Now it is May among the mountains,
Days for speeches in the valley towns,
Days of dream and days of struggle,
Days of bitter denunciation ...
Now it is May in the minds of men
Days for vision and for marching,
Days for banners and for music,
And beauty born of sacrifice.
—From The Angry Summer: A Poem of 1926 by Idris Davies (1943)
The 1926 British general strike is best known as one of history’s most excruciating betrayals. This class-wide mobilisation—which involved 3 million workers under a hostile Conservative government—was strangled by its own leadership after just nine days. Without securing even a gesture of compromise on the part of employers, trade union leaders imposed a crushing defeat on their own members. For those seeking to understand the frequently treacherous actions of modern union officials, the story remains an important one to study and remember.
In the five years before 1926 there had been an explosive rise and gradual decline of strikes across Europe. Britain was no exception: a powerful shop stewards movement had gripped the centres of British industry in engineering, transport, mining and textiles in the years after the war. Union membership had surged beyond 8 million in 1920, but militancy receded as the Trades Union Congress (TUC) manoeuvred to take greater control of disputes and wrest control from rank-and-file committees after 1921. By the mid-1920s, workplace organisation was almost completely eroded and unions were in retreat as employers moved to claw back gains. Union membership sank to 5.5 million in 1924.
The British bourgeoisie understood that, despite winning the war, they were losing ground to the United States and a rapidly modernising Germany. Restructuring of the British economy was needed to maintain global power, and, to achieve this, a decisive defeat needed to be inflicted on the waning union movement.
Because coal made up 95 percent of all energy use and was crucial to British industrial recovery, the ruling class began their assault by targeting the relatively powerful Miners’ Federation.
Following the November 1924 election of Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government, the state and coal mine owners—under renewed pressure from German competition—moved aggressively to drive down labour costs. This culminated on 30 June 1925, when mine owners announced the termination of their agreement with the Miners’ Federation, reducing miners’ wages by 10 to 15 percent, and the scrapping of the minimum wage, clearing the path for sweeping wage cuts and longer working hours across the board.
In response, engineers and rail workers took solidarity action with the miners, including imposing bans on handling coal. Baldwin’s government bailed out the mining bosses to avoid a premature confrontation, granting a nine-month subsidy to the coal industry to underwrite wages.
Unions celebrated, but the ruling class was biding its time. A government commission was asked to deliver a plan for raising the profitability of British coal once the subsidy ended—wage cuts and longer hours would be imposed under official government sanction. Meanwhile, Baldwin focused on stockpiling coal, arresting Communist leaders and organising strike-breakers ahead of the coming battle.
Conditions in Britain’s mines were already horrific. In a 1970s interview with historian Margaret Morris, one participant in the general strike described the beginnings of his working life as a 14-year-old boy in the coal pits of Fife.
“As a matter of fact”, Abe Moffat told Morris, “I’m one of fourteen: seven brothers and seven sisters, all of us went in the mine. And my father. And my mother worked on the pithead, and my grandmother worked on the pithead”.
Moffat recalled so many children working the mines that parents would sign them up to the union as a matter of course: “At that time it was the custom for your parents to join the union the first day you went down the pit”.
This was tough, dangerous work. “I wasn’t long in the pit when I got an accident”, Moffat recalled, “It was almost six weeks working in the pit, and a big stone came down from the roof, and fortunately for me it didn’t strike my body, it only struck my foot. At that time there’s no first aid at the pit, and my older brother had to carry me home on his back ... you can imagine the face of my mother, when she seen her young son, going on six weeks working in the mine, being carried home on her other son’s back.”
Working-class people had little choice, though—living costs in 1925 Britain were 80 percent higher than before the war.
Yet the centrality of coal to British capitalism necessitated that even more vicious and exploitative standards be set in the mines, and that a symbolic humiliation be forced upon the Miners’ Federation. “Whatever it may cost in blood and treasure”, declared coal baron and Nazi sympathiser Lord Londonderry in 1925, “the unions will be smashed from top to bottom”.
As soon as Baldwin had granted the subsidy to mine owners, he began perfecting his strikebreaking machinery. Ten “district headquarters” were established across the UK, staffed by appointed commissioners who recruited scab labour, organised road transport and coordinated food supply channels to circumvent the impact of any future strike action when the subsidy ended. Historian W.H. Crook wrote that “the government had prepared its weapons against possible industrial warfare; the railroads and the large industrial firms had laid in vast stocks of coal; and the output at the mines had been immense”.
In most major cities, members of the aristocracy and middle classes established branches of the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS). The stated purpose of the OMS, as reported by Communist journalist Robert Page Arnot, was to organise “loyal citizens” to “assist in maintaining essential public services ... food, water, light, power and transport”. That is, once the government and bosses had provoked unions into a strike, the legions of respectable society would step in to ensure minimal impact on the circulation of profits.
According to the digital centenary project General Strike 100, the types of organisations involved in organising scabs were universities, the Citizens’ Committees for Essential Public Services (linked to local Conservative party branches) and the proto-fascist Middle Class Union. By the time the strike began in May 1926, 100,000 volunteers had registered with the OMS.
While the ruling class prepared for open confrontation, the peak body of the trade unions was focused entirely on lobbying the government for an extension of the wages subsidy. In his biography of union secretary Ernest Bevin, Allan Bullock notes that in the seven months leading up to the general strike, “the full General Council [of the TUC] did not once discuss what was to happen when the government subsidy came to an end on 30 April nor concern itself with preparations for the support of the miners”.
This seemingly confounding posture was consistent with the union bureaucracy’s entrenched practice. The official institutions of the British labour movement had much earlier turned to a permanent policy of class collaboration. Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, the TUC had issued a joint statement with the Labour Party calling for an immediate end to all strikes and “amicable settlements” to disputes for the sake of the “national interest”. More no-strike pledges were signed in 1919, as union leaders attempted to quell postwar eruptions of rank-and-file militancy. By 1924, the officials had gained experience in helping a Labour government break strikes on the docks, and basic arbitration mechanisms entrenching union leaders’ legal accountability for industrial action were firmly in place.
For many union leaders, strikes were a last resort—the bureaucrats would prefer to kneel and beg on the moral high ground of industrial peace, rather than to risk being framed as the “offending” party responsible for class war. Some more “left-wing” leaders in the TUC were prepared to call for strike action, but they were not prepared actually to carry it through. Indeed, they hoped the mere threat of a strike would compel the government to simply extend the subsidy to the mining industry.
But the government was not only interested in keeping the mines afloat—it was determined to provoke a generalised dispute to discipline the unions. Once this became clear to the officials, they had little choice but to follow through on their threat. Although they first attempted various gestures of submission, including a promise to force the miners to accept a wage cut, the TUC eventually was forced to call a general strike.
The truly remarkable aspect of this story is that, despite all the union leaders’ best efforts to avoid the strike, workers still mobilised in their millions once the call went out. By all accounts, the numbers stopping work increased day by day, and workers came out from industries beyond those initially authorised by the TUC. According to the General Council’s plans, engineers and shipbuilders were not supposed to join the strike until the TUC deemed it necessary to raise the pressure on the government. But as the York and District Trades and Labour Council reported to the TUC in the first days of May: “Our greatest difficulty is to keep the men at work who should remain there, they all feel that they should be out helping the struggle”.
For their part, the union leaders maintained their commitment to passivity. The editorial of the TUC’s publication, the British Worker, asserted: “Our task is to keep the strikers steady and quiet. We must not be provocative ... The Council asks pickets especially to avoid obstruction and to confine themselves strictly to their legitimate duties”. The editorial failed to define what other sorts of duties should fall to picketers during a strike, other than obstruction!
Even once action had been initiated, union officials viewed the strike as a demonstration of pressure to force the government back to the negotiating table as soon as possible. Because they viewed it as a temporary protest, they saw no need to build the machinery for a serious and potentially protracted class confrontation. In fact, the bureaucracy was unnerved by the initiative and enthusiasm of rank-and-file unionists, who were setting up self-defence organisations in some places and hundreds of local strike committees in others.
In Fife, the area of east Scotland where Abe Moffat worked, only a single train was in operation for the duration of the strike and a defence committee formed following an attack by police was 700 strong. Marxist historian Neil Davidson quotes one leader of an amalgamated union as lamenting, “[E]very day that the strike proceeded the control and the authority of that dispute [were] passing out of the hands of responsible executives into the hands of men who had no authority, no control, and wrecking the movement from one end to the other”.
When a high-court judge declared the strike illegal on 11 May, it was the out the TUC was looking for. Nine days of passive and begrudging official action was the limit of the resistance they were willing to put up to a full-frontal assault from the ruling class. The strike was called off the following day. When the TUC General Council marched into Downing Street to notify the government, they did so not because the coverage or effectiveness of the strike was waning, but to demonstrate to the state and employers that they were trustworthy negotiators and guardians of the national interest.
Left to fight entirely alone, the heroic miners resisted for another seven gruelling months before being starved back into the pits under the very terms of humiliation the coal bosses had set out to impose: slashed wages and longer hours. Following this decisive victory, the ruling class moved swiftly to codify their triumph, passing the draconian Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act of 1927, which criminalised solidarity strikes and effectively crippled British union power for a generation.
Because the bureaucracy views industrial action as a lever to better negotiate the terms of exploitation, rather than a weapon to end it, union leaders usually prefer to sacrifice the interests of workers than to lose their seat at the negotiating table. As the 1926 strike shows, this is not a reflection of workers’ capacity or willingness to fight, but of the union leaders’ loyalty when the pressure is on. One hundred years ago, the green shoots of proletarian self-liberation emerged even on the most hostile terrain. They can again. As Davies ended his epic poem:
But the battle’s end is not defeat
To that dream that guided the broken feet
And roused to beauty and to pride
Toiler and toiler, side by side,
Whose faith and courage shall be told
In blaze of scarlet and of gold.
