THIS book is not a detailed history of every event, local or national, in the nine days’ strike of May, 1926. Nor is it another essay in the art of “secret history”; there are already quite enough “disclosures” and “revelations” explaining the strike and its ending in terms of personalities and accidents, the weakness or the cleverness of individuals, the stubbornness of the miners, etc. This book gives no new “theory” of that sort to explain actions and omissions that in reality are inexplicable by any such trivial incidentals. It is an attempt—and a successful one—to explain the meaning of the General Strike: the causes behind it, the reasons for the shape that it took, and particularly the reasons for the event that will stick in men’s minds for a long time, and mould the future to a greater extent than we yet realise: the surrender of May 12.
A detailed history, without the analysis that comrade Murphy gives, would only be a mass of unconnected incidents, confusing and at first sight inexplicable. At the same time the reader will notice that this is not an exercise in “pure theory”: that the deductions are not based on preconceived ideas unrelated to the facts; that every fact and figure touching on what is actually happening or has happened, of any importance, is given its due weight and linked up in the argument.
The theory that the strike was due to some exceptional circumstances that can never happen again (e.g., Mr. Baldwin’s “weakness” played upon by the “extremists” in the Cabinet) is dealt with very faithfully by comrade Murphy in the pages that follow. An equally ridiculous theory is popular in certain sections of the Labour movement: that the General Council’s surrender was due to reasons not yet fully known—the personal failure of this individual or the cunning of that one. This book ought to dispose of this idea for ever. It is of no vital importance, for instance, to know how far the Negotiating Committee controlled by Mr. Thomas misled the majority of the General Council as to the nature of the Samuel Memorandum. The facts that are important are bigger things than these, and comrade Murphy gives them.
One “revelation” however, has to be dealt with. Mr. Bromley has given in the “Locomotive journal,” since this book was written, a summary of the report that the General Council intended to make to the Conference of Trade Union Executives on July 25th. The Conference has been postponed, but the General Council’s “reply” published in this way is still being used extensively by the press against the miners. The General Council’s explanation boils down to this: that they did not “let the miners down,” because they had never really promised to back them up!
The claim put forward through Mr. Bromley is that the General Council’s position changed after the publication of the Coal Commission’s Report. On February 27, 1926, they had pledged themselves to back the miners’ demands in full. But on April 8, in a letter to Mr. Cook (not published until after the strike), the Industrial Committee of the General Council “was of the opinion that matters have not yet reached a stage when any final declaration of the General Council’s policy can be made.” The rest of the “reply” is a violent attack on the policy of resisting wage reductions. The plea is that the General Council was never pledged to such a policy.
This plea can easily be answered from the General Council’s own statements. The pledge of February 27 had never been withdrawn or even publicly modified. On March 25, the Industrial Committee of the General Council “reaffirmed its decision to support the miners in their effort to secure a favourable settlement” (“Daily Herald,” 1-3-26). On April 8, this committee “reaffirmed its previous declarations of sympathy and support” (“Daily Herald,” 10-4-26). On April 9, they repeated the reaffirmation (“Daily Herald," 11-4-26). On April 14, they said again “this Committee reiterated its previous declaration to render the miners the fullest support in resisting the degradation of the standard of life." Here are four declarations referring to a “previous declaration." What was this previous declaration? It can only be the pledge of February 27: “there was to be no reduction of wages, no increase in hours, and no interference with the principle of national agreement." (“Daily Herald," 1-3-26.)
The fact that the General Council, while thus repeating the pledge that it later repudiated, was at the same time secretly trying to get the miners to accept a wage, cut, is not a very convincing argument in defence of that Council! But it is a very useful additional fact to prove the main thesis of this book: just as the General Strike was not. due to any individual’s aims or actions, but to the decay of the whole social system under which we live, so the surrender of May 12 was not due to any of the events of those nine days, or even of the nine months before them, but to the inability of a whole system of Labour’s leadership—men, ideas and organisations—to cope with the plain facts of a new era.
Next: Introduction