The seeds of that defeat were planted by the ruling class barely forty-eight hours after Red Friday. They knew their trade union leaders well. On 2 August the Tory Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson Hicks, sounded the new keynote: 1 say to you, coming straight from the Cabinet councils, the thing is not finished. The danger is not over. Sooner or later this question has got to be fought out by the people of the land. Is England to be governed by Parliament and the Cabinet or by a handful of trade union leaders?' The miners' fight was no longer an industrial struggle but a struggle for 'the constitution'. Everyone in the land had to line up on this fundamental issue. The Tories cemented their position by building up the Organisation for Maintenance of Supplies, an organisation which recruited terrified sections of the middle classes along with the fascist rabble, and preparing contingency plans for a senes or kegional com missioners with wide-ranging powers in the event of a national breakdown.
These plans had been drawn up by the previous Tory Government - and were kept hidden from the labour movement by the first Labour Government in the form of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Josiah Wedgewood. when ne nanded back nis once to his Tory successor, J.C.C. Davidson, he told him: 'I haven't destroyed any of your plans. In fact, I haven't done a bloody thing about them. PREPARATIONS But it wasn't these organisational preparations that guaranteed the capitalist victory. By transforming the struggle to an overtly political one, raising the constitutional issue, they had hit the Achilles heel of the trade union leaders - left and right alike. After the strike J.H. Thomas, the railway workers leader who played the most wretched role in the betrayal, said: "I have never disguised that in a challenge
miners would suffice to carry through the General Strike to victory.
Of course, if the General Strike is 'not political' you don't raise political slogans. So the CP had no real answer when Churchill stormed up and down the country talking about the imminent threat to the The slogan of a Labour Government - which could have disrupted the strategy of the bourgeoisie, which required a head-on confrontation with the working class was not raised until the third day of the strike, and then only as a secondary demand.
MANIFESTO In a manifesto on 'The Political Meaning of the General Strike' published on 5 May the party attached overriding importance to the demands of the miners. Additional demands included amongst others nationalisation without compensation and under workers control and... the resignation of the Tory Government and the election of a Labour Government 'if victory is to be clinched". At no time did the CP campaign for power to the Councils of Action and for these to break from the half-hearted and treacherous leadership of the TUC Miners' leaders in 1926 (left to right): Herbert Smith, A.J. Cook and W.P. Richardson General Strike 7