The General Strike, wrote Robin Page Arnot in Labour Monthly in May 1956, “was the greatest event in the last 100 years of the British working class.” We could now say that it was the greatest event ever. Many valiant battles have been fought by British workers over the last 70 years, but nothing has reached the scale and scope of what happened in 1926.

Events are taking place to mark the Centenary this year. The TUC has devoted a whole section of its website to it (https://www.tuc.org.uk/GeneralStrike100years). “Although”, says the TUC, “the strike did not achieve its immediate aims it left a lasting impact on politics, unions and workers’ rights in Britain. … It reinforced the importance of trade unions as a collective voice for workers, [and] sparked debates about workers’ rights, industrial relations and the role of the state that continue today.”

That puts rather too fine a gloss on it. In the aftermath of the Strike, the miners were left to fight alone for another six months – and their ultimate defeat left a mark on the rest of the trade union movement. By their militancy and unity, the miners had been able to inspire the rest of the trade union movement, and were not able to resume that role until the strikes of 1972 and 1974. It is little wonder that the Thatcher government moved to neutralise them by destroying the coal industry altogether.

Furthermore, immediately after the end of the Strike, there was widespread victimisation in some trades such as rail and printing. Overall, a mood of defensiveness and demoralisation set in and trade union membership dropped. The government moved to exploit the defeat by introducing the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act 1927, which made it against the law to engage in mass picketing leading to “intimidation”, in secondary action and in any strike whose purpose was to coerce the government of the day directly or indirectly. Incitement to participate in an unlawful strike was made a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment for up to two years; and the attorney general was empowered to sequester the assets and funds of unions involved in such strikes. Trade union members had to contract-in to any political levy which their union made on their behalf, and civil service unions were banned from affiliating to the TUC and having “political” objectives. It took until 1946 for the Act to be repealed, and of course the Tories later came back again to reintroduce similar measures, first under Edward Heath and then under Thatcher.

Ideologically, the TUC and most union leaders moved away at the time not just from industrial action of a political character but from mass trade union action in general, and went on to embrace Mondism, which was essentially class collaborationism. We still suffer from the legacy of that today.

If we are going to honour properly the struggles of the workers in 1926, then we have to examine what was really going on and why the TUC General Council betrayed the miners after 9 days, and draw appropriate conclusions regarding class struggle, the state and the need to fight for socialism. And, for correct conclusions to be drawn, we need to recognise that there are two Centenaries – not just the General Strike but the Miners’ Lockout too.

Much has been written about the Strike, and new books on it are appearing this year. For this edition of Communist Review we rely in part on the reflections and analysis, written many years ago, of Party members who were themselves active in the Strike and in fighting the Miners’ Lockout.

First, we reproduce the aforementioned article by Robin Page Arnot. In his graphic account he remarks that “Though the miners were the first to be attacked, it was understood throughout the ranks of organised labour that they would not be the last.” The fatal defect, he says, was one of leadership; and the lessons are that “The unity and strength of the working class, … if combined with the necessary fighting leadership, can end the domination of the ruling class generally, and lead the whole people along the road to socialism.” Later in this edition of CR, we include reminiscences of his direct involvement in the struggle of 1926.

In other articles, from 50 years ago, Jack Cohen looks at the battle between Marxism and reformism before and during the General Strike, showing how the General Council regarded the Strike as nothing more than an industrial dispute, and were geared to the traditional search for a ‘formula’ in which both sides had ‘rights’; while Mick Jenkins draws on the long traditions of general strikes in Britain to give a background to the development of councils of action before and during the 1926 Strike itself, discussing the ‘dual power’ that existed, and describing the role that trades councils need to develop to have the potential to become councils of action in future.

Also from 50 years ago, John Foster illustrates the dilemma faced by the ruling class in the early 1920s, due to the rise of a mass Labour Party, and the strategy chosen of ‘constitutionalising’ Labour in order to prevent a working class turn towards revolution. He shows how this strategy was employed during the General Strike itself, with soft rather than hard tactics and “labour’s own right-wing leaders being manoeuvred into a position where they effectively replaced local employers as the main purveyors of capitalist assumptions among working people”.

For our final article from 1976, and to give due attention to the Miners’ Lockout, we reprint George Short’s account of how the miners fought on valiantly when abandoned. We couple that with a much more recent reprint, Sue Bruley’s account of the role of women during the 1926 Lockout in South Wales. There has been very little written on women’s activities in the General Strike and the Lockout, and Sue does reveal the very different male-female gender roles at the time, contrasting them with the activities of Women Against Pit Closures in the 1984-85 strike.

For our final article Nick Moss includes in his Soul Food column a review of poems celebrating the General Strike Centenary from Culture Matters. His title is very much to the point.

Several of our contributors from 50 or 70 years ago end on  a positive note. This may jar today, as the labour movement has moved backwards since then: key industries have been destroyed, along with close-knit communities like the pit villages. Trade union membership has dropped by over half, and we still have restrictive anti-union legislation, despite the Employment Rights Act 2025. Exploitation is much more masked nowadays than in the past, and consequently there has been a drop in class consciousness, even if, over the last few years, there has been a welcome return of trade union consciousness. How to rebuild class consciousness should form part of the lessons of 1926. The Morning Star conference on April 11 was a good start to that process. Building class politics is the key to addressing every crisis we face.