Working-class struggle against the Tory-Liberal coalition government 1918-1922

I gave a talk at Workers' Liberty's 'Ideas for Freedom' event last weekend entitled 'Working-class struggle against the Tory-Liberal coalition government 1918-1922'. Here are my notes - I don't have time at the moment to convert them from notes into an article or 'proper' blog post, so make of them what you will ...

1918
- End of ‘Great War’
- Representation of the People Act
- General Election
- ‘khaki’ election / ‘coupon’ election
- Coalition Conservative - 3,472,738 votes (33.3%); 271 seats
- Coalition Liberal - 1,396,590 (13.4%); 127 seats
- Labour - 2,245,777 (21.5%); 57 seats

The Coalition Government
- Prime Minister: David Lloyd George (Coalition Liberal)
- Chancellor: Andrew Bonar Law (Coalition Conservative)
- Minister of Health: Christopher Addison (Coalition Liberal)
- Foreign Secretary: Arthur Balfour (Coalition Conservative)
- 179 MPs were company directors
- ‘hard-faced men who looked like they’d done well out of the war’ (Baldwin)

The Labour Party 1918
- introduced individual membership
- adopted ‘Clause 4’
- leader = William Adamson
- Daily Herald

The 'Great Unrest' resumes
- 1910-14: strikes; trade union membership rose 2.5m to 4m
- 1918: Unrest resumes
- soldiers’ protests
- summer 1918: strikes in London by dockers; gas workers; council workers; bus, tram and Tube workers; clothing workers; police
- 1919: average 100,000 workers on strike each day
- ‘repression and concession’: troops to coalfields; commissions into coal and port industries
- March 1919: Transport Workers’ Federation wins 44-hr week

Red Clydeside
- 1910-1932
- John MacLean, Helen Crawfurd, Emanuel Shinwell, James Maxton, John Wheatley, Mary Barbour 
- 1919: strike for 40-hour week
- 30 January: 40,000 engineering & shipbuilding workers, 36,000 miners, thousands of other workers on strike
- 31 January: battle of George Square (Bloody Friday): 60,000+ demonstrators attacked by police -> arrests
- 10 February: strike called off: engineering and shipbuilding workers win 47-hour, cut of 10 hours

1919 railway strike
- 9 days: September-October
- new pay scales – cut pay of lowest-paid rail workers 
- NUR strike
- ASLEF supported
- Lloyd George: ‘anarchist conspiracy’
- win for unions

Solidarity with Russia
- 10 May 1920: Jolly George
- Hands Off Russia Committee
- 31 July 1920: Communist Party founded
- August 1920: TUC and Labour Party threaten general strike

Late 1920: slump
- collapse in export trade
- ‘a fit country for heroes to live in’
- government abandoned/reversed social reform
- job losses: eg. 60,000 rail jobs March 1920-21
- unemployment
- 1920: LDCU; 1921: NUWM
- ‘work or full maintenance’
- Go to the Guardians / factory raids
- ‘wait for better times’

Miners' lockout and 'Black Friday'
- Triple Alliance: miners, railworkers, transport workers
- 31 March 1921: coal industry de-controlled
- pay cuts for miners: those who refused were locked out
- 15 April 1921, ‘Black Friday’:
- rail and transport unions failed to support miners
- broke up ‘Triple Alliance’
- ‘the heaviest defeat that has befallen the Labour movement within the memory of man’

Poplar
- East London dockland area
- population = 160,000
- 24% poverty
- infant mortality: 83 per 1,000
- 33,000+ people lived in ‘overcrowded’ housing
- 1919: elects Labour Council

'Poplarism'
- ‘Labour Councillors must be different from those we have displaced, or why displace them?’
- housing inspectors; new housing
- expanded services
- de-casualisation of work
- public works – refused funding
- unfair funding system
- 1921: withheld precepts to cross-London bodies
- “The master class has made the laws”

Prison and Victory
- 25 men / 5 women in prison, from 1 September
- mass mobilisation; organising behind bars
- Herbert Morrison pursues Lloyd George
- will other councils follow the call?
- Local Authorities (Financial Provisions) Act 1921
- Poplar gained £250,000+ per year
- “This is a great discouragement to those who believe in constitutional action and a great encouragement to those who believe in revolutionary methods.”

The Geddes Axe
- Lord Rothermere: Anti-Waste League
- August 1921: Lloyd George sets up committee
- Sir Eric Geddes
- 1922: recommended £87m cuts
- Cabinet decided on £52m cuts
- total social spending (education, health, housing, pensions, unemployment) fell from £205.8m in 1920-21 to £182.1m in 1922-23

The end of the Coalition
- October 1922: Tories leave Coalition
- November 1922: general election
- Conservative: 5,294,465 votes (38.5%); 344 seats
- Labour: 4,076,665 votes (29.7%); 142 seats (+85)
- Liberal (Asquith): 2,601,486 votes (18.9%); 62 seats
- National Liberal (Lloyd George): 1,355,366 votes (9.9%); 53 seats
- Lansbury, Wheatley into parliament; Macdonald new Labour leader
- ‘Labour men everywhere viewed the Lloyd George era as a time of class war and class rhetoric’

Then and now

‘The next government is going to have many challenges, but tackling a public sector that has become obese and poor value for money is going to have to be a priority’, The Times, 2010

‘There are signs of an astonished realisation of the alarming bill for civil pensions that in a few years will be a millstone on the taxpayer's neck.’ The Times, 1922

Come And Hear Me Talk About My Book!

And wish me a happy birthday too ...

Radical History Network of NE London, c/o PO Box 45155, London N15 4RW

Radicalhistorynetwork.blogspot.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
celebrate our history, avoid repeating our mistakes”

Janine Booth speaks on her book
"Guilty and Proud of it!: Poplar's rebel councillors and guardians 1919-1925"
[on sale at this event at £10.00]

Wednesday 21 October at 8pm

Venue: the Postmen's Office at the North London Community House. Its address is 22 Moorefield Road, London N17. The venue is almost next to Bruce Grove British Rail Station, where Bruce Grove meets the High Road in Tottenham.

A Gude Cause maks a Strong arm

In October 1909 thousands of women took to the streets in Edinburgh to demand suffrage - their right to be be seen as people in their own right and with the right to suffrage.  In 2008 some women got together and decided to re-enact the march and set up the Gude Cause (good cause).

On Saturday thousands of women, some men, children and dogs took to the streets and I honestly can't tell you how many but I think it was between 3,000 to 5,000.

It was a great parade, not as many trade union banners as I would have liked but still may.  I marched with the Scottish Socialist party, carrying the banner with PPC for North East Glasgow for the Scottish Socialist Party, Kevin Mc Vey.  You can read Kevin Mc Vey's blog here.


Photos taken by Eddie Truman on the day

Scottish Labour Party on the Gude Cause  - just so I am not partisan on the matter.

It was great to see the march and be part of it I saw people from my history who I literally haven't seen for decades and the sun shone.  Whilst there were no political demands on the march which I think was a mistake even a safe one like Equal Pay would have been good, but as a cultural event it was superb. It was great to see the efforts people went to by getting dressed up, making beautiful banners and learning loads of songs.

Economic Crisis: Learn From The Past

As we all lurch into economic crisis, will the labour movement and the left be up to the challenge? Our job is to organise for the working class to defend itself from the effects of the crisis. We need to do so ideologically, politically and economically ie. to understand the crisis, to put forward demands for government action, and to encourage effective industrial action by workers.

Failure to do so means that working-class people pay the price for a crisis not of our making. And sadly, that is what has happened in the past. So I want to take a look back at the slump of the early 1920s and examine the labour movement's response, in the hope that we won't make the same mistakes this time round.

Towards the end of 1920, the brief post-war boom came to a sharp end, as prices began to fall and trade declined. The following year, 1921, Britain's exports and imports fell by nearly half, prompting The Economist to label it ‘one of the worst years of depression since the industrial revolution’.

Employers being employers, they argued that trade could only revive by making prices more competitive, meaning costs must be cut, meaning wages in particular must go down. Over the next three years, wages fell faster than they ever have done in British history. Despite the bosses’ predictions, this did not reverse the slump. But it did have a catastrophic effect on working-class people.

In any recession, the two main classes fight over who is to carry the cost. So as employers made the workers pay the price, how well did the labour movement fight for the workers?

Soon after the war, two union leaders had made their names in two big industries. Jimmy Thomas was the General Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), which won wages rises through a successful national strike in 1919. At the same time, Ernest Bevin was earning the monicker 'The Dockers' KC' by his articulate and successful advocacy of the case for better wages, conditions and job security at the Shaw Court of Enquiry into port labour.

But the slump wiped away the gains of these two mammoth fights, as the union leaderships responded inadequately.

As slump set in, passenger journeys and freight tonnage on Britain’s railways fell dramatically. The government was preparing to hand the railways back to the private companies having 'borrowed' them into government control during the war, and did so by drastically cutting costs. In May 1921, they suspended the guaranteed working week - and bizarrely enough, Thomas supported them! He and the other union leaders were so scared of job losses that they accepted attacks on working conditions rather than fight both. And guess what happened next? Yep - the job losses came too: in the year following March 1921, the employers sacked nearly 60,000 railworkers.

And Bevin? He saw the Shaw Report's recommendations fall by the wayside and negotiated not improvements for workers but pay cuts. His biographer Alan Bullock wrote that "The most that Bevin and the [Transport Workers'] Federation could do was to retreat in good order, preserving the machinery for national negotiations and using it to negotiate each reduction by agreement."

After the formation of the T&G on 1 January 1922, Bevin was so determined to avoid confrontation with the employers that he negotiated a three-stage pay cut for already-underpaid dockers. In 1923, there was some hope that the third cut would not go ahead, and when those hopes were dashed, dockers walked out across the country. But the T&G refused to make the strike official and ordered members back to work. The willingness of dockers to take action like this suggest that negotiating pay cuts was not 'the most' that Bevin could have done: he could have led a fight.

On the political front, Labour had not yet formed a government, and its 60 MPs were in the most part a rump of ageing trade unionists who were not in the habit of challenging Lloyd George's Tory-dominated Coalition government. But Labour did have power in local government, having won control of a fair few Councils in the 1919 elections in which many working-class men and women had the right to vote for the first time. Many of these new Labour Councils improved pay and conditions for their own employees, several introducing a minimum wage of £4 per week. But when private-sector wages fell, political pressure came on the Councils to cut municipal wages too. Some, such as Herbert Morrison's Hackney Council, willingly obliged; others, such as Poplar, resisted. And Ernest Bevin? He denounced Poplar's intransigence and argued that they should negotiate cuts! Why? Because he could not stand to see the role of union negotiators sidelined.

The Communist Party's J.R.Campbell argued that labour movement leaders’ collaboration with wage cuts arose from a wrong understanding of capitalism: they accepted the view that the slump was abnormal for capitalism, whereas communists recognised that economic crisis is a natural feature of capitalism. “In the sphere of wages, the reformists stand for concessions to capitalism, in order to help capitalism get back to ‘normal’, while the Communists stand for a resistance to the demands of the capitalists and the preparation for a decisive struggle against capitalism.’

So industrially, politically and ideologically, let's not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Important Women In Socialist And Feminist History

The London Socialist Feminist Discussion Group - launched last year followed a dayschool on socialist feminism hosted by Workers' Liberty - has announced its programme of meetings for Autumn-Winter 2008-9. Here it is (and you may be interested to know that one Janine Booth will be introducing the discussions on Constance Markiewicz and on Minnie Lansbury) ...

The London Socialist Feminist Dicussion Group is open to everyone interested in discussing socialist and feminist ideas in an informal and welcoming forum.

Our group meets monthly. Our programme of meetings for autumn-winter 2008-9 starts on Friday 12 September when we will be starting a series of discussions focusing on important women in socialist and feminist history.

This series will start with a look at the life and politics of Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg was a Polish-born revolutionary mostly active in the German socialist movement in the early 20th century. She was co-founder of the Spartacist Lague, a precursor to the German Communist Party. Luxemburg was captured and killed by right wing forces after the failed Spartacist uprising of early 1919. She remains an important figure in socialist history both for her actions during her life and her ideas.

• Friday 12 September: Rosa Luxemburg
  7.30-9.30pm Lucas Arms, 245a Gray’s Inn Road, London, WC1X
  
• Friday 10 October: Constance Markiewicz
  7.30-9.30pm School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG
  
• Friday 7 November: Clara Zetkin
  Time and venue as for October
  
• Friday 5 December: Minnie Lansbury
  
• Friday 9 January: Marie Stopes
  
• Friday 6 February: Sylvia Pankhurst

Time as above. Venues to be arranged
More details socialist.feminist@gmail.com

Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story

If you weren't watching BBC4 last night, you missed a cracker - 'Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story'. This music has long been among my favourite, and although maybe less high-profile than Motown, was more edgy, more sweaty, and ran closer alongside the struggles of working-class black Americans.

It's founding act was Booker T and the MGs, in which black musicians like Booker T Jones played alongside white musicians like Steve Cropper in a 1960s in which segregation was not yet fully illegal and was still rampant. Subsequent stars included Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes and the Staple Singers.

You can not tell the Stax story without telling of the civil rights movement, the sanitation workers' strike and the death of Martin Luther King in Memphis, the home city of Stax.

Here for your delectation is a summary of what you missed (if, indeed, you missed it):

Unfeminine Women In Feudal Kent

I stumbled across this gem of an article in the Daily Herald, 7 September 1921:

STRUCK MATCH ON BREEKS! - Councillor Clark Shocked By a Land Girl - "IN FEUDAL KENT"

"When I was home on leave during the war, a land girl came into the local inn, called for a pint of beer, took out her cigarette case, tapped a cigarette, and struck a match on her breeches! I had to ask whether the creature was a man or a woman."

This experience befell Councillor Donald Clark, of Tonbridge, who has been interviewed on the new fashion of cigar-smoking for women.

"This new feminism," he says, "means that women are rapidly losing all their old charm. Down here we do not yet see women smoking cigars, but even in feudal Kent, they smoke their cigarettes quite unashamed."

In short, Councillor Clark thinks that the cigar-smoking young woman is gravely imperilling her chance of marriage.

What a corker. It reminded me of an article in the Hackney Gazette in the 1990s by our then Labour MP (now LibDem ex-MP) Brian Sedgemore. He used his MP's column to rave against the evil weed, commenting that there was little he found less attractive than a woman smoking. I replied to the following week's letters page, pointing out that there are many compelling reasons for women to give up smoking, but becoming more attractive to Brian Sedgemore was not one of them.

Delete and Insert

Sometimes, you stumble across something that really neatly sums up the difference between the left and the right of the labour movement. And so it was that last week, thumbing through records of London Labour Party Conferences in the 1920s (I'm writing a book on Poplarism), I found this ...

In 1922, the London Labour Party Executive proposed a report to the conference (almost certainly penned by Herbert Morrison, pictured), the introduction to which stated: Fortified by the valuable experience obtained in practical work the London Labour Party faces the electorate with much greater knowledge and experience than it possessed three years ago; it is better equipped than ever to discharge the responsibilities of municipal statesmanship.

Woolwich Trades Council proposed an amendment: Delete "discharge the responsibilities of municipal statesmanship" and Insert "serve the interests of the Working Class."

Well, quite.

"From Trotsky to Respect"

Busy today doing chores around my flat. To stave off boredom I checked out what was on listen again on R4 and came across "From Trotsky to Respect" :

"Geoffrey Wall looks at the history of the Socialist Workers Party. He talks to members past and present and asks how well a Marxist party is surviving in the 21st century."

Its a two parter, next one on the 16th.

All interviewed were SWP members and as you would expect were upbeat and positive. The presentation was quite rose tinted and I especially loved the bit where Alex Callinicos spoke of being recruited on the lawns at Balliol.

The next part is covering Respect, which might make more interesting listening. Will we hear from Lenny ?
Will it include non SWPers?

Anyone else caught it?

Minnie Lansbury RIP

Today is the 86th anniversary of the death of one of my all-time heroes: Minnie Lansbury.

Yet another woman whom history has ignored in favour of her male comrades and family members - Minnie was George Lansbury's daughter-in-law - she deserves to be much better-known amongst socialists, feminists and those with any interest in labour movement history.

Born in 1889 to Jewish parents in Stepney, Minnie Glassman became a school teacher before marrying Edgar Lansbury in 1914. She was a committee member of Sylvia Pankhurst's East London Federation of Suffragettes, which mobilised and involved working-class women (and men) whom 'Votes For Ladies' campaigns elsewhere held in contempt. In 1916, she became Assistant Secretary, and when ELFS became the Workers’ Socialist Federation in 1918, Minnie was elected Assistant Secretary.

Minnie served on Poplar's War Pensions Committee from 1914-18. She joined the Communist Party as soon as it was formed in 1920.

When Labour swept to power on Poplar Borough Council in 1919, it appointed Minnie Lansbury as one of its Aldermen. In this role, she played an important part in the Rates Dispute of 1921 (about which I am writing a book, due to be published later this year). Minnie and 29 of her fellow Councillors were imprisoned after they refused to collect precepts for cross-London bodies, preferring to raise money only to support the population of the desperately poor, recession-ravaged, dockside borough of Poplar. The Poplar Councillors' militancy, stubbornness and mass working-class support brought them victory, forcing the government to adjust the local government funding system massively in favour of the pooorer boroughs.

But it cost Minnie Lansbury her life. On January 1st 1922, she died of pneumonia, almost certainly made worse by the effects of six weeks imprisonment in the previous September and October.

I have some fantastic photos (not yet ready for reproduction) of Minnie going off to Holloway prison, cheered on by thousands of local men and women, the crowds stretching back as far as you can see. As she went, she gave a quote to the Daily Herald: ‘I wish the Government joy in its effort to get this money from the people of Poplar. Poplar will pay its share of London’s rates when Westminster, Kensington, and the City do the same!’

Corbera d'Ebre - reminder of the Spanish Civil War

I have just come back from visiting a comrade in Corbera d'Ebre and I fell in love with the place. It is fantastic - a little village in the Terre d'Alta of the Catalan region of Spain, everyone has their own land to grow vegetables and fruit and those without land are allocated a council owned horta or allotment. At this time of year peppers, aubergenes and tomatoes are still growing, it is fantastic. And EVERYONE speaks to EVERYONE - you would not want to be in a hurry in Corbera d'Ebre as as soon as you see some one you know (in a village of 1000 people, thats everyone) you have to chat.

But the thing that struck me was the reminders of the Spanish Cival War - I have read about in books, watched telly programmes, one of my favourite books is Homage to Catalonia and of course I have seen Land and Freedom but seeing a village that was decimated by Franco is something else - there is nothing there except rumble - the old village has been preserved and a new village was built. I was actually quite shocked by it, Corbera d@Ebre , a republican strong hold held out as long as it could the neighbouring town Gandesa was pro-Franco (which was not bombed) helped destroy the little village.

Here's a wee you tube of the village - the old village is up the hill and the new village is down the hill. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXY3xa7VZ9Y

I hope to go back soon