13.06.1996

Fight like hell

From the Workers’ Weekly, paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, June 11 1926

Considering everything, [miners’ leader] AJ Cook’s account of the Nine Days is a marvel of moderation ... He tells a plain story - and nothing that rhetoric can do would add to or subtract from the damning effect of the facts upon those responsible for the great surrender.

Boldly stated, the facts are:

That from the moment when it became clear that the government were resolved to test whether they were bluffing or not, a section of the [TUC] General Council began, in an ever intensifying mood of panic, looking for a way of escape from the pledges they had given to the miners and the movement at large.

They all but succeeded in calling off the strike before it had begun on terms that would have involved the miners in an agreed surrender; they did in the end call off the strike upon terms which accepted reductions for the miners, and left them to struggle alone under the weight of this implied condemnation ...

It has been pleaded in their defence that they were none of them revolutionaries and therefore could not be expected to carry through a revolution. This is sheer stupidity. They were neither asked nor expected to conduct a revolution. The only talk of ‘revolution’ came from the government and was the shallowest and most obvious of bluff. They were asked to conduct a trade union struggle and they failed in their most elementary duty - that of securing their own members against victimisation before throwing up the struggle.