Review: The General Strike: A Revolution Betrayed?. Platform Films, April 2026. Running time: 73 minutes.
This is a fascinating, nostalgic film, well worth watching repeatedly; it contains so much. It is based on a re-discovered documentary from the early 1970s that uses eye-witness accounts by people who lived through the devastating events of the General Strike and the Great Depression. The eyewitnesses include Leslie Paul of Lewisham Council of Action and Walter Citrine, TUC General Secretary.
The press release says the strike was ‘betrayed by union leaders’ and ‘the film contains vital lessons for present day trade unionists’. Norman Thomas of Platform Films says, ‘watching the film you get a real sense of how close the strike came to success’. However, the strike was doomed from the start.
To the complacent, cynical, comfortable men of the Labour and Trade Union movement, revolution was anathema. They were patriots to a man. Their betrayal had begun when they had refused to make common cause with the revolutionary Irish in 1913 in Dublin. ‘The same leaders were to betray the struggles of the British working class right up to the defeat of the General Strike’ (Ireland: The Key to The British Revolution. p38. David Reed 1984). When the Simon Commission on Tuesday 6 May declared the strike illegal, the TUC were relieved to know they would not face unlimited fines or jail if they gave up.
Norman Thomas says, ‘The film vividly illustrates how the strike was opposed by the full force of the British establishment’. The bourgeois classes were united against the ‘menace to liberty’, the threat to civil society of revolution and civil war. They had economic and political power, the Press, the Emergency Powers Act (EPA) of 1921, reservists, special forces, machine guns posted at pit heads, the patriotic scabs of the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS), the Territorial Army, battle ships in all the river estuaries from Scotland to Cardiff. Fascists were enrolled as Special Constables. The Catholic Church denounced the strike as sinful. The newly formed BBC broadcast fake news to confuse and misdirect people.
The working class and the Communist Minority Movement were less well prepared, nonetheless the film depicts the creative and militant strategies they were forced to adopt. Miners’ leader A J Cook stockpiled food to hand out. There were soup kitchens, Poor Relief and Public Assistance. They stockpiled stones to pelt blacklegs as they left the mines. They had tramline saboteurs, the direct actionists of the day. They had meetings, conferences, demonstrations, and marches. They refused to print an offensive edition of the Daily Mail. They had their Councils of Action, a product of the Trades Councils. Churchill called them ‘British Soviets’. They had their own press: The St Pancras Bulletin, The Northern Light, The Spark and the CPGB publications: Workers Weekly and Workers’ Dreadnought. The TUC had the milder The British Worker. Working class youths made bonfires of the government’s British Gazette and Churchill’s Morning Post. They were loathed by the labour aristocracy, and their activities were outlawed under the EPA.
The union leadership was in favour of class collaboration and compromise from the start. When it had discussed nationalisation with Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1919, it had meekly requested ‘a degree of workers’ control’. Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the first (minority) Labour government, stated, ‘Socialism is the idea of the political state acting more and more in cooperation with the industrial state.’ Labour MP JR Clynes concurred, ‘We ask for the cooperation of all classes’. MacDonald then secured the expulsion of 12 communists from the Labour Party at its Conference in October 1924, and their imprisonment a year later for sedition, to prove Labour’s worth to the ruling class.
There is little sense in the film of the vast wealth of the British Empire and the social divisions it created; but all the classes are there, starkly exemplified by individuals. There is a brief glimpse of inter-imperialist rivalry which benefited the miners with higher wages when France occupied the Ruhr in 1923 when the supply of German reparations dried up and British exports of coal rose to record levels.
The communists concentrated on bread-and-butter issues, ignored the need to struggle against opportunism, lost sight of the existence of the labour aristocracy and the split in the working class and thought only to change the leadership (see FRFI 141 and 311). When Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin posed the strike in terms of state power, the TUC panicked. As one eyewitness observes, ‘They had got themselves in a revolutionary position and they weren’t revolutionaries.’ Clynes said he was not in fear of the capitalist class: ‘The only class I fear is my own’.
There was undoubtedly a revolutionary feeling in the working class, symbolised by footage of the pit ponies rolling in the fields, temporarily freed from the darkness and mud underground. Spirits were high. When the Labour Party expelled the communists, membership increased. When the strike was betrayed by the TUC on 12 May, another 100,000 came out on the following day. The miners continued the strike for seven months until starvation drove them back to work for whatever wages were offered.
What are the lessons if the debacle is not to be repeated? In ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder, Lenin tells us to show ‘the utmost flexibility in our tactics’. ‘We do not and cannot know which spark … will kindle the conflagration … we must, therefore, with the aid of our new communist principles, set to work to “stir up” all and sundry’. We need to build an organisation that takes itself seriously and poses the question of state power, even before, and especially before, conditions are ripe for its realisation.
At the end Walter Citrine says, ‘It (the Strike) ended fairly, in a very British manner’. The Labour Party is excused with the typical ‘left’ myth: ‘unable to reconcile the aspirations of its founders with the requirements of capitalism (it) reached what appeared to be the pinnacle of reformism in 1931 with the return of a National Government’. The TUC is more accurately depicted: ‘The retreat of the General Council opened a new era of collaboration between the employer and the state. From having been the highest expression of organised labour the TUC became almost imperceptibly an essential part of the bureaucracy of government’.
The abiding image is of the coal pickers on the slag heaps and the haunting wind of the soundtrack.
