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General Strike Of 1926 Essay, Research Paper

The General Strike of 1926

Essay written by Michael Funk

Why did the General Strike of 1926 fail and what were the effects the strike

had upon industrial relations in Britain?

The General Strike of 1926 lasted only nine days and directly involved around

1.8 million workers. It was the short but ultimate outbreak of a much longer

conflict in the mining industry, which lasted from the privatisation of the

mines after the First World War until their renewed nationalisation after the

Second. The roots of the General Strike in Britain, unlike in France or other

continental countries, did not lie in ideological conceptions such as

syndicalism but in the slowly changing character of trade union organisation and

tactics. On the one hand, unskilled and other unapprenticed workers had been

organised into national unions since the 1880s to combat sectionalism and to

strengthen their bargaining power and the effectiveness of the strike weapon. On

the other hand, at the same time and for the same reason trade unions had

developed the tactic of industry-wide and ’sympathetic’ strikes. Later during

the pre-war labour unrest these two forms of strike action, ‘national’ and

’sympathetic’, were more often used together which in an extreme case could have

meant a general strike. The symbol of this new strategy was the triple alliance,

formed in 1914, which was a loose, informal agreement between railwaymen,

transport workers and miners to support each other in case of industrial

disputes and strikes. As G.A. Phillips summarised:

The General Strike was in origin, therefore, the tactical product of a

pattern of in-dustrial conflict and union organisation which had developed over

the past twenty-five years or so in industries where unionism had been

introduced only with difficulty, among rapidly expanding labour forces

traditionally resistant to organisation, or against strong opposition from

employers.

Therefore, a large majority of the British Labour movement saw a general

strike along the traditional ‘labourist’ view, which emphasised the separation

of the political and the industrial sphere, as a purely industrial act. This

notion was supported the developments in the 1920s when the depression and the

employers offensive weakened the militant and revolutionary forces , whereas the

success of the Labour Party and the reorganisation of the TUC General Council

further strengthened these ‘labourist’ forces.

The government’s and the employer’s view, of course, was a different one.

Since the French syndicalists in 1906 had drawn up the Charter of Amiens,

reaffirming their belief in direct political action and the general strike as a

means of overthrowing the Parliamentary system, governments and industrialists

all over Europe saw a general strike as a revolutionary challenge for the

constitution and the economic system. Although the British Labour movement had

never been really committed to this idea, during the post-war boom when it was

on the offensive, there were two examples of semi-syndicalist conceptions

concerning the use of industrial action against the war and British intervention

against the Soviet Republic. Government and employers were warned and did not

hesitate to condemn every notion of nation wide industrial action as

unconstitutional and revolutionary.

The mining dispute which caused the General Strike emerged after the First

World War when the triple alliance broke and the miners were left to fight alone

against the government’s plans to privatise the mines. As a result the mines

suddenly returned to their private owners and the miners faced demands for very

substantial wage cuts of up to 50 per cent . The dispute escalated because the

crisis was seen by all the key players -the government, the em-ployers and the

Trade Union Council (TUC)- as an example for future industrial relations in

Britain. The trade un-ion movement saw its opportunity to challenge the notion

that wage reduction could solve Britain’s economic diffi-culties and decided

therefore that a future united action in support of the miners would take the

form of a general strike. But as Margaret Morris emphasised. "It was the

absence of any possibility of finding an agreed solution to the difficulties in

the mining industry which made a confrontation on the lines of the General

Strike almost inevita-ble, not any generalised will to class conflict".

The Conservative government, however, saw its role as a neutral, standing

between the contending parties and rep-resenting the British people as a whole.

Its industrial policy included the application of the principle of

co-partnership in industry, in the hope that workers and management would begin

to see their interest as identical, a policy which was ultimately challenged by

a general strike. The Government was completely aware that a trade union victory

would have important political implications such as government intervention in

the coal industry as well as encouraging further industrial action of a similar

dimension. Moreover, in 1926 the government was very well prepared for a major

industrial dispute, whereas unemployment and uncertain economically

circumstances forced the trade union movement in the defensive.

Due to this, the scene was set for a nation-wide

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