The Strike That Failed

Summarizing Several Important Aspects of the Recent Walk-Out in England

PHILIP GUEDALLA

FEW of us, very few of us indeed, are likely to forget in any hurry the cold spring of 1926. In the first place, the weather was more than usually detestable. But we had something more to talk about than the weather. Not that we Saw It Coming. That is the private privilege of leader-writers, old gentlemen in clubs, and those Sunday oracles beneath whose eloquent pens their fellowcreatures stand perpetually at the Turning Point and the Parting of the Ways and in all those other critical situations which serve so admirably to fill a column. No one—except in history books—foresees the slow march of events. War came in 1914 and found Paris mainly concerned with the shooting exploits of the audacious Madame Caillaux; in 1870 it found France deep in domestic calculations of the probable duration of M. Emile Ollivier's well-meaning ministry; in 1792 it found Mr. Pitt wrapped tightly in his judicious anticipation that "unquestionably there never was a time in the history of this country when from the situation of Europe we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace". Did not the unforgettable Hammond assure his chief a week before the Ems telegram that he had never known so great a lull in foreign affairs? No one foresees any more freely in politics than on the race-course. People are only wise after the event. It is, if you come to think of it, the most convenient time for being wise.

SO none of us foresaw the strike. Wewereuncomfortably consciousof an interminable dispute about the mines. But we had seen those clouds before, had lived in the shadow of them—on and off—for something like five years. Sometimes, indeed, they hung a little lower; and sometimes they Boated further up. Patient Commissions listened to serried lines of witnesses, who demonstrated (if they were miners) that they were underpaid or proved with equal certainty (if they were mine owners) that there was no means of paying higher wages. But the world at large was mainly indifferent—with an uneasy feeling that the bill would, in someformorothcr,bcsentinto the taxpayer. So it discussed its private concerns, improving business, hopes of summer holidays, the franc, Spinelly, and the Australians.

And then it came. It was all . . . one hates the analogy, but—to be frank—it was all a little like the war. There was the same surprise, the same sudden sense that the bottom had dropped out of things, and the same stupid threat to the ordered life of a community at peace. Our forty millions became sharply aware that persons with monosyllabic names, of whom they had never heard, were issuing orders to them. A Mr. Pugh commanded them to stop at home or, if they wished to go to work, to walk there. A Mr. Swales directed them to leave off reading newspapers. They saw their milk roll into London in most unexpected conveyances, because these unknown figures willed it; and under the influence of these highly remarkable events they became dimly aware that something was happening. With a sound instinct they forgot all about the miners, who played the ungrateful part assigned by fatc a fewyears earlier to "gallant little Belgium". The miners had caused the trouble. But when a General Strike was called to aid them, they quickly receded from the public mind into a dim and remote perspective.

WHAT had occurred? The great Trades Unions had rushed to the rescue of the underground workers in a chivalrous desire to paralyse the community into providing more pay. But by doing so, they quite unwittingly raised a larger issue. Some of them—but not many —saw it; and some—but still fewer—welcomed it. For when Mr. Pugh and Mr. Swales issued their orders, they challenged by industrial action the right of Britain to order its own affairs in its own way. It was barely eighteen months since we had elected a House of Commons. Few of us viewed it with eyes of passionate affection; but at least, by the simple act of voting for or against its members, we had all had a hand in making it. It gave us the not unmixed blessing of Mr. Baldwin's Government, which again we viewed with eyes largely undimmed by tears of devotion. Yet we knew that, as we had put them in, we would equally put them out at the next elections, if we were minded to. They were—these Tory ministers —for all their airs and their vast majority, our own creation—a poor thing, but our own. We had accepted them with all their imperfections; and, if they misgoverned us, it was our fault for having given them the chance.

But here, in the wintry springtime, was a Mr. Pugh who ordered us all about, a Mr. Swales who told us how to behave, a Mr. Citrine who offered obligingly to see that we did not starve. And most of us—black-coated or shirtsleeved, white-collared or tastefully knotted round the neck with a striped choker—profoundly disliked the picture, and it was our dislike that broke the Strike. There arc, it must always be remembered, forty millions of us; and less than four had combined to give any authority whatever to their new dictators. We had dim recollections of school lessons about the long struggle of Parliament against misguided kings and unruly barons—and what, in the light of this eventful history, was Mr. Pugh? We had not elected him. He wore no crown. Perhaps he was a baron.

THAT, unintentionally, is precisely what he was. He never meant to be. But he had a touching faith in the exclusive privilege of his own section of the community to do as it pleased; and that hallucination leads barons to their worst mistakes. The error, in this instance, was just one more legacy of the war. For our labour leaders formed their mental habits in that bad school. In war-time, when the uninterrupted functioning of the industrial machine was vital to the continuous supply of shells, a Trades Union had only to permit a passing frown to deface its brow—and eager ministers granted its lightest requirements in nervous haste. This happy time endureef for some years longer than the war itself. A judicious caution had dictated a similar deference during the industrial troubles of Mr. Lloyd George's later rule in 1919 and 1921; and its wisdom is, perhaps, hardly open to doubt. The war-shocked State was disinclined to look too closely into the merits of successive demands upon it, since the repose which it purchased was of greater value than the Danegeld which was extorted. The habit (one sees it plainly now) grew upon labour leaders. They revelled in their power—the crisis, the summons to Downing Street, the happy settlement. At the same time a loud minority looked hopefully towards the supersession of theold Parliamentary machine by this industrial aristocracy. Mr. Cook delighted weekly meetings of miners with the bright prospect of their new omnipotence; there was a thin trickle of imported nonsense about the dictatorship of the proletariat; and in this vague illusion serious Trades Unionists toyed with the notion of a General Strike.

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That was the mood in which the miners formed their grand alliance with the railwaymen and the transport workers. It was the wartime mood; and, stranger still, it chose a pre-war weapon. The General Strike had been brandished for years before the war, to break the sleep of nervous communities. They were, it must be confessed, easy enough to scare. A rail accident bristled their hair; the loss of the Titanic gave them a week of wild hysterics. But the post-war citizen of a European state is a hardier mortal. His trains arc stopped—and he sits down on a bag to wait. His papers fail to arrive in time for breakfast—and he listens in. His milk is rationed—well, he has been rationed before. He has seen worse in France; or, if he never went up the Line, he—and she also, if it comes to that—has seen the street lamps darkened and heard the Gothas whirring and the dull crash of bombs, the swish of shrapnel on the empty pavements. The public nerves are stronger since the war; and the moral effect of a General Strike, which must have scared a pre-war community into surrender, was reduced to nil. In that aspect, the threat failed, for the simple cause that Labour in a war-time mood tried a pre-war weapon upon a warhardened public.

A second reason led to its utter failure. The post-war citizen is a resourceful being. There is an abundance of steady-eyed persons who were temporary technicians of a dozen crafts during the war. And, above all, he— and she, too—drives a car. The General Strike reckoned without that paragon of private property, the family motor car; and in the outcome petrol defeated steam.

I have tried to sketch the mind of the labour leader and the common citizen, because the labour leader made the Strike, and the common citizen broke it. There were few personalities besides. On the Government side the smile of Mr. Baldwin retained the public confidence; there was an uneasy feeling that Mr. Churchill might do something clever and that Sir William Joynson-Hicks might just do something. The suppression of newspapers effectually silenced Parliament; but the Elder Statesmen chimed in with a chorus of measured wisdom, of which Lord Oxford's was the promptest and Lord Balfour's the most reasoned. A strange feature was the total disappearance of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and the parlour Socialists. For the labour leaders brushed aside the solemn figures of their Front Bench. There was no sound from Mr. Sidney Webb, no word from Sir Patrick Hastings on a legal issue of vital concern to their supporters; and the House of Lords heard nothing from the Labour peers except the silence when Lord Haldane made no answer to an unpleasant question from Lord Birkenhead. Excepting Mr. Thomas, who alternately wrung his hands and clenched his fists, we saw nothing of the familiar constellations of the Labour firmament. Perhaps the weather was too bad for them.

Where are we now—a few weeks after the strike? The citizen has signally defeated the advocate of sectional loyalties; and we have established once again our right to be governed by Parliament rather than by King John or by King Charles—or even by Mr. Pugh. Since there are parts of the world where democracy was beginning to lose faith in itself, that victory may have its value beyond our shores. For ten whole days our politics were strictly logical; and in that time we established once again that majorities rule, that counting heads is far better than breaking them, that literal translations of German economics are hard to square with British facts, and that the Social Revolution is not coming just yet.

Which is the cause that few of us, very few of us indeed, are likely to forget in any hurry the cold spring of 1926.