09.04.2026

A study in bureaucratic inertia

Marking a hundred years since the 1926 General Strike, Jack Conrad shows that, while the Tory government urgently, assiduously, ruthlessly prepared, the TUC was content to pass left-sounding resolutions and then urge strikers to tend to their gardens

Retreating before a TUC-threatened general strike in solidarity with the miners, Red Friday - July 31 1925 - saw the panicked Tories agree nine-month subsidy for the coal industry. Stanley Baldwin’s cash-strapped government simultaneously established a commission headed by the Liberal grandee, Sir Herbert Samuel. Everyone knew it was a delaying tactic. Confrontation was inevitable - in the first place between the coal owners and the coal miners.

Coal was by far the most important industry of the day, employing between 1.1 and 1.2 million workers. Coal-powered furnaces made gas, generated electricity, drove steam engines, kept homes, offices and schools warm during the long winter months, etc, etc. Coal was the prime energy source. Arthur Horner and Allen Hutt wrote of ‘Coal capitalism’.¹ Needless to say, work underground was notoriously hard, dangerous and unhealthy. Occupational diseases such as pneumoconiosis were common occurrences, as were injuries and death. “Close the coalhouse door, lad. There’s blood inside,” runs the chilling opening line of Alex Glasgow’s song.²

Profitability

The coal industry had long suffered from a crisis of profitability: 1,400 private companies and 2,500 pits, 613 of them producing 95% of the output.³ Most mines were primitive and hobbled by a woeful lack of capital investment. The industry was therefore grossly inefficient. Stiff competition from Germany and the US ate into established markets. There was additionally the growing use of oil (eg, the Royal Navy switched away from coal in 1910). One bright idea, already suggested by the Sankey commission in 1919, was to nationalise and close the least productive pits … that actually happened in 1947 (though with Clement Attlee’s Labour government paying generous compensation to the owners).

Meanwhile, the Mining Association of Great Britain - described by Tory cabinet minister Neville Chamberlain as the “stupidest and most narrow-minded employers I know” - was intent on breaking the national agreement, whereby all miners were paid at the same rate, and forcing down wages and extending hours on a colliery-to-colliery basis - that through imposing a national lock-out if necessary.⁴ Equally, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain was intent on preserving pay, conditions and a national agreement which limited competition amongst its members (the sine qua non of trade unionism).

Understandably then, the CPGB warned that Red Friday was in no way anything but a temporary victory. The Workers’ Weekly editorial explained why:

What has been achieved is the imposition on the capitalist class of an unstable truce, which cannot lead to industrial peace, but only to renewed class conflict. Behind this truce and in the industrial peace talk which will accompany it, the capitalist class will prepare for a crushing attack upon the workers. If the workers are doped by the peace talk and do not make effective counter-preparations, then they are doomed to shattering defeat ... The government, acting on behalf of the capitalist class, is certain to prepare for a new struggle with the working class under more favourable conditions than this time.⁵

Obviously what was at stake was far more than coal owners versus coal miners. The Tory government was determined that Britain, in the words of Winston Churchill - chancellor of the exchequer - had to be governed by parliament rather than “some other organisation not responsible by our elective processes”.⁶ This, remember, from a Tory whose party gained its 200-seat “oppressively swollen majority” in the House of Commons through the forged ‘Zinoviev letter’ and by stampeding the middle classes into the camp of reaction.

The October 1924 general election was rigged. Ramsay MacDonald’s minority Labour government was overthrown not by a mere vote of the combined ‘bourgeois bloc’ of Tories and Liberals in parliament: there was an anti-democratic conspiracy at the heart of the state that involved MI6/MI5, Conservative Party HQ, the Daily Mail and Buckingham Palace. Although Labour gained a million votes, the Liberal Party collapsed. William Gladstone’s great party had been reduced to a pathetic 40 seats. In class terms, Britain was rapidly polarising. The middle ground virtually disappeared in parliamentary terms and the Tories were turning to the methods of civil war. The mailed fist was clearly visible. While Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald called for moderation and negotiations, Baldwin’s government pressed ahead with energetic preparations for the impending struggle. Within five days of Red Friday it had underway a complete overhaul of its machinery of repression. Once this was completed, the state machine would be ready to take on the organised labour movement.

The police, army and navy were given detailed contingency orders. Stockpiles of coal were readied. The country was divided into 10 areas, each under a minister as a commissioner. Civil service staff were appointed for each division. They were to handle transport, food, postal services and coal. Within each area local structures were created, with a chair selected by the government to convene and preside over a volunteer service committee. All officials were given plenary powers conferred on the government by the Emergency Powers Act. They could requisition, fix prices and order arrests. To put the whole thing in motion, all that was needed was a telegram from Whitehall containing the single word - ‘Action’.

Baldwin’s government also established the “strictly neutral” Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies. An overtly strikebreaking organisation. OMS pretended to support the “legitimate efforts of trade unions”, only opposing “unconstitutional” activity.⁷ It recruited some 100,000 mainly middle class volunteers, who were secretly trained as drivers, telegraph operators and for “protecting the public services”.

The ruling class had yet another line of defence - the British Fascists. In the words of home secretary Joynson-Hicks - recorded in cabinet minutes - this well-disciplined counterrevolutionary organisation was “at the disposal of the government”.⁸ In fact the British Fascists split over the “strictly neutral” OMS: one wing, the Loyalists, under the leadership of Brigadier-General RBD Blakeney and Rear-Admiral AE Armstrong, promptly joined; the other (majority) wing lent the government support through the somewhat mysteriously named Q Division.

In fact, the British Fascists had made the fight against Bolshevism and “a general strike designed to paralyse the country” the core of their programme. To second the “efforts of the OMS” they drilled, attacked communist meetings - they even kidnapped the CPGB’s Harry Pollitt (his assailants were caught, tried and acquitted⁹).

Left mask

By contrast, TUC and Labour Party preparations were noticeable by their absence. The key leaders of the labour movement put their faith in the constitution. Despite a few imperfections, such as the House of Lords and other so-called feudal relics, Britain was on the road to the socialist commonwealth. The monarchy could be left to play a purely ceremonial role. Meanwhile, though the TUC was willing to threaten the government with a general strike in a trades dispute, it was not willing to step beyond the bounds of legality.

‘Shout loud, but no wielding the big stick’ accurately summed up the approach.¹⁰ At the Scarborough TUC, held in September 1925, extraordinarily militant-sounding resolutions were passed. Even CPGB initiatives won resounding majorities. Believing that the government would back down, as it had in 1920 over Russia and on Red Friday, and wanting to keep control over the left-moving rank and file, trade union general secretaries gave their bloc votes, 2,456,000 to 1,218,000, for a declaration, seconded by Pollitt, that “The union movement must organise to prepare the trade unions in conjunction with the Labour Party and the workers to struggle for the overthrow of capitalism.”¹¹

Abandonedly, the same officials went on to pledge support for the right of self-determination for the colonies. Arguing against the motion, JH Thomas - railworkers leader and former colonial secretary in MacDonald’s government - desperately implored congress not to make itself appear “ridiculous”. He was defeated by 3,082,000 to 79,000 votes - a margin that again reflected the almost universal desire of the right to pose left.

Needless to say, bureaucratic leftism was a mask of convenience. The trade union leaders showed their true face when it came to concrete questions. Asked to reaffiliate trades councils, they ruled the motion out of order. Asked to extend the powers of the TUC, they referred it back. Asked to organise workers’ defence corps, they fearfully rejected the call. And, when it came to elections to the general council, right reformists - including, after an absence of two years, the very self-same JH Thomas - found themselves returned. The same bloc votes were used at the Liverpool conference of the Labour Party, which not only endorsed the miserable record of the short-lived MacDonald government, but - albeit with a thin majority - barred communists from individual Labour membership.

Our party

Immediately after Red Friday the CPGB launched a concerted campaign to alert the working class about the oncoming battle. The Workers’ Weekly carried a front-page box in every issue, showing how long remained before “the termination of the mining agreement and the opening of the greatest struggle in the history of the British working class ... we must prepare for the struggle.”¹²

Up and down the country the CPGB ceaselessly called for the class to be put on a war footing and for agitation in the army and the navy. While urging “the organisation of workers’ defence corps”, it attacked the OMS as “the most complete scheme of organised blacklegging and strikebreaking yet devised” and “the most advanced form of fascism yet reached in this country”.¹³

The government was so concerned about the communist danger that police raids were ordered on the party’s King Street HQ and the offices of its London District, the Young Communist League and the National Minority Movement. Large quantities of papers were seized, as well as busts of Lenin and Zinoviev and a mysterious metal sphere (the King Street lavatory ball cock).

Twelve prominent comrades were arrested and charged on three counts: “(1) Conspiring on certain dates to publish and utter seditious libels and words; (2) conspiring to incite persons to commit breaches of the Incitement to Mutiny Act, 1707 [actually 1797 - JC]; (3) conspiracy to endeavour to seduce from their duty persons serving His Majesty’s Forces to whom might come certain publications, pamphlets and books, and to incite them to mutiny.”¹⁴ The trial of the 12 communist leaders became a trial of communism. The prosecution was out to prove the illegality of the CPGB. Communism is financed from Russia, it seeks to establish “forms of government by force”, creates antagonisms between different classes and “involves the seducing from their allegiances of the armed forces of the crown”.

Despite widespread condemnation of the trial and clever defence arguments, the jury only took 20 minutes to return guilty verdicts. In his summing-up, judge Rigby Swift stated that it was no “crime to be a communist” or “hold communist opinions”, but “it was a crime to belong to this Communist Party”. Harry Pollitt, William Gallacher, Wal Hannington, William Rust and Albert Inkpin got one year. The remaining comrades - Ernie Cant, Tom Bell, Tom Wintringham, Arthur MacManus, JT Murphy and Robin Page Arnot - were sentenced to six months. Tom Bell does not overstate his case when he says: “No better testimony could be given to the influence of the Communist Party in this period.”¹⁵

However, it ought to be said that the CPGB’s leadership displayed a completely casual, irresponsible, attitude towards itself. Everyone with sense enough could see that a strategic confrontation was in the offing. As we have shown, the CPGB repeatedly said exactly that, and urged corresponding preparations. Why then did it not take measures to ensure the freedom of its most important comrades in the nine months leading up to the general strike?

Nonetheless, the imprisonment of the CPGB 12 did nothing to damage the party’s standing nor halt the growing response to its message. On the contrary. Membership, although still pitifully small, had more than doubled since 1922 to 5,000. A measure of the CPGB’s immediate constituency, however, was the National Minority Movement, discussed in the previous article.¹⁶ It had just under a million affiliated members at its 1926 peak.

The NMM was a united front, which meant unity in action with the ‘official’ lefts - but simultaneously criticism of them too. The idea being to split the mass of militant workers away from trade union (mis)leaders who were only prepared to talk left.

This could, however, be given a pedagogic spin. In Communist Review, JR Campbell insisted that, when it came to the ‘official’ left, it is the “duty of the party and the Minority Movement to criticise its weakness relentlessly and endeavour to change the muddled and incomplete leftwing views of the more progressive leaders into a real revolutionary viewpoint”.¹⁷ Frankly, that could only really be done by winning ‘official’ lefts to join, or rejoin, the CPGB and operate in a truly disciplined fashion under the accepted norms of democratic centralism. I am thinking of the likes of Alf Purcell (FTAT), George Hicks (Bricklayers), AJ Cook (MFGB) and Alonzo Swales (AEU). Of course, that never happened.

Industrial unions

It should be stressed that the task set for the NMM was “not to organise independent revolutionary trade unions or to split revolutionary elements away from existing organisations affiliated to the TUC”, but to convert the “revolutionary minority within each industry into a revolutionary majority”. There was a definite mass feeling in Britain for radical change and very significant numbers thought of themselves as revolutionary socialists. For the moment though, they looked to leftwing Labour MPs and trade union officials as their legitimate leaders. In other words, there had to be an ideological struggle waged to defeat left reformists and centrists of every kind. Not by going round them, bypassing them: no, they had to be engaged with and gone through.

By marshalling the militant minority among the rank and file, the CPGB sought to overcome the petty sectionalist prejudices of trade unionism and thereby increase the fighting capacity of the class as a whole. Although having affiliations from official trade union bodies, the NMM was structured along industrial lines - there were, for example, miners’, metal workers’ and transport minority movements. Each in its own way was seen as a precursor to a powerful, single union in each industry. And, as the NMM grew, so would the CPGB. Or at least that was the calculation.

The March 20 1926 national conference of the NMM had a record 883 delegates, representing, as already noted, nearly one million organised workers (almost a fifth the number affiliated to the TUC). The conference called for every trades council to be reconstituted as a council of action “by mobilising all the forces of the working class movement in its locality”. It also demanded the TUC general council convene a National Council of Action.

Yet one has to admit that the main solution proffered by the CPGB was problematic. It advocated binding powers, even “all power”, for the TUC (yes, it sounded very Russian, but neither the affiliated trade unions nor the TUC were the equivalent of soviets, which were exceedingly democratic and capable of organising the masses in their entirety).¹⁸ Anyhow, moved by rank-and-file miners’ leader Arthur Homer, a resolution was adopted which stated, along these lines, that it was “imperative that all the forces of the working class movement should be mobilised under one central leadership to repel the attack and to secure the demands of every section of the workers”.¹⁹ Of course, that “one central leadership” was the TUC.

This hardly readied the working class for betrayal by the TUC - as inevitable as the betrayal of Andrea Egan, Sharon Graham, Daniel Kebede, Fran Heathcote, Matt Wrack, Eddie Dempsey and other ‘official’ lefts, if presented with similar conditions nowadays (let alone Paul Nowak, Garry Smith, Joanne Carns, etc).

Not surprisingly the Samuel commission agreed with the coal owners that in order to make the industry prof­itable there would have to be heavy wage cuts and an end to national agreements. That dashed TUC hopes, but confirmed CPGB expectations. Among ordinary workers there was seething anger - a gut recognition that, if the miners lost, the whole class would lose too. As a consequence there was a determination to stand together. Pushed on by mass pressure for action and effectively committed to unleash it on May 1 1926 - unless the government backed down on the miners - the TUC at last summoned union executives to a meeting in order to explain and affirm its plans. This was on April 29! The TUC had discussed its plans for the first time only 48 hours before!

On the surface the trade union bureaucracy was overwhelmingly for the general strike. A roll call of the union executives was taken. In bloc vote terms there were 3,653,527 for the strike, a mere 49,911 against (unions with a membership of 319,000 and over had to consult their governing bodies). Bevin announced that trades designated in the ‘first line’ would begin their strike at 11.59pm on May 3 1926.

Raising himself to what he doubtless imagined were the heights of stentorian rhetoric (which, as any psychologist could tell, unconsciously revealed his real financial fears and mindset), Bevin described the bureaucracy in heroic terms: “We look upon your ‘yes’ as meaning that you have placed your all upon the altar for this great movement and, having placed it there, even if every penny goes, if every asset goes, history will ultimately write up that it was a magnificent generation that was prepared to do it rather than see the miners driven down like slaves.”²⁰ Jumping to their feet, the leaders of Britain’s unions hurrahed and sang the ‘Red flag’ before joining the biggest May Day demonstration London had seen for years.

No doubt

However, despite the song (with its barbed ref­erence to flinching cowards) and the obvious willingness to fight below, the TUC still hoped and prayed that “something will turn up” - ie, a negotiated settlement. On May 2 1926, instead of readying its army, TUC leaders were closeted with Baldwin, attempting to come to an accommodation based on acceptance of the Samuel commission’s recommendations.

The TUC’s determination to avert the general strike left Baldwin in no doubt. Certain that the general council did not believe in the strike, certain it would not take it through to a struggle for power, he reckoned he was on a sure-fire winner.

In fact, Baldwin took an “extremely simple but very stubborn line” throughout the general strike. Consisting of ‘good Englishmen’, the TUC had, he knew, no intention of risking a bloody civil war. But it was trying to intimidate the government with the threat of “political revolution - the destruction of the constitution”. Baldwin wanted to split the moderates from the militants. However, he was now in a position to demand that “the perpetrator must surrender before [any further] conversations were possible”. Churchill too was of the opinion that “We were at war” … there was no room for compromise.²¹

Even in the midst of talks the coal owners fired the opening salvo. Their lockout began. OMS recruiting posters were put up throughout the country. In Buckingham Palace the king signed a state of emergency proclamation. Orders in council were issued in the form of emergency regulations. Local authorities were told to prepare themselves. So, against its wishes and compromising instincts, the TUC general council found itself the general staff of a general strike. It was to prove incompetent, suffocating and, yes, treacherous.

The TUC’s first move was to claim the right to negotiate for the one million miners. Little did the MFGB imagine that meant selling them out. The TUC was also concerned that the strike would take place in carefully controlled, discrete stages. Workers would not be brought out en masse. They would be ordered to strike one wave after another - with the more moderate transport and general unions going first - and individual unions having responsibility for their members and ensuring the continued functioning of health, food and sanitary services.

By marching the workers into battle in two lines, a tight bureaucratic control was to be maintained. By organising in a fragmented way, it was calculated that self-activity could be limited or prevented altogether. An approach which owed more to fear of the rank and file than any determination to beat the enemy.

The general strike would thereby be a series of independent sectional strikes and for some time be only partial. And, while it was absolutely right to maintain essential supplies and services to the population at large, the TUC was quite willing to see existing management continue to manage. There was no call, or even thought, of imposing strict workers’ control over these vital areas of everyday life ... and making a great display of it (that would, if it had been done, transformed middle-ground, wavering, public opinion and could well have swung many millions more in favour of the strikers²²).

Either way, the strike began because of the government, not the TUC. The government was determined on confrontation and another, final, defeat of the working class. The TUC was supine and unsure. Courts and establishment figures lined up to denounce the strike as illegal. The TUC said all it wanted was to safeguard the miners. John Reith gave unlimited air time for Baldwin, but decided that neither MacDonald nor the archbishop of Canterbury nor even Lloyd George would be allowed to broadcast. So much for the much vaunted neutrality of the BBC. It was and remains an instrument of government.

The contrast between the two opposing camps could not be more stark. In its British Worker, the TUC called for football matches with the police and insisted that the whole thing was nothing but a non-political trades dispute. In parliament and in Churchill’s unbridled British Gazette the government claimed to be defending “freedom and the constitution” and rained down accusations that the TUC was opening the way for revolution. The TUC pleaded its innocence. The government deployed the army and navy and used OMS volunteers - shambolic on the rails, docks and trains, effective as brutal special constables. The TUC turned down Soviet workers’ aid and urged strikers to quietly sit out the strike at home, tending their gardens.²³

Broadly speaking, TUC instructions were faithfully obeyed by trade unionists. Even though the weakest sections were in the first line, there were only a tiny number of scabs. From every locality, from every union, TUC headquarters at Eccleston Square received countless daily reports - all giving details of a strike that was solid beyond even the most optimistic expectations. Moreover, government plans began to show signs of fraying. Nevertheless for the moment the mass of workers remained under effective TUC control.

Despite provocation, the overwhelming majority of strikers bent over backwards to avoid the violence the TUC was so concerned to prevent. With only the minimum of trouble, the authorities were allowed to move food, unload goods at the docks and run a skeleton train, bus and tram service. Inevitably though, whatever the TUC’s intentions, a general strike remains a general strike.

1. A Horner and A Hutt Communism and coal London 1928.↩︎

2. ‘Close the coalhouse door’ (1968).↩︎

3. J Schneer Nine days in May: the General Strike of 1926 Oxford 2026, p9.↩︎

4. Quoted in Q Outram ‘The stupidest men in England? The industrial relations strategy of the coal owners between the lockouts, 1923-1924’ HSIR September 1997, p66.↩︎

5. Workers’ Weekly August 7 1925.↩︎

6. Quoted in R Page Arnot The miners: 1910-1930, London 1953, p383.↩︎

7. Initial OMS communique quoted in R Page Arnot The general strike London 1926, pp50-52.↩︎

8. Quoted in J Foster ‘Imperialism and the labour aristocracy’ in J Skelley (ed) The general strike: 1926 London 1976, p43.↩︎

9. They claimed that they only wanted to take Pollitt “away for a weekend in north Wales” (N Copsey Anti-fascism in Britain London 2017, p4.↩︎

10. We are “not going to begin wielding the big stick”, Ernest Bevin told Baldwin. “We did not start it.” Quoted in A Hutt The post-war history of the British working class London 1937, p128.↩︎

11. Quoted in A Hutt The post-war history of the British working class London 1937, p117.↩︎

12. Workers’ Weekly August 28 1925.↩︎

13. Workers’ Weekly October 2 1925.↩︎

14. Quoted by home secretary Jaynson-Hicks - hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1925-12-01/debates/3f477014-58a9-44e6-874b-abfab77244f4/CommunistProsecution.↩︎

15. T Bell British Communist Party London 1937, pl09.↩︎

16. J Conrad ‘Fridays black and red’ Weekly Worker April 2 2026 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1579/fridays-black-and-red). See note 20.↩︎

17. Quoted in A Hutt The post-war history of the British working class London 1937, p125.↩︎

18. The party’s attitude towards the TUC general council was the subject of debate in 1922. Against the argument that the TUC could be transformed, Rajani Palme Dutt wrote: “The cry for the general council as the solution for the labour movement is as foolish as the cry for the League of Nations in the international field ... And the parallel is so exact because the error at bottom is essentially the same: the belief that a combination of the existing forces will achieve a solution, when it is the existing forces that are at fault ... Only the political struggle of the working class as a class can unite the workers; the only uniting force of the working class movement can be a political party of the working class. The trade unions are by their very nature separatist: only a political party can be the combining force ... Unless that party develops, the working class movement will continue to drift in sectionalism and confusion. Only when a political party of the working class can unite the workers around the common demands of the political struggle and so rally around those demands the manifold organisations of the working class, only then and by those means will the unity of the working class be achieved” (Labour Monthly October 1922). Palme Dutt was defeated. On the other hand, it is undoubtedly true that the Communist Party can not only win the leadership of trade union: it must do if there is going to be working class rule. Anyway we shall discuss the ‘All power to the TUC’ slogan in a later article in this series.↩︎

19. Quoted in A Hutt The post-war history of the British working class London 1937, p125.↩︎

20. TUC The mining crisis and the national strike London 1926, p34.↩︎

21. P Addison Churchill on the home front London 1993, p262.↩︎

22. In May 1926 composer Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote: “On the whole I am with the miners.” On the other hand, he also wrote: “I doubt the side of revolution has any better scheme for the better government of the country.” His conclusion? “I cannot deny the duty of the govt to see to it that people do not starve.” Hence, “If one accepts the benefits, one [must] support the organisation which provides them.” Logically at least - we cannot rerun history - if the TUC and the strikers had taken control over the supply of the basics of life then they would have had a good chance of winning over waverers such as RVW. See - vaughanwilliamsfoundation.org/letter/memorandum-on-the-general-strike-by-ralph-vaughan-williams.↩︎

23. After receiving news of the general strike, the All-Union Central Committee of the Soviet trade unions called upon its members to donate one-quarter of a day’s pay in support of the workers in Britain. On May 5 it remitted 250,000 roubles to the TUC and on May 7 it sent two million roubles. On May 9 the TUC informed the AUCCTU that it refused to accept the money or any other support from Soviet workers.↩︎