14. “Never Again”

Wellred

Core Argument

Chapter 14: “Never Again”

The defeat of the 1926 General Strike marked a catastrophic turning point for the British working class. After the TUC General Council’s capitulation, the miners were left isolated to fight alone for seven months before starvation forced them back on humiliating terms. Churchill’s British Gazette had demolished the TUC’s false claims of “reassurances” with headlines of “Unconditional Surrender”. The betrayal was comprehensive: despite Cramp’s promises of complete reinstatement, rail companies used the return to work to weed out militants, and Thomas later admitted 45,000 victimised workers remained unemployed. The General Council rejected the miners’ appeals for a coal embargo and strike levy, then concluded “NEVER AGAIN!” – a renunciation of class struggle itself.

The consequences were devastating. The Baldwin government’s 1927 Trade Dispute and Trade Union Act made sympathetic strikes illegal, protected strike-breakers, curtailed picketing, and attacked political funds. Strike action collapsed, union membership fell sharply, and the Labour Party lost over a quarter of its income. Mining areas suffered years of victimisation, wage cuts, repeal of the Seven-Hour Act, and long-term unemployment.

The young Communist Party proved incapable of filling the vacuum. Having cultivated the image of left-wingers on the General Council to suit Stalin’s opportunist policy, the CP then abruptly reversed course in 1929, adopting Moscow’s ultra-left line. R. Palme Dutt denounced the Labour Party as a “machine of reformism”; J. T. Murphy declared revolutionary workers could no longer affiliate, pay the levy, work for, or vote for Labour. This sectarianism destroyed the Left-Wing Movement and isolated the CP.

This policy reversal reflected Stalin’s consolidation of power after Lenin’s death in 1924. The defeats of the German working class in 1923 and the British in 1926 strengthened the bureaucratic reaction against the October Revolution, rooted in Russia’s backwardness and isolation. The Communist International was purged and swung from opportunism to ultra-leftism, denouncing Labour leaders as “social fascists”. By 1935 the National Minority Movement was dissolved.

Meanwhile, trade union leaders embraced class collaboration. Robert Williams declared they could not overthrow capitalism but must supersede it. George Hicks invited employers’ co-operation, taken up by Sir Alfred Mond in the Mond-Turner talks. But capital, holding the whip hand, sought merciless subjection. The Wall Street Crash and Great Depression brought mass unemployment. The defeat of the General Strike and other working-class defeats in the 1930s paved the way for fascism and the Second World War.