 Mae gennymau yng Nghymru ar y 1926 erbyn y gweithio'r gweithio'r mewn ffordd y Llywodraeth Brytych yn deall. Felly, mae'n gwneud yn gweithio'r gweithio. Firstly, gyda'r ysgael a'r gweithio'r gweithio, a'r ddylai'r 4 miliwn arwain, mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio a'r 5.5 miliwn arwain. Rwy'n meddwl, mae'r gweithio'n gwneud hynny'n meddwl fel lawer o gweithio'r gweithio ar y Gweithio Rhywun Arferbarig, yn dod o'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio a'r roi wedi rhoi'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio ar y dylai'r gweithio'r gweithio ar gyfer roedd. Mae'n dweud o'n meddwl ffordd y Gweithio'r gweithio ar y gweithio, a gweithio'r gweithio ar gyflonau fath oherwydd arall, gyda ifanc o gymryd hon a chi'n ôl i'r prif mwyn porque diolch gwaith o'r hyn dechrau'r bwysig a fawr yn ei wneud o bwysig fel y cyfleidaint a'r gwahiaeth i gael â'r rhai gwasb iawn. Ac mae gael i'r rhai gwahanol caer o gyflawn, ond nid dyfod mwyo, ond yw'n ffordd i chi'n knewuno gyda'r rhai, wal 했어 ar y gynllun yr fan gweithio cymrydol i gweithio'r rhai gwahanol, Mae chi'n ystafell i chi'n let, ac mae cyfreidwyr yn ganu'r cymdeithasig yn ymweliadär, ond cyru sy'n ymddylu y glimbwyr y peth sydd yn gweithio'n gyfer y syniad ar y maen nhw, a'r busau bywau yn byw i'n fathddio. Rwy'n mynd i ein hordd o'r rhyw o'r lleoli iechydig y byddwch'r lleoli, yna newydd i'r rhaid i gyfrifio'r lleoli ac yn y gyfrifio'r lleoli dechreu. a'r ddwyliad diwedd y gweinio o'r lluniau ysgol yn teimlo'r gael gan'r ddweud o'r ddweudio'r lluniau ar y cyfyrdd yw'r ddweud ac yn dweud ystrydd ddweud. Ond, o'n gweithio'r ddaeth ag o'r lluniau, ond amser o'r ddechrau'r lluniau a'r ddweud o'r ddweud ystrydd ddweud yn y tyllus o'r ddweud. Ond, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud dw i'r holl gwabwch, yn ymgyrchu gymgyrchu ar y lleol, ac yn y byddwch ar y casgliadau sylfa i ddweud, ac mae hynny yn ymgyrchu'r sylfa, ein ysgolwch ac ysgolwch. Ond ein bod yn ympholio'r bobl ymgyrchu yma yn ymgyrchu, mae'r byddych yn ymgyrch ymgyrchu, ac mae'r bobl ysgolwch yn dweud yn ymgyrchu, ond yn ymgyrchu'r bobl yn ymgyrch, mae hynny yn ymgyrch i'r bobl'r bobl. Pan oedden nhw'n wedi'u gwybod lle ar draws y blwysgwashedd, ti'n cyffredig oedd y dhrom ni'n cyffredigau'n ddrom ni wedi gwybod. Ac dyn nhw'n gwybod cael bod y draddiau sy'n gweld y ddayl iawnl, ac mae'r dynach o'r ddafto gwybod llwyddoch chi ac oedden nhw'n ddeddiau. Mae haydydd i'r hyffredigau tref deall yn ysgrifant, ac mae oedden nhw'n gweld cefnodol ar ei ffordd. Wrth gyrddieith gennym ddiddordeb i'r bêlion hefyd azd14-1. Felly, mae'r cyffweithbeth yn aelod werthu. Aeth yn y disgynneud yn y Smid Ypholol. Rwyf ni'n ddechrau, mae'r cyffweithbeth ei adnir, rydyn ni'n leif erioed jugw heatedr ynglyn Genedd, gallewch chi'n casg o hyd o'r cyffweithbeth yma ffragl. Ond yw gofio'r cyffweith yn y cyffweithbeth gyda'r cyffweithbeth, a dyma'r cyffweithbeth mae'r cyffweithbeth yn eto'r gyffweithbeth The German Revolution of 1918, very turbulent events developing all over Europe, and these events had a massive impact on workers in Britain, such that there was a pre-revolutionary situation actually developing in early 1919. In January of that year, the government actually sent 10,000 troops into Glasgow to try and suppress a strike that was actually developing back then into general strike proportions. During those events in 1919, the Miners Federation, which was the union of the mine workers, this was a union that was 800,000 strong out of a total of 1.2 million miners. They were pressing for a 30% wage increase, a six-hour working day, and nationalisation of the mines under workers' control. Of course, these demands were rejected by the government, who had actually taken control over the mines during the First World War, although they were still privately owned. They went straight away in response, the miners threatened a strike. This was at the same time that other unions, which were in an alliance with the miners' union, this was called the Triple Alliance, it was forged between the mining railway and transport unions, they were also pushing their own demands in this period of intense class struggle. The government was therefore terrified of a general strike developing which they weren't actually prepared for. Therefore, the government manoeuvred, and they called a Royal Commission, which was supposed to investigate the mining industry, the findings of which would supposedly be binding on the government. This is quite an old tactic which had been used previously to quite some success in order to try and cut across the class struggle and diffuse such anger. This is important to note because it will be used again later in 1925 in the run-up to the strike. This actually had the desired effect. Within 17 days of calling this commission, the government came out and recommended higher wages, they recommended a seven-hour working day and the leaders of the miners' federation actually accepted this and they called the strike off. This, we can see, was clearly a result of the ruling class granting concessions in order to try and save the system as a whole in order to stop the movement getting out of hand. Of course, as Marxists, we fight for any progressive reforms of the working class but at the same time we point out the limited nature or temporary nature of these reforms under capitalism. This was certainly the case with these concessions granted to the miners which, as I said, were necessary in order for the ruling class to buy class peace. At a certain point, when the capitalist feels strong enough all these reforms will come under attack as they ultimately couldn't be afforded in the long run and that's precisely what happened soon after. So, in February 1921, the government handed back control over the mines to the original miners and immediately the miners went back on the offensive and they announced drastic cuts to the miners' wages in order to make them so-called economically viable. This time, however, despite the strike being actually called by this triple alliance it quickly broke down and this was due to a split at the tops of the unions about whether to accept a settlement and it ultimately very quickly collapsed and the alliance broke down leaving the miners to fight this struggle alone. Now, that breakdown became known as Black Friday and was a very important event in the British labour movement and really it was a very humiliating climb down for the whole trade union movement. The miners were eventually defeated a few months later and this led to a general offensive of the bosses against the working class and it began with the miners but actually six million workers subsequently had their wages cut. Now, the miners' wages were actually softened or cuts to their wages were softened by the granting of a £10 million government subsidy to the coal owners but all of these events had a big impact on consciousness. Many saw how the miners' struggle was connected to the general class struggle and many people drew the lesson that if united you could extract big concessions from the capitalist but if the movement was divided it would suffer a big defeat. At the same time as all of this there was a big shift within the trade union movements to the left. In 1921 the parliamentary committee of the TUC transformed itself into a greatly strengthened general council with powers to actually represent the movement as a whole but despite these defeats such as Black Friday the general mood within the rank and file in the working class remained very militant. We had as well the election of A.J. Cook who was a militant miners' leader from the Rhondda Valley in South Wales to the leadership of the miners' federation in 1924 and this man Cook described himself as a Marxist although he had actually broken with the Communist Party which he was a member of previously he's probably what we more termed like a centrist talking very left or even revolutionary in words but actually when it comes down to the crunch kind of acting in a reformist way but nevertheless he was a far more militant and a far better leader than all the others at that time and this was a reflection of a general leftward shift throughout the whole labour movement. You also at that time had the election of so-called left leaders or seemingly left leaders to the TUC general council so figures such as Purcell who is the leader of the furniture workers union who is the leader of the building trades union and a man called Swales who is of the engineers union as well as this you also had the development of the Communist Party which anyone who was in the previous session with Ben Glinewski would have heard a lot about they played a significant role in strengthening this movement they were excluded officially from affiliation to the Labour Party the affiliation was blocked by the Labour Party leadership but that didn't stop many Communist Party members and they began systematic work in the trade unions from 1923 as a result of the United Front tactic in the Communist International and the industrial committee of the Communist Party actually began to draw together the various rank-and-file movements in the trade unions beginning initially with the miners into a unified minority movement and they developed this national minority movement was launched officially in August 1924 and the aim of that was to transform the trade unions into militant fighting organisations which were to be a weapon for actually transforming society as a whole and not just for fighting for wage increases or shorter hours and they emphasised as part of this the development of factory committees and also trade councils the idea of which was to become central organising bodies for the class struggle in every area now with the fall of the Labour government in November 1924 this really opened the door to a full-on capitalist offensive at that time the ruling class really thought this is the moment now to claw back all the concessions that they've granted in the past and return British capitalism to profitability connected with that in 1925 the then Chancellor Winston Churchill announced a return of the pound to the gold standard and the reasoning behind this was that they were very keen to return London to its position as the world financial centre but in order to restore the value of the pound to a fixed rate with gold it meant that exports would become extremely uncompetitive on the world market unless the costs of production which included wages of course were enormously slashed so that's the general background to the period leading up to the general strike the ruling class knew that in order to come on this offensive and successfully attack the working class as a whole they needed to break the back of the miners union first and this as an aside was a lesson that was keenly understood by Thatcher and the Tories in the 80s and why they went after the miners then but all things came to a head on the 30th of June in 1925 when the coal owners gave a month's notice to terminate the existing contracts of the miners with drastic wage cuts of 13.5% an increase of the working day and the scrapping of national agreements now the next day the Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin he announced at a meeting with the miners union that all the workers in this country have got to take reductions in wages in order to put industry back on its feet this of course was rejected by the miners union at a special conference the day after and they referred the matter to the general council of the TUC which proceeded to appoint a committee of mine to negotiate with the coal owners and the government during this time there was an active campaign of militant miners supported as well by this national minority movement which had a key backing from the communist party and this pressure from below led to key sections of the trade union movement offering their support to the miners and I think a lot of the leaders in the trade unions were afraid that if they didn't actually come out and publicly back the miners' struggle that they themselves would lose leadership of this movement to the communists who were putting forward these kind of militant demands and as a result of that pressure a month later on the 30th of July there was a special conference of trade union executives which actually agreed to ratify an embargo on the movement of coal in the event that this lockout by the mine owners actually proceeded and this was agreed to by the committee of nine as well as the general council the result was that the very same day the Tory cabinet, the government were recalled for an emergency session and the government after quite a short deliberation decided to back off and offered a temporary retreat and they offered a nine month continuation of this subsidy to the mining industry in return for the mine owners calling off the lockout and again for the calling of a royal commission to investigate the reorganisation of the industry and this event became known as Red Friday in the movement in contrast to Black Friday that went a few years before now I think the government realised at the time that they weren't in a position to actually take on the working class and they needed more time in order to prepare for a more decisive showdown but the leaders of the Labour party simply just celebrated Red Friday as a victory they just called it simply a triumph of right and justice as if it was this kind of moral victory they didn't see that in fact the victory was obtained through struggle, class unity, mobilisation and organisation and that in fact it was only a temporary victory that the real task ahead was to prepare for the greatest showdown that was coming now the government on the other hand did in fact prepare and they prepared well almost immediately they set up to work on the organisation of the organisation for the maintenance of supplies, the OMS in other words the organisation for the scabbing of a strike and they've raped in various generals and lords and establishment figures to create what was in effect a paramilitary strike breaking force it was supposed to be private and voluntary but it had the full backing of the ruling class in terms of finances, resources and facilities and as part of this force it included the recruitment of thousands of so-called special constables middle class types who fancy themselves as policemen and they were equipped with truncheons and helmets and so on and they also incorporated most of the elements of British fascism at that time which was still a young force then they were really the shock troops of the far right and they were incorporated into this under the leadership of the retired Brigadier General the government made very detailed preparations for what to do in the event of a general strike and how to break it they divided England and Wales into ten divisions each with its own civil commissioner there was a separate scheme in Scotland but it was very similar the civil commissioners were generally junior government ministers and they were instructed to maintain law and order they were meant to control road transport, food and fuel supplies now one of these commissioners it was a man called Lord Winterton he said that we were given the further instructions that in the event of a complete breakdown to take drastic action of a comprehensive character now remember this was in the context of the revolutionary situations in Russia, Germany and elsewhere so you can see that the ruling class had this firmly in their minds for good measure as well the government also had arrested twelve leaders of the communist party and sentenced them to between six to twelve months in prison their idea was of course to try and paralyse the party to private of leadership and divide the labour movement but in reality it had the opposite effect there was a mass campaign of solidarity throughout the whole labour movement and a big increase in communist party membership as a result but what was actually done by the general council in order to prepare for a strike well almost nothing in fact the outlook of the general council was to assume that they would simply just use this in order to negotiate a new settlement with the government and they put all of their hopes into this royal commission that was being prepared and actually told workers to hold back from struggle and to not worry about preparing just wait for the royal commission to publish its findings in September you also had the strengthening of the right wing within the TUC the congress of the TUC elected a man called Jimmy Thomas who is an extreme right wing leader of the National Union of Railwaymen he was elected back onto the general council along with another reformist leader Ernst Bevin and this meant that the general council was even more shifted to the right later on in March the royal commission finally published its findings it was known as the Samuel report after Sir Herbert Samuel who was the man leading this the aim was to divide the labour movement like really giving the right wing leaders an excuse to sell out the movement and say look we've got this royal commission we've just got to use that as a basis for negotiations the report rejected the nationalisation of the mines and it proposed that they should be reorganised in the future under private ownership but really the key point of the report was that wages had to be decreased now and that the government's subsidy to the miners had to come to an end immediately as well as the increase in the hours of the working day now this would have been clearly a disaster for the miners nevertheless the labour leadership kind of reacted very enthusiastically to this report Ramsay McDonald who was the leader of the labour party hailed it positively as a landmark report the industrial committee which was set up by the general council and dominated by the right wing urged that this report be used for the basis of negotiations to bring this dispute with the miners to an end but the miners federation to their credit remained firm and it stuck to their demands they were not a penny off the pay and not a second on the day and they were in absolutely no mood to compromise with the miners they were prepared to take strike action by themselves if necessary in order to win these demands and remember at this time miners' wages were already at semi-starvation levels they weren't prepared to accept any further cuts but still the TUC general council did nothing really to prepare for a strike and this was as fundamentally they didn't want one they thought still that they can negotiate with the government and that this threatened general strike was simply just a kind of tool to add pressure onto the ruling class and they thought it would again be like the situation in 1919 where even just the calling of a strike would be enough to kind of win all their demands but really they hadn't appreciated that the fundamental objective situation had changed of course the negotiations became deadlocked Ernst Bevan, who is on the general council he actually omitted after all these events that the general council only called a meeting to prepare what to do for the event of a breakdown in negotiations three days before the lockout notices from the mine owners were due to come into effect and that they actually had no plans at all to run a general strike everything came to a head on the 1st of May at a conference of trade union executives where the general council gave its report to the executives on what the situation was the fact that the negotiations were completely deadlocked and the conference took a vote which was to place the powers in the hands of the general council and to conduct a general strike and this vote was won overwhelmingly it was done on a delegate basis the delegates in favour of this represented 3.65 million workers compared to those opposing it 49,911 the general council therefore found itself kind of stumbling into a general strike that it actually itself didn't actually want to leave even then it still thought that it could negotiate a settlement with the government over the next few days and that the strike vote itself again was still just enough to put enough pressure on the government to back down and you can see this Jimmy Thomas, this right wing leader on the general council, he said I suppose my usual critics will say that I was almost groveling and it's true and all my long experience I never begged and pleaded as I have done today he said not just because I believed in the cause of the minus but because I believed in my bones that it was my duty to the country that I involved in now clearly his idea of duty to the country didn't of course mean duty to the working class of the country but it meant to the capitalist of the country Ramsey MacDonald again who said is the leader of the Labour Party he said at that time just as it was about to break he said I don't like general strikes but honestly what can be done and that really summed up the position of the Labour leadership at that time the position that the reformists found themselves in against their wishes but this general strike had gone over their heads and now they were having to lead it reluctantly now negotiations were still ongoing with the government when events were really brought to a head by an unofficial strike of print workers at the Daily Mail and they'd refused to print a provocative anti-union editorial titled The King and Country now the Tory Prime Minister Baldwin he feigned complete outrage of this and he demanded immediately that the TUC denounce this kind of wildcat strike of the print workers as well as calling off the general strike immediately now of course the TUC leaders very quickly repudiated the Daily Mail strike and said that they wanted to that was a mistake and that they were going to put pressure on them to end it but when they rushed back to Downing Street to inform the government of this they were simply told that the Prime Minister had gone to bed and couldn't be disturbed they were completely snubbed and really by then it was clear the government wanted the strike and it was just using this as a pretext and it was too late to really call it off from the workers leaders the wheels for it were already in motion and Jimmy Thomas he's reported to have come away from Downing Street at that time literally in tears and clearly he feared the general strike way more than the Tories did so he's been preparing for this kind of showdown for months and Jimmy Thomas said in any challenge to the constitution God help Britain unless the government won now with leaders like that who needs enemies so despite the complete lack of preparation by the leadership the response from below was incredible it was actually overwhelming at midnight on the 3rd of May which is when the strike officially began there was only three unions out of 1,100 which had refused to answer the strike call and the industrial heartlands of Britain were brought to a complete standstill the railways and public services were brought to a complete halt just some figures in London not one of the 4,000 buses which were run by the London general London bus company were actually running that next day only nine trams out of 2,000 actually moved anywhere and only 15 out of 315 tube trains were on the move and these were only for very short distances the docks across the country were completely silent only the national sailors and finance union actually openly scabbed the strike but a number of the branches at the rank and file level went ahead with the strike anyway against the instructions of their leadership the volunteer scab force of the OMS proved completely ineffectual these middle class professionals and students were largely incapable of actually driving the buses and trains many ended up crashing to much comedy and most ended up trying to work on the docks but they only succeeded in getting anything moving towards the end of the strike and this was under incredibly heavy military protection you'd never actually seen working class action on this scale before we've only been dreamt of by workers for many decades this was the first time that the working class began to actually feel their real power and act as solidly as one unified class now of course the general council was not expecting this at all there's many reports that they said we have from all over the country reports that surpassed all our expectations they said the difficulty of the general council has been to keep men in what we might call the second line of defence rather than call them out now this idea of a second line of defence is worth mentioning this was actually a mistake it shows the half hearted reformist attitude to the strike rather than going all out and calling the working class out to paralyse the country the general council adopted this tactic of just calling some layers out initially and keeping others in reverse bringing more and more into the dispute as a bargaining position against the government so initially the workers were out on strike of course the 1.2 million miners were locked out they weren't technically on strike but in support of them you had workers from all forms of transport you had the dockers, you had printing trades the iron and steel workers metal and heavy chemical workers as well as building workers or with the exception of those who are working on house building or hospital extensions but it didn't include some key sections like shipping, shipbuilders power workers the post office which at that time included the telephone exchanges engineers, electricians as well as some others and of course a wide layer of workers responded to the call actually many villages who had never seen a strike in their life suddenly coming to the forefront of this struggle and some inspired people by the strength of this movement but large numbers of unorganised workers who weren't in a union actually joined the strike nobody wanted to be that person who was scaping this movement by the second day you saw this development of councils of action they sprung into effect all over the country and they combined elected delegates from trade councils the trade unions and local labour parties and the idea was that they acted as district headquarters of the strike and they coordinated the activities of the strike on the ground in each area and these were really in most cases organisations that were moribund or even non-existing in many places they were completely transformed by the heat of the struggle the councils organised picketing communications the granting of permits for transport and other things and even workers defence corps in some areas the strength to be fair varied across the country but in the industrial heartlands some of them were very strong and in effect they were the embryo organs of a new form of workers power with each day of the strike these councils of action became stronger and stronger better organised more general in their scope and this is a report from a sheet metal worker in Ashton he said employers of labour were coming cap in hand begging for permission to do certain things or to be more correct to allow their workers to perform certain customary operations he said most of them turned away empty after a most humiliating experience for one and all were put for a stern questioning just to make them realise that we and not they were the sort of the earth now in some areas like Northumberland and Durham in the North East where the strike was the strongest the councils of action were so strong that government representatives were forced to go to these councils of action and actually plead for permits and actually were refused and they said the workers were beginning to take power into their own hands and this is something you see developing nearly all indefinite general strikes or revolutionary situations or mass movements which is the beginnings of a situation of dual power and that's something that both the ruling class as well as these reformist leaders at the time understood to one degree or another the ruling class and the government knew that they had to take whatever measures necessary in order to defeat the strike and they were confident that they could do this and that the strike really was the first step in a general onslaught against the working class as a whole but the reformists were terrified of this developing dual power they feared control of the strike and they were actually passing from their hands and they were terrified of revolutionaries actually becoming the leading factor in the strike and taking the movement all the way and instead of strengthening the strike these reformist leaders kept it limited while at the same time falling over themselves to do a deal with the government in order to bring the strike to an end now you can see the contrasting measures the approach is taken by the government and their state on the one hand and the trade union leaders on the other the state had created the OMS they prepared this for nine months in advance in order to battle the strike is this was immediately incorporated fully into the apparatus of the state and the OMS scabs were told that they had the full authority to do whatever it takes to defeat the strike in contrast on the worker side you had this council of action which were not prepared for already in advance except from initiatives from the communist party their success really came down to the magnificent capacity for the working class actually to organise and struggle now as I said some of these were very powerful but all of them were limited in their scope and they were hampered by very vague or limited instructions from the general council of the TUC which gave very little authority to the councils to actually make decisions themselves or really take control of their areas and it meant many days were actually wasted by hundreds of councils having to send their messengers down to TUC headquarters in London for interpretation of the TUC headquarters in London for interpretation or clarity over the orders that they were receiving and it took them days to set up regional and district structures and that hamstrung a lot of efforts for effective mass picketing there were many complaints from workers that transport permits were just being handed out far too freely to the bosses and it was undermining the power of the strike the government very quickly set up its own propaganda paper called the British Gazette and this was edited directly by Winston Churchill it was aided by support from all the millionaire press particularly the Morning Post the Daily Mail and the Daily Express who all offered the use of their printing presses and skilled scabs in order to get these papers out and the print works where they actually printed this were surrounded by an army of police in order to protect it from pickers and from the start the main editorial line was that this strike was a threat to the constitution to the British Empire to law and order to democracy, to the family and to religion and just on that point for good measure the head of the catholic church actually came out and declared the strike to be a sin against God of course you know it has had the BBC being used as the propaganda agency of the ruling class which it is there was non-stop attacks on strikers appeals for scabs, fake reports of mass defections and so on the British worker which is this paper here which was very kindly brought in today by Comrade Terry McPartlin and this was set up by the TUC and his key message was actually proposing restraint it emphasised repeatedly that the strike was simply an industrial dispute and no threat to the constitution and you can see the same message to all workers the general council of the TUC congress wishes to emphasise that this is an industrial dispute it expects every member taking part to be exemplary in this conduct and not give any opportunity for police interference the outbreak of any disturbances would be very damaging to the prospects of a successful termination of this dispute and there's pages and pages of this kind of line Puget editor is saying this is not a threat to the constitution and so on it plays such a role that the editor of the times in a very establishment paper congratulated this the editors of this for being a moderating influence on the course of the strike the state took immediate measures as well to prevent the communist party from printing their own paper the workers daily even before the strike started the police raided their headquarters and smashed up the printing presses and instead they managed a very great difficulty to produce a strike sheet called the workers bulletin the police throughout the strike actually resorted to arresting anybody they found selling it and at one point even anybody just in possession of a copy of this paper could face between six weeks to two months in prison and that leads me on to the role of the police and the military the police arrested thousands of strikers during the course of the strike miners and communists were particular targets and they used tens of thousands of these special constables who were often sent to areas far away from their homes and given licence really to go on the rampage against the working class there was heavy use of baton charges as well as raids on communist party offices, homes the seizure of duplicators and printing materials and so on the ruling class brought in the military I think really initially more to intimidate the working class than anything else as I think really the ruling class would have thought twice before actually using the military to attack the workers so I think they would have been terrified of actually the military splitting along class lines but nevertheless all military leave was cancelled two battalions were dispatched to Liverpool as well as another two to surround the London docks and they were supported with cavalry and armed cars battleships were anchored in the Mersey the Clyde of Swansea, Cardiff and other cities Hyde Park was turned into a kind of armed camp but in contrast the TEC made no real effort in fact no effort at all to organise workers defence corps in fact they actually positively argued against it the general councillor instead was doing his utmost to keep workers in home rather than joining the pickets and one appeal from the general council which I've actually found in this paper here but I'll read it off my nose just for clarity the appeal said advice workers to keep smiling, refuse to be provoked get into your garden look after the wife and kiddies I said if you've not got a garden go out into the country, parks and playgrounds do not hang around the centre of the city and here this is advice that could have come straight from Winston Churchill and the British Gazette they instead tried to organise football matches to keep strikers away from any kind of militant action but of course this advice wasn't listened to by many workers in many areas the councillors of action did indeed organise workers defence corps often on communist party initiative in Meffill in the 5th Coalfield after police charges on mass pickets and these baton charges the council of action reorganised the defence corps they increased it from 150 to 700 volunteers half of whom had actually served in the First World War and they proceeded to march through the town in military formation armed with pick shafts after that the police didn't dare touch the strikers again and that's really a key lesson for the left that it is possible to defeat the power of the capitalist state if we're suitably organised and determined now of course the government was alarmed by these developments but they knew that the real way to defeat the strike was to actually go after its leaders and they used the full machinery of the state to soften them up on the third day of the strike the Attorney General gave a speech to the House of Commons declaring the whole strike illegal and he said that every trade union leader who advised and promoted this course of action is liable in damages to the uttermost farving of his personal possessions they also used the press and the military to suggest that the government was preparing for civil war and indeed it was and after a few days the government even threatened the arrest of the entire TUC leadership when we say that bourgeois democracy is simply a screen for the dictatorship of capital you can really see this very clearly throughout the course of the strike and as I mentioned both the government and the TUC leadership understood that a general strike in this sense really poses the question of power by who runs society and either the working class will move forward and take power or it will suffer a crushing defeat and the government therefore took whatever actions necessary it thought to hang on to power whilst the TUC leadership did everything they could to make sure that the strike didn't challenge this power and this really is summed up by another quote from Jim Thomas who I said was one of the key leaders on the TUC general council he said what I dreaded about this strike more than anything else was this if by chance it should have got out of the hands of those who would be able to exercise some control every sane man knows what would have happened I thank God that it never did but that fear was always in our minds therefore on the third day of the strike you had Sir Herbert Samuel who was the man who previously led this royal commission and he was called back from his nice holiday in Italy to immediately begin secret negotiations with Jimmy Thomas and again they used his previous Samuel report as a basis for negotiations now after days of negotiations the general council agreed to endorse this new Samuel memorandum which was simply a rehash of his report from 1925 and this contained no concessions from the coal owners whatsoever and he said it still involved huge cuts to wages and longer hours but Samuel had personally given apparently a vague and undocumented hint that this subsidy to the mine owners may be continued but this Samuel memorandum was agreed behind the backs of the miners' leaders who knew nothing about it and they were effectively sold out by the general council now on the eighth day despite this Samuel memorandum having no authority whatsoever from the government the leaders proposed to call off the strike and of course the miners' leaders were furious about this they said this proposal contained nothing for what we've been fighting for all along and has no guarantees that this lockout would be actually ended or any guarantees at all against victimisation but Thomas said well you may not trust my word but will you not trust the word of a British gentleman i. Samuel who's been the governor of Palestine now of course the miners were absolutely right not to trust this British gentleman as to prove subsequently by the events the next day on the 12th of May the general council unconditionally surrendered to the prime minister without any terms without any written statement or demands for any guarantees and in contradiction to the miners' leaders who were adamant that they wanted to continue the struggle immediately an announcement was made on the BBC that the strike had been called off and that it was an unconditional surrender but as predicted by the miners the lockout notices were not withdrawn there was no suggestion of any continued subsidy for wages and any further negotiations and this news came as a complete shock to millions of workers because actually at that point the strike was actually at its most strongest precisely at the point where it was being called off and actually 24 hours after the official surrender the number of strike is actually increased by 100,000 and this included railwaymen dockers, engineers and other sections who renewed the strike in order to prevent it from ending up as a complete route and they were attempting to resist enormous victimisation which the bosses began on earnest and faced with that growing out anger Baldr and the prime minister announced that employers must take back workers without any victimisation but in reality hundreds of thousands were indeed victimised or made unemployed or were taken back on worse terms and conditions the miners actually held out until the end of November but eventually there were staff back to work they were forced to accept all of the conditions of the owners without any concessions whatsoever but going back to the actual sell out the initial shock of this surrender was followed by an intense sense of betrayal there's a report from the Wakefield strike committee they said that the position on the 12th of May was that there was no sign of weakening on the contrary the spirit was magnificent and the consternation in dismay prevailed when the news that the strike had been called off had been confirmed this sense of betrayal was particularly felt against the so-called lefts on the general council who many workers had illusions in it wasn't simply that these lefts had remained silent or it's just simply been numbered by those on the right they actually played an active role themselves in this betrayal so Persa was directly involved in negotiations with the government to bring it to an end Hicks was actually foremost in rejecting a massive donation of £1.25 million raised by Russian workers and he actually referred to this donation as Dam Soviet Gold and many couldn't understand the actions of these men you know people understood the betrayal of people like Thomas and the right wing but many people thought that the lefts were on their side and it leads us to this question of well why did these left wing people betray Trotsky actually remarked that actually betrayal is inherent in the politics of reformism and this isn't a question of like a kind of conscious betrayal we're sure that many of these people are very sincere in what they're doing but it's not really a question of their sincerity but it's a political question it's fundamentally all reformists including the left reformists do not think that workers can take power and run society themselves they've got no perspective at all of a fundamental transformation of society they think that society can only be changed gradually bit by bit through the framework of the existing society and that you know essentially this means just appealing to the capitalist to be nicer and to be more humane to workers but many of these people are terrified of actually embarking on a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist state which they see as all powerful they've got no confidence of winning such a struggle no confidence in the working class to create an even stronger power than the capitalist state or no confidence in splitting the army and the police and winning them on class lines and therefore when it comes to the crunch they became more scared of the natural revolution developing that this kind of movement of the workers getting out of their own hands then they do of selling out the movement to the capitalist and you've seen this time and time again throughout history and always with tragic consequences now I've got to sum up just a very brief word on the role of the communist party there's loads more that could be said about it but even from before the strike it would have been warning for months of the coming struggle and for workers to get prepared and during the course of the strike it nearly doubled its membership from 6,000 to over 10,000 but in many areas it actually formed the backbone of these councils of action but ultimately it failed to fully rise to the challenge of the strike to expose and replace the reformist leadership and it actually helped foster illusions in these so-called left trade union leaders illusions which they've been building up for over a year and in a large part that was due to the formation of the Anglo-Russian trade union committee which was in theory a knighted front between Russian and British trade unions for the Stalinist leadership of the communist international uncritical support of these left trade union leaders who they themselves had illusions in as offering a point of support for the Soviet Union and from the agreement of this pact in 1925 the activities of the communist party markedly changed they watered down their criticisms of the leaders and ended up just promoting these left ones and therefore performed throughout the strike that she subordinated its own independent activity to just playing the role of loyal trade unionists rather than of revolutionaries and it limited itself to just calling on the leaders of the TUC to carry out a left policy rather than strengthening the rank and file to carry out this challenge to the leadership itself and once the betrayal took place although there was a change in their in their material they put forward for a change of leadership they'd actually done nothing concretely build for and prepare for this challenge to take place had they pursued an energetic and independent policy they could have emerged from the general strike enormously strengthened even in the event of this defeat but as it turned out they couldn't escape part of the blame for the defeat particularly this sense of betrayal against the lefts which the communist party had helped to promote so although the communist party continued to grow until October the defeat of the miners in November had a very profound effect and many many drifted away from the party and it never really kind of or it didn't recover for many many years now after the strike I'll sum up the very reformist leaders who let us betrayal simply declared never again they said they tried to theorise the defeat as inevitable for all general strikes they said that they're impossible to win and dangerous to try and therefore shouldn't be done again they tried to put the blame for this defeat anywhere but themselves general strike really is the need to prepare for an advance to understand the conditions that give rise to these kind of mass political strikes so that we're not taken by surprise by them there are of course different kinds of general strike ones of a limited duration like a one day or two day general strike which really are more of a form of protest but an indefinite general strike like these events really posed the question of power and for that you need a revolutionary organisation that can lead such a strike to victory and that cannot be improvised on the spot you need to prepare for that in advance so that's what we're trying to do here and that's why I'd encourage you to join us in that task