resistance\u2019, but could be deployed \u2018if absolutely necessary to prevent, say, the destruction of a power house or the firing of a petrol tank\u2019. Tear gas was authorised \u2018where a situation became so serious\u2019 that troops would otherwise have to shoot. The country was divided in twelve, with a \u2018civil commissioner\u2019 in charge of each portion. To these men, Britain seemed to have become like a colonial territory, and they enjoyed \u2018the glories of a ten days Proconsulship\u2019. One wrote happily to the new viceroy of India that he had \u2018ultimate powers\u2019 as \u2018comprehensive as those of any head of a Province in India\u2019. The boundary between what some historians have described as the \u2018zone of law\u2019 (Britain) and the \u2018zone of violence\u2019 (the empire) had collapsed.<\/p>\n

Half a million volunteers came forward to break the strike. Many were surplus to requirements. Two-fifths became special constables, for which they were paid five shillings per day, plus five shillings each week. Volunteers had better results with some forms of work than others. Trams, if they could be got out of depots, were relatively simple to drive and navigate. Buses were easy to drive, but could break down and it was easy to get lost. One bystander was killed by a bus while strikers were attempting to bring it to a halt. Trains were tough. One volunteer crew took more than 37 hours to get from King\u2019s Cross to Edinburgh. Two volunteers on the railways were killed in accidents and seven people died when trains run by volunteers collided.<\/p>\n

To keep the capital supplied with food, a huge logistics camp was established in Hyde Park, but a \u2018tremendous display of force\u2019 from the army and navy was needed to enable volunteers to unload ships and to protect lorry drivers carrying produce in the working-class East End. Twenty-four Royal Navy ships were deployed on the Thames and troops marched through the streets in great columns with fixed bayonets. Men who had scavenged iron bars to fight the police didn\u2019t dare engage the soldiers.<\/p>\n

Many \u2013 probably most \u2013 volunteers were lower middle class, working class or unemployed. But those from the upper and upper middle classes were often thrilled at this opportunity for \u2018proletarian cosplay\u2019, as Mustill puts it. Students who had missed out on the war were now especially excited to be \u2018in it\u2019, as one undergraduate at St John\u2019s College, Cambridge told his mother. An Oxford student told\u00a0A.J.P.\u00a0Taylor: \u2018\u201cI wonder if I shall ever come back again,\u201d quite in the spirit of Rupert Brooke.\u2019 For these volunteers, private property wasn\u2019t just something from which they personally benefited: it was an article of faith. They feared socialism, and cleaved to the tenets of political economy. They had seen revolution on the Continent since the war, and thought \u2018direct action\u2019 was, as the Tory grandee Lord Salisbury put it, \u2018in its logical development, revolution\u2019. One woman later recalled that \u2018the solid middle class regarded Arthur Cook\u00a0…\u00a0as a devil incarnate \u2013 talked of him in terms like the ones we later used of Hitler. He seemed such an enormous threat to the peace and security of our lives.\u2019<\/p>\n

Anxieties about gender (which gets little sustained attention in any of these books) were also important, intertwining with worries about the breakdown of a political-economic order in which the upper and upper middle classes were top dog. One civil commissioner heard \u2018disquieting rumours of the effeminacy and of the perverted political views of Oxford undergraduates\u2019. A Tory\u00a0MP\u00a0feared that communists were trying to destroy Britain by undermining \u2018the patriotic and religious instincts but also by deliberate sex corruption\u2019. In fact, sex corruption was no bar to class solidarity. Chips Channon, a Tory, declared in his diary that he feared Hubert, a \u2018nectar-like\u2019 guardsman with whom he was in love, would be \u2018killed in the rioting\u2019, but signed on as special constable nevertheless: \u2018[I] begin dangerous duties tonight at six with terror in my heart. Only for England would I do this. I have a baton and a whistle.\u2019 Torrance suggests that in \u2018one sense, the strike acted as a great leveller, giving the middle classes a taste of working-class life\u2019. It was an amuse-bouche at most. At Prince\u2019s Dock in Glasgow, volunteers slept on a luxury liner; in London, they could take up honorary membership of the National Liberal Club for the duration of the strike. At the canteens in Hyde Park, they were served food by society ladies whose efforts were written up in the\u00a0Tatler<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Cant and Lee suggest that workers went into the strike \u2018thinking they were fighting on behalf of the class\u2019. This is too simple an explanation of the reason so many downed tools, and so many others were, like the trade unionists in Reading\u2019s biscuit factories, \u2018straining at the leash\u2019 to join in. Ordinary trade unionists were both selfless and self-interested. Many knew that their employers would like to follow the mine-owners in depressing wages and conditions; as one\u00a0NUR\u00a0poster proclaimed, \u2018Solidarity\u00a0…\u00a0will safeguard your own position.\u2019 But for many, \u2018the call of fellowship and justice\u2019, as Harold Laski put it \u2013 or \u2018duty\u2019, according to Jimmy Thomas \u2013 was also strong. After the vote on May Day, Bevin told the assembled delegates: \u2018Even if every penny goes\u00a0…\u00a0history will write that it was a magnificent generation that was prepared to do this rather than see the miners driven down like slaves.\u2019 Strikers knew the sacrifices might be very great.<\/p>\n

The culture of disciplined solidarity that trade unionists had nurtured over decades was the engine of the strike. It depended on the knowledge that collective action secured workers\u2019 power and security, knowledge that was shored up by victories (and undermined by defeats). It was enacted by the embodied practices of trade unionism, such as votes taken by show of hands at mass meetings, where the enthusiasm of the many could sweep up the hesitant few (or at least make them disinclined to set themselves apart from the crowd). It was further bolstered by local communities, which often imposed severe penalties on blacklegs in the form of physical violence and social exclusion. Social death could be enacted symbolically: when nine railway workers broke the strike in Swindon, their union branch held a mock funeral for them, knocking on the door of each strikebreaker before parading fake coffins to the local rubbish dump and burning them.<\/p>\n

Solidarity leveraged working-class codes of masculinity: strikers (and women supporters) insisted that strikebreakers \u2013 scabs \u2013 were less than men, and one wrote happily to the\u00a0TUC\u2019s acting general secretary, Walter Citrine, that the strike was creating \u2018a stronger and more virile workers\u2019 movement than the world has ever known\u2019. This masculinity was racialised: Bevin said that the miners wouldn\u2019t be \u2018driven down like slaves\u2019, and the Communist Party implored workers to stop \u2018British capitalists\u2019 driving \u2018the workers here down to coolie conditions\u2019. Masculine pride also thrilled to a world turned temporarily upside down. An official of the Scottish Horse and Motormen\u2019s Association, for instance, was \u2018in his element\u2019 smoking a cigar as he dictated which of a \u2018stream of employers\u2019 coming to him would receive a permit to move their goods; he also designated whisky a \u2018staple food stuff\u2019.<\/p>\n

Many workers wanted to be \u2018in it\u2019 too. They didn\u2019t want to be accused of scabbing and they didn\u2019t want to work alongside scabs. They didn\u2019t want to have anything to do with \u2018black\u2019 goods that had been moved by blacklegs, or to work machines powered by \u2018black juice\u2019 (electricity). Few hoped the strike would turn the world permanently upside down, and those who did were generally animated not by Marx but by the Bible and the tradition of English radicalism that pitted productive against unproductive labour. Even the Communist Party thought the strike was \u2018not the revolutionary crisis which is haunting the minds of the ruling class\u2019, but \u2018one of a long series of crises attending the decline of British capitalism\u2019, and hoped to use it simply to build \u2018morale\u2019.<\/p>\n

Baldwin framed the strike as a fundamental threat to the authority of Parliament and the cabinet, and thus to the British constitution. The Conservative and Unionist Party was on shaky ground here: shortly before the war many of its leading lights had backed the use of violent action in Ulster to prevent Irish Home Rule, with Andrew Bonar Law, a future Tory prime minister, claiming that there were \u2018things stronger than parliamentary majorities\u2019. The constitutional issue was even more dangerous for the\u00a0TUC, however, which insisted that there was \u2018no constitutional crisis\u2019. Schneer argues that Baldwin was right: the\u00a0TUChad opened Pandora\u2019s box. It\u00a0was<\/em>\u00a0trying to force the government to do something, and \u2018if the government returned to the bargaining table, it would be acknowledging implicitly that it could not protect the community that the strike jeopardised. It would have lost its entire raison d\u2019\u00eatre.\u2019<\/p>\n

If that was the case, though, then the unions had already smashed the constitution on Red Friday in 1925, when they forced an elected government to do what they wanted. And if parliamentary sovereignty was being undermined in 1926, then \u2013 as a naval officer who volunteered as a bus conductor said \u2013 the government should have arrested \u2018such as dared to challenge that sovereignty\u2019; to do otherwise \u2018was a dangerous advertisement, surely, of its lack of faith in its own powers\u2019. But it wasn\u2019t theoretical or legal arguments that led Baldwin to describe the strike as a threat to the (famously unwritten) constitution. It was a political strategy.<\/p>\n

Baldwin wanted the\u00a0TUC\u2019s unconditional surrender. The state could beat the unions, but the cost of using volunteers, police, specials and troops to grind them into the dust might well have been too great. The unions were powerful and they were an established part of British society. The moral capital of workers who\u2019d fought in the war was high and they deployed it, wearing their medals and yelling at strikebreakers: \u2018Who won the war, eh?\u2019 As Baldwin said on the radio during the strike, much of the general public had a \u2018good deal of sympathy with the miners\u2019. The constitutional issue gave him a justification \u2013 actually, an imperative \u2013 for demanding the unions\u2019 capitulation. It tied his hands in just the way he wanted them tied. When the archbishop of Canterbury proposed a compromise solution, Baldwin\u2019s secretary told him the prime minister \u2018thought he must himself adhere to his declaration\u2019 that the\u00a0TUC\u2019s unconditional surrender \u2018must precede the beginning of negotiations by him\u2019, and banned the archbishop from broadcasting his proposals over the radio.<\/p>\n

By the last day\u200b of the strike, 12 May, there were probably more men out than ever before, as the\u00a0TUC\u2019s \u2018second wave\u2019 \u2013 engineers and shipbuilders \u2013 joined the dispute. But some strikers were returning to work and blackleg labour was proving increasingly effective. The situation was labile and hard information scarce. As Schneer says, the\u00a0TUC\u00a0received reports throughout the nine days that \u2018the strike was solid everywhere; but, also, that men were trickling back to work; that troops were on the move, even in tanks; but, also, that troops were refusing to move because they supported the strike; that pickets were peaceful; that they were violent.\u2019 The labour movement was travelling very fast \u2013 but whether towards a peaceful or a bloody d\u00e9nouement wasn\u2019t clear. All the\u00a0TUCleaders knew for sure was that the miners were unwilling to compromise. And only the miners\u2019 union had the funds and the organisation to stay out for weeks or months. If the strike continued much longer, the\u00a0TUC\u00a0feared (at best) a catastrophic collapse of funds and solidarity or (at worst) troops firing on strikers. Though there is no evidence that the government ever considered it, the\u00a0TUC\u00a0leaders were also afraid that they might be arrested.<\/p>\n

As a result, the\u00a0TUC\u00a0negotiators were desperate to end the strike quickly, \u2018as an army and not as a rabble\u2019, in Citrine\u2019s phrase. They jumped at a new set of compromise proposals brokered by Samuel, who had rushed back from a writing retreat in Italy to act as an informal mediator. But Baldwin did not want compromise. When the\u00a0TUC\u00a0general council turned up at Downing Street to discuss Samuel\u2019s memorandum, its members were told: \u2018You know the prime minister will not see you before the strike is called off.\u2019 Baldwin\u2019s strategic brilliance was clear. By entering his presence, the\u00a0TUC\u00a0leaders were admitting defeat. They acknowledged the strike was over. Rather bewildered, they half-heartedly attempted to extract some concessions. Baldwin made none. Citrine and the cabinet secretary drafted a press release saying the strike had been called off.<\/p>\n

Baldwin seemed to many contemporaries an \u2018enigma\u2019. A fellow Tory suggested he didn\u2019t think about problems but sniffed at them \u2018like an elderly spaniel\u2019. Lady Baldwin wrote more accurately that her husband \u2018was always an idealist; they tell me also he was quite a cunning politician.\u2019 He was a committed Christian and a paternalistic employer; uncomfortable with the family business\u2019s excess wartime profits, he anonymously donated a fifth of his fortune to the Treasury after it ended (hard to imagine anyone in the Conservative Party doing anything similar in the age of Michelle Mone). As leader his most consistent theme was \u2018industrial peace\u2019. But he hated state intrusion in the economy, and was determined to \u2018wean\u2019 the coal industry \u2018from the breast of the state\u2019. He was also on constant manoeuvres to incorporate the constitutionalist Labour Party into the political system and to destroy the Liberals. Already wounded by its wartime split, the Liberal Party was further damaged by Baldwin\u2019s conduct of the strike. His exploitation of Samuel\u2019s good offices and of the constitutional issue brought plenty of Liberals over to the Tories. By showing how effective constitutional arguments were against the labour movement, he isolated those within it who continued to advocate for direct action. Though he had worked in good faith to avoid a general strike, once it began Baldwin\u2019s ideological strategy and the state\u2019s monopoly on violence meant he was able to win a comprehensive victory.<\/p>\n

Cant, Lee and Mustill see things differently: the workers were betrayed by their own leaders. The\u00a0TUC\u00a0leadership had become, as early 20th-century syndicalists suggested of the\u00a0MFGB\u00a0leadership, \u2018trade unionists by trade\u2019. As the strike grew stronger and stronger, these \u2018panicked bureaucrats\u2019 feared \u2018the development of an alternative leadership\u2019 among the rank and file and called it off. This view of the motivation of trade union leaders has its counterpart in the neoliberal \u2018new public management\u2019 of the late 20th\u00a0century, which was suspicious of all state bureaucracies on the grounds that they would tend to promote the interests not of the public but of the bureaucracy \u2013 that is, the bureaucrats. There\u2019s something to this theory, but in both cases, its view of human motivation is too narrow-mindedly individualistic. Even after its defeat, the\u00a0TUC\u00a0still felt the strike was \u2018morally justified\u2019, as Phillips put it in 1976. There were imperatives higher than self-interest.<\/p>\n

Cant and Lee call Jimmy Thomas, who was\u00a0MP\u00a0for Derby as well as leader of the\u00a0NUR, \u2018scab-in-chief\u2019. Thomas had long attracted suspicion from the Labour left. He was not a socialist but a labourist, with hints of populist, progressive and working-class Tory. Born illegitimate, he began working full-time at twelve and rose through the ranks of the railwaymen\u2019s trade unions, helping broker the amalgamations that produced the huge\u00a0NUR. He enjoyed the pleasures of the common man and the aristocrat \u2013 drink, gambling, sport, the high life. An inveterate social climber, he was friends with many on the other side of the strike. One story goes that when, hungover, he told Lord Birkenhead, \u2018Ooh Fred, I\u2019ve got an \u2019ell of an \u2019eadache,\u2019 his friend replied: \u2018Try a couple of aspirates.\u2019 In 1931, Thomas confirmed the left\u2019s worst suspicions by following the erstwhile Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, into a National Government with the Tories which imposed austerity on a country racked by depression.<\/p>\n

Before the strike Thomas had \u2018striven\u2019, \u2018pleaded\u2019 and \u2018begged for peace\u2019, and once it began, he worked frantically to end it. As Mustill says, Thomas \u2018spent most of his social time in the company of the ruling class and saw first-hand their determination to beat the unions\u2019. Mustill disapproves, but it did mean that Thomas knew what would happen if the strike got out of control. As he said on the eve of the dispute, in any such conflict the \u2018state must win\u2019. In the years of labour unrest preceding the Great War, troops had shot strikers on multiple occasions. Why should Thomas risk his men being killed when, as he saw it, they could improve their condition \u2018by a cross\u00a0…\u00a0at the ballot box\u2019? Schneer casts a freshly \u2018ambiguous light\u2019 on Thomas, who is known to have enjoyed betting on the stock market in the 1920s. Schneer has uncovered evidence that in 1926 he was short-selling stocks in the expectation that a general strike would cause a crash. This was insider trading; but it also means that Thomas\u2019s desperate attempts to avert the strike were intended to prevent the very event from which he stood to make money. In fact, there was only a small downturn in the market when the strike began, and it almost immediately rallied. Thomas probably ended up losing big. There are imperatives higher than self-interest.<\/p>\n

Having emerged victorious, the employers went on a counter-offensive, attempting to replace unionised workers with non-union men, and to drive down wages and conditions. This immediately provoked a new wave of strikes (dockers on Teesside stayed out until 25 May), as well as street disturbances significant enough that some police forces took on more specials. Baldwin did a U-turn, announcing he would not countenance attempts to slash wages and conditions. Strong unions were relatively successful in defending their position, though even the railwaymen, who retained their existing wage settlements, still lost guaranteed working hours and many members didn\u2019t get their jobs back (according to Thomas, 45,000 were still out of work in the autumn). In less well-organised workplaces there was widespread victimisation.<\/p>\n

But the employers were only partially successful. Trade union membership declined but didn\u2019t collapse. Overall, there wasn\u2019t a major fall in workers\u2019 real wages in the late 1920s. (One side-effect of the strike was to hobble the old export industries\u2019 competitiveness, helping to bring about the pound\u2019s final departure from the gold standard five years later.) The Tories passed punitive legislation in 1927, banning sympathy strikes and strikes aiming to \u2018coerce\u2019 the government, but it didn\u2019t go as far as many employers wanted and end unions\u2019 immunity from damages incurred by employers during strikes, which would have fatally undermined trade unionism. The Labour Party didn\u2019t sustain much damage: it won a by-election in Hammersmith North in late May 1926 with an increased vote share. Baldwin\u2019s unconditional victory was only over trade union action that could be construed as having \u2018political\u2019 goals, not over the Labour Party or the unions\u2019 bread-and-butter work of improving wages and conditions. After the strike, the unions remained mainly unideological and defensive, but also disciplined and relatively strong. The labour movement marched on.<\/p>\n

The exception\u200b was the miners, for whom the situation was grim. They were locked out for six months \u2013 a period of immense hardship. Mustill writes that \u2018a spirit of solidarity spread across the coalfields\u2019, with the labour movement, churches and chapels mobilising in support. It wasn\u2019t enough. Miners\u2019 wives had to claim poor relief (locked-out miners weren\u2019t eligible); by the summer, more than 80 per cent of families in some mining areas were on relief. The establishment charity Save the Children stepped in. Some miners set up efforts to produce coal from seams close to the surface for their own use and for sale; some were co-operative but others petty capitalist. A breakaway union sprang up in the relatively prosperous Nottinghamshire coalfield, and by the end of summer, Cook felt the same way Citrine had during the general strike. Orderly retreat was better than a rout: \u2018We must have our Mons.\u2019 Wages were set on a district by district basis, and were lower almost everywhere; miners accepted an eight-hour day.<\/p>\n

From the mid-1930s, rearmament and then war sent the demand for men, munitions and coal soaring once more, and transformed Labour\u2019s fortunes. After 1945, Labour\u2019s first majority government nationalised the coal industry, as the\u00a0MFGB\u00a0had first demanded in 1912, and the process of reorganisation, mechanisation and rationalisation finally began, just as Samuel had recommended in 1926.<\/p>\n

At the last big anniversary of the strike, in 1976, trade union membership was at an all-time high, and direct action on the up. Two long national miners\u2019 strikes had recently led to states of emergency, but the miners had won. In 1974, in response to the second strike, the Tory prime minister, Edward Heath, had called an election, confident that posing the question \u2018Who governs Britain?\u2019 would bring him victory, but he was beaten by Labour. Today, in the aftermath of Thatcherism, deindustrialisation and globalisation, trade unionism is strong only in the public sector, and even there it isn\u2019t very strong. Cant and Lee pair portraits of the progress of the general strike in the South Wales Valleys, Swindon and London\u2019s docklands with accounts of communities and organising attempts in these places today. Their politics are vanguardist and revolutionary, but rather than being rigidly theoretical, their portraits of places and people are subtle and perceptive.<\/p>\n

In Bedlinog, once the \u2018Little Moscow\u2019 of South Wales, self-employment via tech platforms is on the up, and some people are making good money. The old habit of miners who, with money left after payday and a weekend of drinking behind them, might decide to take \u2018Saint Monday\u2019 off, is back in a new guise, with contractors cancelling work booked on apps when they want a long weekend. But there is no new big employer in the village, mass trade unionism is long gone, social infrastructure is threadbare and one person in the pub tells Cant and Lee that \u2018I\u2019ve never met a communist before.\u2019 The \u2018decline of organised class politics in the village\u2019, they argue, has led not to \u2018increased legitimacy for the capitalist status quo\u2019 but a \u2018transformation in how that illegitimacy is understood\u2019. The \u2018loss of faith in collective action, the disenchantment with the dominant parties, the feeling of social decay\u2019 all push voters towards Reform\u2019s resentful, suspicious anti-politics.<\/p>\n

In London, Cant and Lee wait outside McDonald\u2019s branches, dark kitchens and onboarding centres to organise Deliveroo riders and Uber drivers. App workers are the dockers of the 21st\u00a0century, waiting around to see if there\u2019s work, taken on per job, per minute. A series of strikes disrupted Deliveroo in 2024 but faded quickly. Police guarded dark kitchens, and differences in migration status divided the riders. Dispersed, precarious workers are hard to organise into \u2018durable structures\u2019. An Uber driver tells Cant and Lee he \u2018feels he is living like a slave, instructed and controlled by the platforms and the customers who use them\u2019. He counteracts this feeling by organising for the Independent Workers\u2019 Union of Great Britain, trying to have at least one conversation on activism every day with a fellow worker. Organising generates agency even if progress is slow. The dockers first mobilised in the wave of \u2018new unionism\u2019 in the 1880s and didn\u2019t win a guaranteed minimum wage until the election of the Attlee government in 1945.<\/p>\n

In 1926, Swindon was home to a massive Great Western Railway works. It closed in 1986, around the time that Honda arrived in town. Four decades later, the car factories have shut and logistics is taking over. A huge automated Amazon fulfilment centre,\u00a0BRS2, opened in 2021, and when Cant and Lee visit, a\u00a0UScompany is building warehouses\u00a0SS45\u00a0and S915 (combined footprint: 1,461,982 square feet) on the Honda site. They talk to Erblin, a construction worker at the site, a former Amazon delivery driver who came to Britain as a young man. He has two daughters, but doesn\u2019t see them much during the week because he commutes two hours each way to work; he hopes to gain skills and move into better-paid roles in the construction industry. But as he says, \u2018You\u2019ve got to have money to make money.\u2019 The fifty richest families in Britain today have more wealth than the poorest 34 million people combined. The other day Erblin watched his boss arrive by helicopter.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The review article by Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite replicated below appears in the current issue of New Left Review.\u00a0 I think that it\u2019s one of the best pieces I have read this year on the General Strike, the centenary of which was commemorated in May.\u00a0 The reviewer rightly identifies the railway workers’ union leader Jimmy Thomas as … <\/p>\n

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