General Strike paralysed UK in struggle for dwelling wage whereas Tories bought vindictive revenge

On May 2, 2026

Nearly two million workers joined Britain’s first – and only – General Strike, which began at midnight on 3 May 1926, in support of starving miners and their families

11:00, 02 May 2026

At midnight on 3 May 1926, nearly two million workers joined Britain’s first – and only – General Strike. Their walkout in support of starving miners and their families was the greatest act of working class solidarity in history. But it wasn’t enough. The nationwide stoppage, called by the TUC General Council, virtually paralysed the nation as railwaymen, transport workers and printers heeded the call for sympathetic action. Workers walked off the job from John O’Groats to Land’s End, in an exhilarating show of unity that surprised even the strike leaders.

But after only nine days, accused by the Tory government of fomenting a Communist revolution, TUC chiefs lost their nerve and called off the strike, leaving the miners to fight on alone until humiliating defeat six months later. 1926, a searing memory in the hearts and minds of trade unionists, is being commemorated across the country – most poignantly today in Barnsley, [2 May] where former miners demonstrate, with their union banners held proudly aloft.

They have more reason than anyone to remember, because their year-long Great Strike for Jobs of 1984/5 was a virtual replay of 1926, on a smaller but no less devastating, scale. That, too, resulted in vindictive Tory revenge. It all began when coal owners, determined to sustain profits under pressure from international competition, demanded a cut in colliers’ wages from £6 to a pittance of less than £3 a week. Even King George V said: “Try living on their wages before you judge them.”

But Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had already decided on confrontation with the Miners’ Federation, setting up a paramilitary Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, mobilising the army, police and volunteer strike-breakers. Historian AJP Taylor recorded: “The Cabinet wanted a strike.” And they got one, just like Thatcher in 1984.

The TUC general council, set up only the year before, lacked confidence and had no control over the walkout. Local committees sprang up to co-ordinate picketing, food and distribution of an official strike paper, the British Worker, which reported “workers calm and steady.”

The strike was originally called in several key sectors – the railways, buses and trams, newspapers, docks, and iron and steel trades. But such was the enthusiasm that, for example in the West Midlands, there was trouble keeping men in work who were not involved. Scunthorpe was “like a town of the dead from the industrial point of view.”

The government set up an official newspaper, The British Gazette, edited by Winston Churchill, priced one penny. Its first headline on 5 May, blustered ‘The First Day of the Great Strike: Not So Complete as Hoped by Its Promoters.’ It reported a “mushroom town of ordered activity in Hyde Park” created to handle milk supplies to the capital.

Churchill opined: “This is a conflict between union leaders and Parliament. And that conflict can only end, and must only end, in the unmistakable victory of Parliament. This victory His Majesty’s Government is definitely resolved to secure.” The TUC general council, clearly taken aback by their own runaway success, feared deliberate misrepresentation of precisely this sort. “This is an industrial dispute,” they insisted. “There is no constitutional crisis. The sole aim of the strike is to secure for the miners a decent standard of life.”

Considering the vast numbers of men on strike in so many towns and cities, and the passions aroused by such unprecedented action, 1926 was largely peaceful. But more than 5,000 arrests for violence and sedition were recorded, and some rioting took place in the industrial North of England and Scotland. Parliament’s sole Communist MP, Shapurji Saklatvala, was arrested for calling on “the Army boys” not to fight strikers.

There were ugly scenes in the London docks on 8 May, when unarmed soldiers broke the picket line and escorted food lorries to Hyde Park. And when tram services restarted in Plymouth, crowds attacked vehicles and smashed windows. That same day, the British Worker reported “50,000 out and not one case of blacklegging” at Woolwich, with “the great Arsenal and Dockyard like an industrial museum, no sound of a hammer breaks the stillness throughout the hundreds of shops and not a wheel turning.”

The worst, and potentially most disastrous, incident took place on 10 May, when striking miners derailed the Flying Scotsman at Cramlington, just north of Newcastle. An eight-man gang, believing the train carried coal, sabotaged the rails, causing the engine and several coaches of the southbound express to come off the track and overturn. The train was slowing down, and miraculously, only one of the 281 passengers suffered a minor foot injury. The eight men were jailed for up to eight years.

As the strike went into its second week, the government claimed that supplies were improving everywhere, with more trains running and record numbers of volunteer “specials” signing up, especially in London. Strike editions of Right-wing national newspapers carried stories of scarf-waving university students driving trains, but they were never much more than propaganda photo-shoots. One passenger thought it all “very jolly” watching an immaculate youth in plus-fours with a green flag telling his driver: “I say, you might go !”

The end, when it came with indecent haste, was anything but jolly. As later happened in 1984, the High Court ruled the dispute unlawful and made the unions liable for unlimited damages. On 12 May the TUC called off the strike, with no commitment for employers to take back any dismissed men, and no deal for the miners.

The government trumpeted “surrender in Downing Street,” and fast-tracked new laws banning general or sympathy strikes and mass picketing. The miners, led by legendary leader A.J.Cook, with his slogan “Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day!” fought on, gradually returning to work on lower wages, until the last were starved back in late November. The blame game that began then has never really ended. The miners accused the TUC of betrayal, the TUC thought it “best to avoid useless sacrifice” because the miners had determined on a fight to the finish.

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In 1985, Arthur Scargill, the reincarnation of A.J.Cook, criticised the TUC for failing to mobilise the whole labour movement in support of his members. They, too, went down to defeat and the subsequent destruction of their union and the coal industry. One thing is indisputable: 1926 was – to use the words of their most ruthless opponent at the time – “the miners’ finest hour.’