More workers were on strike on the day the strike was called off than at the start. It is an unrivalled story of rank and file solidarity and of betrayal by trade union leaders, at a time of political and economic upheaval.

The general strike was not without precedent – in the autumn of 1842, led by Staffordshire coal miners, half a million workers across the country struck for two months in protest at the rejection of the Chartist demand for universal male suffrage and against wage and job cuts.

Backbone of the nation

Once again, in 1926, the miners were absolutely central. Today there are fewer than 300 coal miners in the UK, but in the 1920s there were over 1 million. In numbers, in importance to the economy, in social and political weight, they were truly ‘the backbone of the nation’. Over 100,000 worked in each of the Durham, South Yorkshire and South Wales coalfields. Safety was also a major issue. A thousand a year were killed in the pits.

 In 1924, the minority Labour government persuaded the mine owners to give a 13% pay rise. But the following year a Conservative government introduced the Gold Standard of foreign exchange, coal exports predictably fell, and the owners demanded 13% pay cuts, an end to national negotiating, and a longer working day.

In response, the Trades Union Congress, heavily influenced by the growing Minority Movement, pledged support to the miners and empowered the General Council to call a general strike. The government introduced a coal subsidy, but established an Organisation for Maintenance of Supplies (OMS) to break any strike.

On 30 April, when the coal subsidy ended, the mine owners locked out the miners. Next day a conference of trade union executives approved a general strike, to begin at midnight on 3 May. The Miners Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) gave the TUC full powers to run the dispute.

Power and solidarity

So, overnight, 1.5 million workers – transport, iron and steel, building, electrical and gas workers, printers went on strike, called out by the TUC, to be joined a week later by shipyard workers and engineers.

The real power of the strike was local organisation. In towns and cities across the country, councils of action or strike committees were set up, often by the local Trades Union Council, to control movement of goods, organise mass pickets, speakers and meetings and produce and distribute strike bulletins. Government’s efforts to break the strike through the OMS, recruiting undergraduate scabs to drive buses and trains, work in the docks or enlist as special constables, and bringing in soldiers and tanks, failed.

The MFGB was clear on its demands: ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’. The TUC was not. The archbishop of Canterbury’s call for a return to work, no pay cuts, and restoration of the coal subsidy, was censured by the government

TUC leaders such as JH Thomas of the National Union of Railwaymen desperately fought to prevent and then end the strike, as did the Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald. They agreed with the government that the strike was a ‘challenge to the constitution’. Which, as it developed, it definitely could have become.

TUC ‘negotiators’ accepted the terms of a memorandum drawn up by (Lord) Herbert Samuel that accepted wage cuts. (Samuel, the recently returned British High Commissioner for Palestine, had chaired a 1925 Royal Commission into the mining industry that recommended wage cuts.) When the TUC called the strike off after 10 days on the basis of a memorandum that was never accepted by the government, the reaction of many workers was disbelief, then anger.

During the strike, independent working-class organisation developed to an unprecedented degree. The government failed to break the strike. It was the TUC leaders who called it off. The betrayed miners, under their general secretary Arthur Cook, fought on for seven months, during which the Nottinghamshire area – even then one of the more profitable fields – broke away from the MFGB and settled. The rest of the union was forced back to work with pay cuts, longer hours, and an end to national negotiations.

The following year a law, the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act 1927 was passed by the Westminster parliament banning general and sympathy strikes and mass picketing. Civil service trade unions were forbidden to affiliate to the TUC or take strike action. It mandated trade union members to contract-in to any political levy which their union made on their behalf resulting in an 18% fall in the income of the Labour Party, which was heavily reliant upon union funding.These laws were introduced with the intention of preventing action like the General Strike in the future, even though the strike itself had been defeated.

Antiunion laws as well as leaders who work with the bosses have both been part of what militant trade unionists need to guard against in the long decades since 1926. One of the lessons of the strike is the need for the tank and file to take action independently of the bureaucracy when necessary. In 1926 the working class demonstrated its power in developing organs of dual power that challenged the established order. If the TUC leadership had been confronted and the strike had continued, the movement would also have had to confront the issue of the role of troops.