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was condemned to fail from the outset. After five years of struggle the miners

could not accept any wage cuts while the mine owners did not see any

possi-bility of running the mines profitable without any. Furthermore, the

owners’ case was supported by the government, which did not want to interfere in

industrial relations. Moreover, becouse the government saw the strike as a

revo-lutionary challenge to the constitution and the economic system it demanded

unconditional surrender from the be-ginning. But in fact, as Magaret Morris

emphasised, the General Strike was neither a revolutionary act nor an industrial

dispute. "Only if the Government had intervened by additional subsidies or

by coercing the coal owners could the difficulties of the coal industry have

been solved in some other way than at the expense of the miners. The General

Strike, therefore was a political strike and needed to be pursued as such if it

was to make any progress" . Therefore the General Council of the TUC, which

always emphasised the industrial character of the dispute, by the very nature of

the General Strike was not fighting the owners but the government, which was

forced into taking part in negotiations and put this pressure on the owners. As

the government refused to intervene and the TUC could not openly challenge the

government there was no chance for a successful end and the TUC had to call off

the strike.

A general confusion on the side of the trade unions and a principal lack of

communication between the different parties surrounded the circumstances of this

surrender. Sir Herbert Samuel lead the final negotiations based on his

memorandum, but he did not have any authority from the government. The

Negotiating Committee of the TUC was well aware of this fact but nonetheless it

expected Samuel to provide an accurate reflection of what the gov-ernment was

prepared to do. However, the trade union side thought that the strike was in

decline and was losing more and more of its faith in its success, and therefore

accepted the Samuel Memorandum without the miners ac-cepting, which, of course,

would have been crucial for the signing of a final agreement. Therefore neither

the government nor the miners, and of course, neither the employers were

involved in the negotiations which the Nego-tiating Committee thought to have

turned in its favour. Only after they had called off the General Strike did they

realised that they had nothing in their hands.

While the miners were left to fight alone until their humiliating defeat in

November 1926, the other workers re-turned to work where they faced their

strengthened employers. In some trades, such as railways and printing, work-ers

suffered widespread victimisation . The real extent of victimisation, however,

is very difficult to estimate be-cause besides the dismissal of militants and

the replacement of workers by volunteers, there was also an increase in

redundancy due to the reduced circumstances of many trades. Nevertheless most

employers tried to reinstate their men under new conditions which meant new

bargaining arrangements and some times substantial wage cuts. In the long term,

however, employers did not exploit their victory and showed an increasingly

moderate behaviour and the willingness to collaborate. The symbol of this new

climate became the Mond-Turner talks where the General Council together with

prominent industrials discussed the future of industrial relations. This

development was not only the result of the General Strike but, as Phillips

emphasised, also due to the "sectional conflicts which took place in the

early 1920s, which had been in many cases more costly to the firms involved, and

which certainly seemed a likelier mode of resistance to further attack on wages

now".

After the end of the strike the Conservative government emphasised its

industrial neutrality again and continued to refuse any responsibility for

managing the economy. Nevertheless, after the General Strike it responded with a

new Trade Dispute Act which made general strikes illegal, tried to severe the

financial link between trade unions and the Labour Party and made picketing much

more difficult. The government’s intentions was to drive the trade unions back

into their ‘labourist’ line, but because the trade unions lost the General

Strike, among other reasons, exactly because they were too much committed to

this ‘labourist’ line, this policy was highly superfluous and in fact the new

legislation had virtually no effect. The government, therefore, was never able

to capitalise on its victory, but as the history of the strike showed that was

never its intention.

Among historians the most controversial issue concerning the General Strike

is its impact on the development of the Labour movement. For Marxist historians,

such as Martin Jacques and Keith Burgess, the General Strike marked a central

watershed in this development. They emphasised a shift to the right of the whole

Labour movement and a further strengthening of traditional ‘labourist’ forces ,

whereas the left and especially the Communist Party was isolated and lost its

influence. Jacques described this new direction as a general rejection of

militancy and the use of industrial action for political ends, the strict

separation of the political and the

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