How far would you agree that government policy towards the mining industry was mainly responsible for the outbreak of the General Strike in 1926?

by vikramm95 (student)

The General Strike in 1936 is the only time in British history where a critical mass of the labour force of the country has decided to strike in favour of one union. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) supported the miner’s right to strike after a proposed cut in their wages and increase in their hours caused outrage. However, the causes of the General Strike are much more complicated than this, with government policy playing an important role as well as the state of the economy and the coal industry at the time.

The government had nationalised the mines during WWI but this had ended in 1921 when they refused to follow the recommendations of the 1919 Sankey Report which advocated the ‘principle of state ownership’. This was against the will of the miners who thought that if the government controlled the mines, there would be more standardised wages and working conditions. So the decision to return the mines to state ownership in 1921 created some underlying animosity between the miners and government prior to the strike. On ‘Red Friday’, Baldwin introduced a subsidy so that the wages of miners would not fall until the Samuel Commission, which had just been set up to find a solution to the mining crisis, had time to report. This pleased the miners, some of whom thought they had won against the government because their wages were not cut. However, it soon became clear that Baldwin’s subsidy had merely bought the government time to prepare for a General Strike. The subsidy was clearly not economically sustainable, but it prevented a strike in the short term and gave Baldwin time to prepare over the next 9 months until the Samuel Report was published. Baldwin could use the Emergency Powers Act of 1920 which enabled him to take emergency measures to stop threats to the supply of food and fuel. The miners and many others were opposed to this act because they thought it gave the government too much power to physically intervene whenever they saw fit. Thus, Baldwin’s willingness to use it further heightened tensions.

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Baldwin is often accused of failing to take the opportunity offered by the Samuel Report to resolve the problem. However, this accusation seems unfair as the mineowners had rejected the part urging them to improve conditions and the miners had refused to accept a cut in wages, famously saying ‘not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’. Therefore, the recommendations of the Samuel Report were useless because they clearly could not be met. The only real way Baldwin could have prevented the strike would been to have continued with the subsidies, but not only was this uneconomic, the Samuel Report had also specifically advised against doing this, so it would have been seen as a huge loss for the government. Baldwin is also accused of not doing enough to negotiate with the TUC to bring the Strike to a quick and peaceful end, with Seaman saying that Baldwin refusing to talk to them was ‘the most provocative action taken by any participant in the sequence of events up to that moment’. However, Baldwin was determined not to give way to any of the miners’ demands so it is not surprising that he did not want to meet with them as it would have been pointless because the miners would never have accepted a cut in their wages. The Conservatives also did not want him to negotiate with the TUC which would have been important to Baldwin because he must have been concerned about retaining the unity of the Conservatives. Baldwin’s refusal to talk to the TUC may have been one of the most significant triggers for the strike, as the TUC felt they had no other choice, but it certainly was not completely unreasonable.

The state of the economy was also an important factor that caused the General Strike as it happened during a tough economic period for Britain. The staple industries e.g. coal, steel and textiles were shrinking and were struggling to compete internationally. Coal in particular was very inefficient and they had failed to modernise to a similar level to countries such as the US and Poland with 80% of British coal being mined by hand. The heavy use of coal during WWI meant that rich seams had been depleted, making it more expensive to mine coal in many existing coalmines. During the war, much more coal had been used domestically and Britain had exported much less leaving other countries to fill the gap, in 1913 they exported 94million tons compared to only 36 million tons in 1921. After the French stopped occupying the Ruhr in 1924, there was a large increase in the amount of German coal available on the international market. Thus the demand for British coal was falling dramatically, with it being so much more expensive than coal from Germany, Poland and the USA. It was particularly expensive because the coal industry in Britain was comprised of many small inefficient mines which meant that they could not achieve economies of scale. Demand for coal in general was falling anyway because oil and electricity were being used increasingly and advancements in other industries such as steel manufacturing meant that they required much less coal to make the same amount of steel.

Conditions in mines were terrible, with one miner being killed every 6 hours on average. The pits were dirty and unhygienic with coal related diseases being rife. Cave-ins were common and there were no doctors or nurses to deal with the medical issues of the miners’. The decline of the coal industry in Britain was a hugely significant cause of the strike because it led to declining profits for mineowners which in turn led to them controversially decreasing the wages of their workers. Although many accuse the mineowners of being too concerned with immediate profits and not re-investing enough into their mines to modernise them, if the demand for British coal had not fell so much mine owners would not have had to decrease the wages of the miners, and arguably there would not have been support for the General Strike.

While government policy, including Baldwin’s stubbornness, was undoubtedly a critical reason for the outbreak of the strike in 1926, Britain’s backwards methods of mining and the global decline in demand for coal were far more important. THese led to the fall in wages of the miners which was the main trigger for the strike as the bad conditions alone were not enough for the TUC to have supported the miners. Therefore, it appears that decline in the coal industry was the most important cause of the General Strike, with government policy playing a smaller role.