12.03.2026

Great Unrest to councils of action

Marking the centenary of the 1926 General Strike, Jack Conrad looks at the background of imperial decline, Ireland, women’s suffrage, trade union militancy and working class defence of Soviet Russia

Without doubt, the general strike of May 3-12 1926 is one of the most important events in the history of the working class movement in Britain. Other strikes have lasted longer. Some much longer - most memorably the year-long 1984-85 miners’ Great Strike. However, the general strike pitted class against class. It too had the miners at the centre of battle - there were around a million of them in those days. But the front was much wider, involving, as it did, the TUC and all the big trade union battalions. Ultimately state power was at stake.

Hence any party, any movement which is serious about socialism must painstakingly study the general strike and draw appropriate lessons for future struggles. Peddling nostalgia and unthinking hand-me-downs have no place in Marxism.

The immediate origins of the 1926 general strike lie squarely in the late 19th century and the relative decline of Britain as the global hegemon. Eric Hobsbawm estimates that in 1850 Britain produced as much as “two thirds of the world’s coal”, about “half its iron” and half its commercially produced cotton.¹ Needless to say, Britain had rivals. That became all too evident with the 1873-96 Long Depression.

Britain’s industrial supremacy finally met its day. Already by the end of the 1880s competition from Belgium, France, but above all Germany and the US, affected even branches of production where Britain previously enjoyed a virtual monopoly. Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan, Krupp, Thyssen and Stinnes accumulated capital, which in absolute terms left their British counterparts far behind. So it is of more than symbolic importance that in the early 1890s both Germany and the US surpassed Britain in the production of steel - that era’s gauge of industrial prowess.²

Such external challenges brought about a sharp intensification of the class struggle at home. In the name of restoring competitivity, rates of exploitation had to be upped. One attack followed another. Lock-outs, recruiting scab labour, police violence and court action broke the new unionism of unskilled workers. Trade union membership tumbled. But it was not all one way. Under these testing conditions the working class giant finally awoke from its long post-Chartist slumber.

In 1900, the trade unions gave birth to the Labour Party. Britain’s two-party, Con-Lib system slowly morphed into a two-party, Con-Lab system, by way of a three-party, Con-Lib-Lab system.³ Beginning with just two MPs, Labour made its big breakthrough in 1906. Some 300,000 voted Labour and 29 MPs were returned. In January 1910 that increased to 40 MPs. True, politically, most were liberal-labour politicians, not socialists.

Nonetheless, socialist ideas underwent a revival. The Social Democratic Federation was founded in 1881 (taking on its new name in 1884). Less than a decade later the reformist Independent Labour Party came into existence under the leadership of Keir Hardie. Though beginning very much as a sect, the SDF won an important, if thin, layer to its Marxism. The ILP won a somewhat wider layer to its Christian-tinged socialism. Yet, while organised adherents were always few in number, socialist ideas spread far and wide. Into the intelligentsia, into the trade unions, into the masses.

Alarm bells sounded in ruling class circles. Traditional methods of intimidation - scab labour, army bayonet and police baton - proved inadequate. From amongst the more astute minds there had already begun the search for a strategy that would obtain consent for capitalism and provide a positive alternative to socialism.

Paying a ransom

Joseph Chamberlain argued that property should pay a “ransom” for the “security which it enjoys”.⁴ Along the same lines, Arthur Balfour stated: “Social legislation is not merely to be distinguished from socialist legislation, but is its most direct opposite and its most effective antidote.”⁵ In his pamphlet, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, Lenin quoted another of these patricians, Cecil Rhodes. He had related to his close friend, the journalist, WT Stead, how in 1895 socialist agitation and fear of revolution gave an added impetus to his imperialist convictions:

I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism ... My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem: ie, in order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The empire, as I have always said, is a bread-and-butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.⁶

Between 1870 and 1900 Britain added 4,754,000 square miles of territory and 88 million people to its already extensive empire. There was, moreover, a corresponding shift from free trade to empire protectionism and finance capital (banking, insurance and overseas investments). However, not only did the empire provide a captive market for Britain’s industries, lucrative positions for the haughty products of its public schools and an ideological focus for national cohesion. The ‘white Dominions’ became the chosen destination for the “strongest and most energetic” among its surplus population.⁷ Millions journeyed to Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand.⁸

It ought to be added that meanwhile the British state faced massive discontent in the Kingdom of Ireland: remember, since 1800 a ‘home’ country in the United Kingdom. The 1879-82 land war saw a revolutionary overturn of landlordism. This was followed by John Redmond and legislation conceding home rule. Opposition in Ulster triggered the Curragh mutiny and threatened civil war. Easter 1916 opened the door to the rise of Sinn Féin and Dáil Éireann. By the early 1920s the whole of Ireland had been lost to semi-independence apart from the six counties of Northern Ireland.

Then there was the women’s suffrage movement. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst successfully committed the Women’s Social and Political Union to a “Deeds, not words” strategy, which saw letter bombs, arson, vandalism and other forms of direct action, leading to frequent arrests, imprisonment and hunger strikes. The WSPU was the Palestine Action of its day (not that it was subject to a formal state ban). Note, women did not achieve equal voting rights with men till 1928.

Economistic accounts of the general strike are more than prone to disregard questions such as Ireland and women’s suffrage. Eg, Peter Taaffe’s book, 1926 general strike.⁹ Trade unions, bosses, wages and conditions constitute a tunnel vision, which excludes such vital political factors from consideration. Not our approach.

Nonetheless, there was certainly a huge upswing in economic struggles. Between 1910 and 1914 - the Great Unrest - there were roughly 3,000 strikes, over 1,200 of them in 1913 alone. Some 2.5 million took part. An all-time high was recorded in 1912, with 40 million working days lost to strike action. Trade union membership grew in leaps and bounds. Membership, which stood at 2,447,000 in 1909, almost doubled to 4,135,000 by the end of 1913. Though representing only 15% of the workforce and divided into some 1,100 separate unions, this still meant that Britain had one of the highest trade union concentrations in the world.¹⁰

It was the strike wave itself which made weakened unions strong. Rosa Luxemburg was undoubtedly right on this score -well, if objective conditions are favourable. Against conservative trade union officialdom, which argued, “We are not yet strong enough to risk such a hazardous trial of strength as a mass strike”, she insisted that the social explosion organises.¹¹

In April 1914, the Triple Alliance was formed uniting the Miners’ Federation, National Union of Railwaymen, and the Transport Workers’ Federation. The core idea being that, if one strikes, all strike. Events appeared to be heading towards a strategic confrontation - the sniffy Fabian technocrats, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, write of a “spasm of ‘insurrectionism’”.¹² Their fellow Fabian, HG Wells, likewise worried: “It may be that we are in the opening phase of a real and irreparable class war.”¹³ Tragically, as with Germany, the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 put a temporary stop to all that.¹⁴

There was a tidal wave of patriotic madness. The Labour Party and the TUC stopped protesting against the war threat and instead put themselves at the service of king and country. Class war at home gave way to imperialist war abroad.

Beacon of hope

October 1917 showed what could be done ... if there was a Communist Party. The Bolsheviks inspired advanced workers everywhere to follow suit. In Britain this beacon of hope combined with a steadily growing war weariness - together they put class war back on the agenda.

Strikes - especially amongst engineering workers - became frequent from 1915 onwards. In turn the army and navy became ever more restless in the last two years of the war. With the end of hostilities, reluctance to demobilise the forces meant a growing spiral of dislocation within the state machine. Mutinies and desertions, increasingly common in 1917, became organised and ever more dangerous to the capitalist class.

Soldiers unwilling to return to France staged mass demonstrations and in January 1919 troops effectively took over Calais in protest at the refusal to demob them. Only by dispatching two divisions from Germany was the mutiny broken. And, as is often the case, it was in the navy that discontent took the most politically defined forms. At Plymouth and Portsmouth the red flag was run up on several ships, and ships’ committees became widespread, with delegates going from ship to ship and from port to port.

Against this backdrop, the counterrevolutionary intervention against Soviet Russia could only mean further politicisation and provide a vital common cause. In March 1919 the miners’ Fed demanded the withdrawal of British troops from Russia. In April, supported by other unions, it proposed the same thing to a joint conference of the Labour Party and TUC. The general part of the resolution was endorsed. But the miners also proposed a series of defiant actions, which would force government compliance with this and other demands (the lifting of the blockade against Germany, the end of conscription and release of conscientious objectors). TUC chair H Stuart-Bunting would not accept this part of the resolution. It “implied taking industrial action” for political ends. And that, according to many trade union tops, would mean plunging Britain into “revolution and civil war”.¹⁵

With even the Black Watch and Coldstream Guards refusing to embark for Russia, a police strike and a flood of wage disputes, there was more than a whiff of revolution and civil war in the air. Therefore, when it came to stopping British intervention against Soviet Russia, revolutionaries could confidently demand that official resolutions had to be turned into deeds.

On January 18 1919 a national conference of 350 delegates met in London under the slogan, ‘Hands off Russia’. Called by the London Workers’ Committee, in association with the British Socialist Party, Socialist Labour Party and the International Workers of the World. It agreed a resolution, moved by Harry Pollitt, pledging “to carry on active agitation to solidify the labour movement for the purpose of declaring a ‘general strike’, unless the unconditional cessation of allied intervention had been officially announced and we are satisfied as to the truth of the announcement”.¹⁶

The resolution was not designed to be a paper one. Nor was it. Meetings and organisation followed and in May Harry Pollitt, Sylvia Pankhurst and a small band of Workers’ Socialist Federation members began a determined campaign of agitation among London dockers and shipyard workers, urging them “to refuse to touch any ship that is to carry munitions to Russia”.¹⁷

Reflecting the growing influence of those arguing for direct action, a broad Hands Off Russia campaign was set up in June 1919 at a conference in Manchester. Its president was AA Purcell, a member of the parliamentary committee of the TUC, and also included on its national leadership were CT Cramp, industrial secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, Tom Mann, general secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and George Peel, secretary of the National Shop Stewards’ Committee.

The same month saw Russia dominate debates at the Labour Party conference. James Sexton of the Dock Labourers was typical of the right wing and the time. He claimed to be a “revolutionist of a social character and believed in social revolution”. That said, he did not believe in “letting mad dogs loose”.¹⁸ Frankly, the best left forces wanted just that - if by “mad dogs” was meant the self-activity of the working class.

The BSP - from 1916 a Labour Party affiliate - advanced the call for a national conference, “having as its object the organisation of a general strike that shall put an end once and for all to the open and covert participation of the British government in attacks on Soviet Russia”.¹⁹ This was overwhelmingly defeated - no small thanks to a wily speech by Ernest Bevin, in which he warned against ill-prepared action that must result in failure. In spite of that, the left still won the day by a substantial 1,893,000 to 935,000 majority for its resolution committing Labour to consult the parliamentary committee of the TUC “with the view to effective action being taken”.²⁰

Unmoved and now on the territory of the Labour Party’s NEC, the right continued to obfuscate. As the constitution would in the future serve a Labour government, it must not be torn apart by mad dogs. The government should be persuaded by parliamentary words to leave Russia alone. Nothing more. Faced with deliberate inaction from the official centres of leadership, the Triple Alliance unions decided (by 217 delegates to 11) to recommend a ballot on industrial action among its members. That was on July 25 1919. Four days later, Winston Churchill, secretary of state for war, announced the withdrawal of British troops. Showing the undying commitment ministers of the crown have to the truth, Churchill swore blind that the decision had been made a year before! As to the other demands around conscription and conscientious objectors, what was the fuss all about? They had already been dealt with or were in the process of being so.

Sanky Commission

Such a retreat could only but be temporary. Battle was soon renewed. Emboldened by Labour Party and TUC shilly-shallying over Soviet Russia, the government rejected the Sanky Commission’s report on the mines. Set up under Sir John Sanky in 1919, it recommended among other things higher pay, shorter hours and public ownership of the coal mines. These recommendations were due in part to the miners’ nominees who sat on it, but also owed a lot to new-found sense of liberalistic justice brought about by the tilting balance of class forces.

Instead of acting themselves to secure these con­cessions, the miners’ leaders decided to pass the buck to the TUC, apparently hoping it would organise general strike action in their support. Their trust in the TUC was sadly misplaced. Not for the first time, nor the last. The result was a timid “educational campaign”: on this occasion the theme was “mines for the nation”.²¹ Furious, the miners’ Fed demanded that the parliamentary committee of the TUC organise a special congress to consider a resolution calling for “trade union action in the form of a general strike”.²²

On March 4 1920 they got the former, but by 3,732,000 votes to 1,050,000 not the latter. Like many other government-sponsored commissions of enquiry - primarily set up as a sop, designed to put off decisions and cool ardour - the Sanky Commission report sank without trace.

Single issue

Sanky and the setback suffered by the miners did not mean class peace. In April 1920 Polish forces, armed and diplomatically backed by British and French imperialism, launched a wide-ranging offensive against the Soviet republic. The Hands Off Russia campaign wrote to every working class organisation, emphasising that “more pious resolutions won’t force the hand of the government, but resolutions backed by industrial action will”.²³ The need was pressing. Rolling back the Red Army, Polish forces had cut deep into Ukraine. Things appeared exceedingly bleak.

On June 12, the very day that The Times gleefully reported the Polish capture of Kiev as a “great triumph”, it carried a congratulatory message from George V to the former left nationalist, Joseph Piłsudski, now the marshal in command of Poland’s armed forces. However, the workers in Britain delivered a blow surely worth more than 10 extra divisions for the Red Army. After being told that there was the prospect of strike pay, the East India dockers loading Polish-bound munitions onto the Jolly George walked off the job. The work of Pollitt, Pankhurst and their comrades had at last paid off.

Suddenly the whole working class was brimming with confident indignation and was readying for action. In Russia they had their battle standard. Effectively a single-issue campaign, true. But such narrowness is characteristic and even suits the needs of any mass movement at its earliest stages. Of course, once battle is seriously joined on any level, the most varied tactics and the most far-sighted strategy become a necessity. By keeping to single-issue campaigns, single-issue then turns into its opposite. From being a means to mobilise the widest forces, it becomes a barrier to forward momentum and in point of fact invites demobilisation and defeat.

The Hands Off Russia campaign made colossal strides forward. Demonstrations outside the Polish embassy drew huge crowds. The TUC and Labour Party were bombarded with resolutions. The dockers’ union reaffirmed its support for the London men and demanded that no docker be used for sending arms to the enemies of Soviet Russia. Making matters even worse for reaction, the Red Army executed a brilliant counterattack. The open terrain, the sheer scale of operations and the limited forces employed on both sides meant a war of rapid movement. The Poles had overextended themselves. Supply lines could not be maintained. General Tukhachevsky struck a timely blow and succeeded in driving Pilsudski’s forces out of Ukraine, across the plains of northern Poland and to the very outskirts of Warsaw itself.

If Poland

If Poland fell, it would unleash a revolutionary deluge that would spread into Germany - at least that was the desperate calculation made by Lenin and his beleaguered comrades in the Kremlin. Instead of relying on growing the organisation and the consciousness of the working class in Germany, they clutched at the straw of military methods. Dreadfully disappointed by the post-World War I failures in Austria, Hungary and Germany, they were also emboldened by the stunning successes of the Red Army in conducting the civil war in Russia. The German revolution would once again be run as a minority action, which would, this time, secure victory by urgently requesting ‘fraternal assistance’. From a sovietised Poland, the Red Army would come to the aid of an essentially artificial, uprising in Germany. Central Europe would supposedly follow and after that the gravitational centre of world socialism would then shift from Moscow to Berlin, from backward Russia to advanced Germany. Such were the ambitions … and illusions.

To begin with, the British lion was full of bombast and snarling threats. Winston Churchill belligerently told the cabinet: “We ought to take the transport workers [ie, the dockers - JC] by the throat.”²⁴ In the House of Commons Lloyd George spoke the unmistakable language of war and The Times warned that another conflict was imminent and must be faced “with the same unanimity and the same courage with which we faced the crisis of 1914”.²⁵

The Baltic fleet was given contingency orders. British troops were used against Danzig (Gdansk) dockers, who had struck against the landing of munitions for the Polish army. To leave no shadow of doubt, foreign secretary Lord Curzon dispatched a ‘diplomatic’ note threatening war, unless there was an end to the Red Army’s advance.

However, the working class in Britain had its own answer. On July 21 1920 the Hands Off Russia campaign issued a statement which highlighted the danger of war. It demanded “direct action to prevent it”.²⁶ There was an almost instant rallying of the working class, including the Labour Party.

On August 4 1920 its headquarters wired all its branches and trades councils, warning of the “extremely menacing possibility” of an escalation of the Polish-Russian war.²⁷ “Citizen demonstrations” were announced on the following Sunday, August 8 1920. According to its own estimates, they “met with an unparalleled response”.²⁸

Suitably flushed, on August 9 Labour and TUC leaders, meeting in the House of Commons, set up a national Council of Action. Pressed on by the movement below, it cast caution to the wind and gave notice to the government that “the whole industrial power of the organised workers will be used to defeat this war”. A message was sent, notifying the executives of all affiliated organisations “to hold themselves ready to proceed immediately to London for a national conference”, and advised them “to instruct their members to ‘down tools’ on instructions from that national conference”.²⁹

One day after, the national Council of Action met the prime minister, Lloyd George. He assured them that Britain’s intentions were peaceful. It would continue to support the Poles and Russian whites, but there would be no deployment of British forces. Labour’s claim that the government was engineering an “intolerable crime” against the Soviet republic was “ridiculous”. All it wanted to do was to preserve Polish independence.

This “promise” that there would be no British intervention “robbed” the national conference, which met three days later in the Central Hall, Westminster, “of some of its drama”.³⁰ It also, as Ralph Miliband suggests, allowed some of the most rightwing figures in the labour movement the chance to stand on a political platform remarkably similar to the BSP’s that they had flatly rejected little more than a year before.

Parading themselves as ‘principled leftists’, JR Clynes, JH Thomas, AG Cameron and other Labour notables made near revolutionary speeches. Before the singing of the ‘Red flag’ and the ‘Internationale’ the thousand delegates fully endorsed the setting up of local councils of action and agreed to the threat of strikes “to resist any and every form of military and naval intervention against the Soviet government of Russia”.³¹

Such bold statements from the united body of the organised working class undoubtedly stayed the hand of British imperialism. As we have shown, this was not because of bureaucratic initiative, but the determination of leftwingers, grouped under the banner of the Hands Off Russia campaign. Their pro-Soviet propaganda, their successful agitation among dockers, their skilful combination of official and unofficial avenues were responsible for winning virtually the entire labour movement to threaten a general strike. Labour leaders duly claimed that it was they who saved the country from war. But, as Miliband again points out, Labour was not in fact “called upon to challenge the constitution” and it is “impossible” to tell how its leaders “would have behaved, had the government actually embarked on offensive operations against Russia”.³²

Though it was plain that the leadership had no revolutionary intentions, TUC and Labour Party officialdom was swept along by events, because they were determined to keep control of them.

1. E Hobsbawm Industry and empire Harmondsworth 1975, p134.↩︎

2. In 1880 steel production in Britain stood at 1.3 million tons, USA 1.2 and Germany 0.7. By 1900 US steel production had reached 10.2 million tons, German 6.4 and British 4.9. (Figures in R Palme Dutt The crisis of Britain and the British empire London 1957, p75).↩︎

3. Perhaps the most influential, albeit flawed, account of this transformation is George Dangerfield’s The strange death of Liberal England (1935). The writing is witty and wonderful. If you have not read it, you are missing a real treat.↩︎

4. CW Boyd (ed) Mr Chamberlain’s speeches Vol 1, London, p137.↩︎

5. Quoted in R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1973, p37.↩︎

6. Quoted in VI Lenin CW Vol 22, Moscow 1977, pp256-57.↩︎

7. JA Hobson Imperialism London 1938, p41.↩︎

8. www.researchgate.net/publication/5138702_Emigration_from_the_UK_1870-1913_and_1950-1998. A personal aside: those migrants included my own granduncle, Joe, and my grandaunt, Flo. Joe “rose from obscure beginnings to a position of almost unchallenged power in the Labor Party … He became uncrowned Labor king.” He was also a determined anti-communist (see -adb.anu.edu.au/biography/chamberlain-francis-edward-joe-12304).↩︎

9. P Taaffe 1926 general strike: workers taste power London 2006.↩︎

10. See M Haynes International Socialism No22, winter 1984, p90.↩︎

11. R Luxemburg The mass strike London nd, p61.↩︎

12. S Webb and B Webb The history of trade unionism, 1666-1920 London 1919, p665.↩︎

13. HG Wells An Englishman looks at the world Frankfurt 2018, p30.↩︎

14. See my last article in this occasional series: ‘German takes on the general strike’ Weekly Worker March 5 2026 (www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1575/german-takes-on-the-general-strike).↩︎

15. R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1973, pp67, 69.↩︎

16. Quoted in J Mahon Harry Pollitt London 1976, p77.↩︎

17. Ibid p78.↩︎

18. Quoted in R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1973, p70.↩︎

19. Quoted in A Hutt The post-war history of the British working class London 1937, p37.↩︎

20. Quoted in R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1973, p72.↩︎

21. Ibid p76.↩︎

22. Quoted in A Hutt The post-war history of the British working class London 1937, p31.↩︎

23. Quoted in J Mahon Harry Pollitt London 1976, p80.↩︎

24. Quoted in P Addison Churchill on the home front London 1993, p216.↩︎

25. Ibid.↩︎

26. Quoted in J Mahon Harry Pollitt London 1976, p82.↩︎

27. Quoted in R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1973, p78.↩︎

28. Ibid p76.↩︎

29. Quoted in A Hutt The post-war history of the British working class London 1937, pp38-39.↩︎

30. R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1973, p79.↩︎

31. Quoted in A Hutt The post-war history of the British working class London 1937, p39.↩︎

32. R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1973, p81.↩︎