CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

“Their Greatest Effort Ever”:  The British General Strike, One Hundred Years On

Tyldesley miners outside the Miners Hall during the 1926 General Strike – Public Domain

The General Strike was “the greatest effort the British workers had ever made,” wrote the historian and economist G.D.H.Cole. One hundred years ago, on May 4, 1926, a million British workers walked off their jobs.

These workers struck in sympathy with miners – the more than a million miners who had been locked out by their employers. The miners had refused to accept cuts in pay; in some places, the employers demanded as much as 25%. And they had refused to work longer hours. “Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day,” was their response.

The strike was called by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the British federation of trade unions and a specially convened conference of union executives. The General Council’s mission was to set up a negotiating committee and defend the pay of the miners. Ernest Bevin, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, speaking for the Council, implored “every man and woman…to fight for the soul of labour and the salvation on the miners.” He added that “no person in the first grade must go to work at starting time on Tuesday morning; that is to say, if a settlement has not been found.”

The government, led by conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, set the conflict in motion by ending temporary subsidies to the mining employers. The government’s subsidies had been meant to stave off an inevitable crisis in a sick industry and a reorganization of the industry. In this event, the government saw the miners as an obstacle to reorganization. But they offered them nothing in return for what would amount to a significant sacrifice; the government was quite prepared for this. The Minister of Health, Neville Chamberlain, speaking for the government, expressed its indifference to the miners and vowed that they would receive “not one scrap of assistance” and reduced outdoor relief to below unemployment benefits, in an opening salvo.

A.J. Cook, the secretary of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB), not to be intimidated, championed the strikers, speaking widely in defense of the “brave” miners and their supporters. “What a wonderful response! What loyalty! What solidarity! From John O’Groats to Land’s End, the workers answered the call to arms to defend us, to defend the brave miner in his fight for a living wage.”

Ellen Wilkinson, the “red suffragette,” campaigning for the miners, wrote “that the imagination can conjure up no such scene of desolation, human suffering and hopelessness to surpass what actually met my eyes in the mining districts. Hungry women and children, stoical patient men weary with inactivity… of children who were too hungry to walk to school, of others whose boots were in pawn and had to go barefoot to the soup kitchens, of babies whose features bore the mark of coming death from malnutrition, and of emaciated women who went without food so their children could eat.”

This was the experience of more than one generation of miners. Extreme poverty continued and workers knew this. So was the memory of Black Friday, the dark day in April 1921 when the leaders of the transport and railroad workers announced their decision not to call for strike action in support of the miners, a “breach of solidarity and a betrayal.”   How could they not strike this time? At a time when the trade unions were confident in their strength of organization and numerical growth in the years since the war’s end, but remained embittered by broken promises, “homes for heroes.”

Stanley Baldwin was a moderate, certainly in comparison to the “hawks”........

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