Britain’s General Strike Was Class Struggle at Its Rawest
This year marks the centenary of the 1926 general strike, the biggest episode of class struggle in British history. The response of Britain’s rulers showed their iron determination to keep the working class in its social and political place.
An armored tank leaves Wellington Barracks in London on May 10, the eighth and penultimate day of the 1926 general strike. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
A century ago, Britain was rocked by perhaps the most serious episode of class struggle it has ever known. Millions of workers joined the general strike of 1926, buoyed by hope that they could fend off attacks on the pay and conditions of coal miners and reverse efforts by bosses to claw back the gains organized labor made when workers were in urgent demand during World War I.
They faced opposition from employers, Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government, and a larger swath of the middle classes who were anxious about the growth of trade union power and the political instability that Britain had experienced over the previous decade and a half. David Torrance’s new account of the general strike, The Edge of Revolution, addresses the strike as a pivotal industrial and political conflict that had profound and lasting consequences for Britain.
Cast of Characters
Torrance is a journalist and a political historian as well as a House of Commons Library constitutional expert. His previous books include The Wild Men, an account of Britain’s first short-lived Labour government that was elected in 1924. The first Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, remained the party’s leader in 1926, facing the difficulties of marrying support for the miners with the growing conventional wisdom that Labour was committed to a parliamentary road to socialism.
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