The General Strike was one of the most significant events in twentieth
century Britain. The miners were locked out and the mass of
rank-and-file trade unionists then came out on strike in their support.
With their families and some middle-class sympathizers, the miners and
the labor and trade union movement found itself pitched against the
political establishment, the apparatus of the state, the powerful
mineowners backed by the Conservative Government and most of the media
of the time in what was the sharpest form of class conflict short of
political revolution. It had always said that the British didn't do
general strikes. In 1926 they certainly did!
2026 will mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the General Strike and,
under the very different economic, social and political conditions of
post-industrial, post-Brexit Britain, it is worth revisiting and
examining the complicated coming together of factors which were
eventually to lead to those extraordinary days in May 1926 when the fate
of the nation lay in the balance.
The author examines the economic, social and political processes taking
places from the mid-nineteenth century and argues that this major
confrontation between labor and capital was probably inevitable. He
examines particularly the symbiotic relationship between the coal miners
and the railway workers and the troubled industrial relations in those
industries. His informed and lucid account should interest students of
modern British history, labor history and the fortunes of the railways
in this period.
