The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  From Asquith’s viewpoint this was fighting talk, and matters escalated when Lloyd George refused to attend a Liberal shadow cabinet meeting on 10 May, and instead sent a letter which contained the following:

  I … cannot see my way to join in declarations which condemn the General Strike while refraining from criticism of the government, who are equally, if not more, responsible; and I certainly think that if we support the government in an absolute refusal to negotiate until the General Strike is called off, the struggle may be a prolonged one and the damage to the nation may well be irreparable … I prefer the liberal policy of trusting to conciliation rather than to force.127

  The letter caused a sensation. Asquith in reply in effect accused Lloyd George of sulking and of having cast in his lot with ‘the clericals’, and an acrimonious correspondence ensued.128 Asquith’s supporters started a whispering campaign to the effect that the Welsh wizard was a hypocrite and humbug, and it is true that his attitude was puzzling. In July 1925, at the time of Red Friday, he had taunted the Baldwin government with ‘being afraid of cold steel … running away from the Reds’.129 Moreover, his cryptic remark to Sir Hugh Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff, in 1921 when he himself was still prime minister – ‘How many airmen are available for the revolution?’ – seemed to imply that the preponderance of military force would always be with the government of the day.130 He it was, also, who first passed an Emergency Powers Act enabling the government to deploy the military at will and imprison at will. So what was his game in 1926? Some say that the mutual loathing between him and Baldwin had got out of hand; Baldwin was incandescent that the man who could have solved the entire problem of the coal industry in 1921 at the time of the Sankey Commission, but had ducked the responsibility, should now be trying to occupy the high moral ground over the General Strike. Lloyd George’s answer was that he had not gone looking for trouble in 1921, but Baldwin had deliberately courted confrontation five years later (in this he was correct). Others say that his long-term aim was to unite the large numbers of discontented liberals and disillusioned Labourites in a new party under his leadership.131 Another view is that Lloyd George was schizoid: he was a power worshipper when he had his hands on the levers of government but sympathised with the underdog when he did not: ‘He had a highly dialectical cast of mind which liked to see a balance of forces.’132 Yet others say he was deliberately baiting a trap for Asquith and the Asquithians. At any rate, his next step was to write an article on the General Strike to be syndicated in US newspapers. Because the article was nuanced and not outright condemnation of the strike, it caused a furore when reprinted in the UK media.133 Asquith, furious about Lloyd George’s behaviour, sent him a letter of rebuke on 20 May, which ‘the goat’ chose to interpret as expulsion from the Liberal Party. His mild reply wrongfooted Asquith. The wrangle over whether Lloyd George should be formally expelled backfired badly, with many liberals feeling that the aged Asquith had lost his touch. A student of the incident has written: ‘Having taken so much from Lloyd George, his [Asquith’s] ageing patience snapped suddenly in 1926; but he acted impetuously, badly misjudged his moment, and achieved the opposite of his purpose.’134 Lloyd George enjoyed the powerful support of J. M. Keynes, whose particular bêtes noires were Birkenhead and Simon. Sympathetic to the miners and particularly contemptuous of the idea that the General Strike was red revolution, Keynes agreed with Lloyd George that the root cause of the strike was the lethargy and stupidity of Baldwin and his government. Predictably, he was accused of ‘betrayal’ by the Asquithians. But his support was important for swinging the party behind Lloyd George and seeing him once again confirmed as Liberal leader in 1927.135

  An interesting study could be done on the later careers of all the principals in the General Strike, with some surprising results. Ramsay MacDonald became Labour prime minister in 1929 and then, in 1931, at the height of a financial crisis committed his ‘great act of betrayal’ by forming a National Government with the Conservatives, then holding a general election which reduced Labour to fifty-four seats. Ironically the issue which caused the crisis was the very same gold standard (abandoned that year), which Keynes had warned against and which precipitated the General Strike.136 MacDonald retired, broken and discredited in 1935. Baldwin took over once more as prime minister, made a terrible hash of dealing with the Nazi menace and also retired, discredited in 1937. The third premier of the National Government, Neville Chamberlain, one of the principal hawks in 1926, was also discredited, and his career has been memorably described thus: ‘Chamberlain sinned against Napoleon’s rule: he was a man of No Luck. The cards always ran against him. He was humiliated by Lloyd George at the beginning of his political career, and cheated by Hitler at the end. Baldwin kept him in second place, almost without trying.’137 Two of Baldwin’s hard liners enjoyed the most bizarrely contrasting fortunes, for Birkenhead died of alcoholism at fifty-eight in 1930 while Churchill, no mean drinker himself, survived a miserable period in the political wilderness in the 1930s before emerging as Britain’s saviour and inspiration in 1940. Jimmy Thomas, after a political career dishonestly trying to keep the Ulster issue alive, when Ireland had already become a republic and accepted the separate existence of the North as part of the UK, finally met his comeuppance in 1936. Not surprisingly, the issue was money, specifically ‘insider dealing’ or leaking budget secrets so that he and his business accomplices could benefit.138 Herbert Samuel devoted much of his later life to Zionism but remained bitter about his treatment by Baldwin. He brusquely turned down later suggestions from both Thomas (end of May 1926) and Ramsay MacDonald (September 1926) that he should again intervene in the coal industry. Although he regarded the Tories as ingrates, he had the satisfaction of being held in the highest regard in liberal and intellectual circles. In October 1926 Beatrice Webb claimed that Samuel and Keynes would make infinitely better leaders of the Labour Party than MacDonald and Thomas.139 On the union side, Citrine enjoyed a long life and career as a super-bureaucrat, while Bevin became Attlee’s foreign secretary in 1945, a doughty anti-communist and Cold War Warrior. A. J. Cook enjoyed the most dismal fortunes. Despite his reputation as a rabble-rouser he was actually a pragmatist with an acute sense of what was industrially feasible.140 Thomas’s ally John Bromley, who loathed Cook, tried to criticise him from the platform at the TUC Conference in late 1926, but was howled down by the miners’ delegates; Arthur Pugh in the chair could not restore order and had to adjourn the meeting for half an hour.141 Snowden, too, tried to make Cook personally responsible for the General Strike, while his other enemies were animated by such hatred that they started a canard that Cook had secretly negotiated with the coal owners in July 1926. The Communist Party, displaying the usual sin of factionalism on the Left, absurdly accused him of being a renegade who was secretly in collusion with Ramsay MacDonald and the reformists, even though it was widely known that MacDonald detested Cook.142 A Robespierrean figure, Cook particularly disliked the creeping corporatism of the late 1920s and attacked the ‘trans-class’ talks of Ben Turner and Sir Alfred Mond, only to be himself repudiated by the MFGB.143 By 1928 he was attacked from both Left and Right: ‘I am blamed for everything which is wrong. I am made the scapegoat … a kind of evil genius going around the Districts making trouble,’ he lamented. Finding himself, in trade union terms, virtually an analogue of the Independent Labour Party, for a short while he allied himself with Jimmy Maxton in the ILP. The following year, with Labour once more in power, he became so disgusted with the rejection of Oswald Mosley’s imaginative plans for public works to revive the economy (a kind of pre-echo of Keynes’s later famous ideas) that he resigned from the Labour Party and joined Mosley in his New Party.144 Before he could witness Mosley’s swing hard right into black-shirted fascism, Cook died in 1931 at the age of forty-seven from sarcoma. Around the bedside of the dying man were grouped Citrine, Mosley and the South Wales communist Arthur Horner. As Citrine noted: ‘Rather an odd group: an embryo Fascist, a Communist – and Citr
ine.’145

  The General Strike was one of the most clear-cut revolutionary moments in British history. It did not matter that neither the TUC nor the participating unions were revolutionary and that they were indeed the very mildest of reformists. Both Baldwin and the General Council had dived into waters where they were out of their depth. It only needed a shot from a trigger-happy or frightened soldier or a death resulting from an over-zealous police baton charge to pitch the entire process into a void whose outcome was uncertain or, if eventually certain, only obtained after massive bloodshed. More thoughtful eyewitnesses such as Virginia Woolf continually lamented the provocative and habitual shows of strength by the military, most of them irresponsibly engineered by Churchill.146 The early surrender by the TUC allowed the strike to end without loss of life. Neither the General Council nor the government acted towards the working class with decency and morality, but at least the TUC had the sense to see what loomed ahead; for all the loose talk about ‘revolution’, Baldwin and his colleagues showed no understanding of the phenomenon of revolution and to this extent were living in cloud cuckoo land. The peaceful outcome of the strike allowed observers to see it in retrospect as little more than the petty pique of the middle class versus the working class and vice versa. As G. K. Chesterton remarked, the strike simply illustrated a truism, that people who dress as gentlemen will instinctively band together against people working in shirtsleeves and with their coats off.147 This rather shallow interpretation of class conflict was echoed in many contemporary sources. The more thoughtful reflected that what had seemed praiseworthy at the time, enthusiastic undergraduates manning buses, looked on cold reflection more like Flashman, the bully in Tom Brown’s Schooldays.148 Even Baldwin’s supporters recognised that he had overreacted in his determination to defeat the strikers at all costs.149 Commentators on the Left reflected ruefully on the selfishness of the middle class. As Kingsley Martin reported:

  The great middle class has returned to business as usual, with nothing settled except its character, content with the achievement of an exciting victory over those on whom its prosperity depends, congratulating itself that Englishmen are not as other men, excitable and given to thought, that they are not vindictive … [the General Strike] meant … that there was no serious resistance to the Tory policy of deflation in the 1930s: that, apart from hunger marching, the divided and disillusioned workers had no reply to poverty and unemployment. England remained a crudely class society.150

  David Kirkwood scoffed at those middle-class intellectuals who had been all in favour of the strike at the outset but, when it failed, denounced it as though they had always opposed it.151 Yet there was not much rejoicing among the ‘victorious’ classes. Even middle-class sympathisers took a cynical view of the way Baldwin had exploited them: the Establishment would always mobilise the middle class when it was in danger itself but otherwise ignored it or looked on it simply as a source of tax revenue.152 When Beatrice Webb’s patronising Fabian attitudes became known, she was regarded in the working class as a class enemy, a classic wolf in sheep’s clothing. Particular objection was taken to this statement: ‘Future generations will, I think, regard it [the General Strike] as the death-gasp of that pernicious doctrine of “workers’ control” of public affairs through trade unions and by the method of direct action.’153 More and more people on the Left came forward to denounce Mrs Webb for her supercilious view of the workers and her arrogant condescension in instructing Labour leaders’ wives in the fine points of social etiquette.154 Some observers felt that what had begun as high tragedy had ended in something close to farce. There are always great souls in all eras with a keen sense of the absurd who can see the humour even in unpromising situations. One of these, evidently ‘born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad’, was the leftist David Kirkwood, who was even able to see the poisonous Jix as ‘a character’. He described a moment of high pantomime in the House of Commons when Churchill was being barracked and catcalled by Labour members. Churchill got up and began: ‘If ever this happens again … (pause for dramatic effect) then I will publish another British Gazette.’ The house collapsed into guffaws, in which even Labour joined. As Kirkwood said: ‘No one can be serious when the victims treat their victimisers as a joke.’155 That was the way the General Strike ended: not with a bang but a belly laugh.

  CONCLUSION

  Revolutions

  It is often said that the absence of revolution in Britain’s history is an example of ‘exceptionalism’ and rather like the issue of why socialism never took a hold in the USA. Yet devotees of British (and especially English) uniqueness like to riposte that there is particular exceptionalism even within the general exceptionalism. For example, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was not passive or conservative, as most peasant revolts are held to be.1 And the Jacobite Rising of 1745 was like a meteorite from a clear blue sky, occurring as it did in the midst of an era of Augustan calm, when all indices of demography, economics and political stability suggested that on paper it was ‘impossible’ (in contrast to the situation from about 1770 onwards), with all potential popular forces in England astonishingly inert – one reason why some scholars prefer to see the ’45 as a Scottish invasion.2 All this suggests that to seek a general explanation for the absence of revolution is to quest for a Holy Grail. Nevertheless, one can see why the temptation to do so is overwhelming. Usually analysts have tried to locate some essential feature of the English character and then ‘read off’ political consequences from this. Some see the mere fact of being an island as crucial. Unquestionably the psychic significance of islands in the British collective unconscious is considerable. In literature it surfaces in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Ballantyne’s Coral Island, Swift’s floating island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau, the half dozen islands in J. M. Barrie’s oeuvre, to say nothing of its presence in children’s classics like Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. Then there are the modern examples like Golding’s Lord of the Flies, John Fowles’s The Magus: one could go on and on.3 Others think that Britain’s seafaring role and the production of a nation of sailors and navigators is crucial. This was always a major motif with Winston Churchill. As he boasted to the House of Commons in 1901: ‘Whereas any European nation has to support a vast army first of all, we in this fortunate, happy island, relieved by our insular position of a double burden, may turn our undivided efforts and attention to the Fleet. Why should we sacrifice a game in which we are to win to play a game in which we are bound to lose?’4 Modern writers as various as George Orwell, G. K. Chesterton, J. B. Priestley, D. H. Lawrence and George Santayana have all sought the golden key that would unlock the secrets of the island nation, variously seeking the answer in climate, landscape, xenophobia, atavism and urbanisation.5 Often these writers insinuate the dubious view that revolution is more to do with a change of sensibilities in society – the historical change where people think differently, look at life differently, have a different world-view.

  The basic problem with such interpretations is simply that the zeitgeist changes over time. For example, the British were notorious for mindless violence and hooliganism in the eighteenth century, transformed themselves in the reign of William IV to emerge as the relatively polite and deferential masses of the Victorian era, then underwent another sea-change in the 1960s to return to something like the eighteenth-century position. Certainly the idea that the absence of revolution links with a pacific people will not hold water. England alone experienced 162 violent rebellions of one kind or another – what sociologists call ‘internal disturbances in intra-group relationships’ – between the years 656 and 1921, or roughly one every eight years.6 Yet another problem is that attempts to pierce to the heart of the matter usually assume a homogeneous political and social culture – a thesis which, if it was ever true, is certainly so no longer in the era of multiculturalism. But the attempts continue to be made.7 I
n general, searchers for the ‘open sesame’ of British (and particularly English) culture underrate the considerable ambiguity in Anglo-Saxon attitudes. For example: the English were philistines yet created a cult of the countryside; had a State religion but are largely unbelievers; always despised intellectuals, but were at the forefront of intellectual inquiry. Nonetheless, certain recurring motifs tempt one to wonder if some of the more astute critics are not ‘on to something’. André Maurois, noting that in the eternal struggle between liberty and equality the French preferred the latter and the British the former (albeit usually confusing liberty with licence), concluded that the British were less intelligent than the French. This was harsh, and perhaps Tocqueville put it better when he said that the French prized equality but the British always needed social inferiors.8 It has been frequently asserted that the British would rather have a society of great inequality in which there is an infinitesimal chance of winning the national lottery or the football pools than one based on fairness, justice and equity. This would tie in with the national mania for sports and for gambling. This was a phenomenon that Orwell and his close friend the sociologist Geoffrey Gorer paid particular attention to. Without putting it in so many words, they and other critics have agreed with the Marxist tenet that in England the State is mystified so that it appears, not as the instrument of oppression by the ruling classes, but as the impartial umpire guaranteeing fair play and ‘playing the game’.9 Orwell’s jaundiced view of sport is well known: ‘Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.’10 As for the wider counter-revolutionary role of sport, it is not without significance that the most famous British conservative political theorist of the twentieth century, Michael Oakeshott (see below) once wrote a book entitled A Guide to the Classics, or How to Pick the Derby Winner, published in 1936.