Constant Reader One Way Only

I DIDN’T hear Julian Symons’s wireless programme on the general strike of 1926, but I understand from a friend who did that it followed the lines of his excellent book on the subject (“The General Strike’, Cresset Press, 1957), which every reader of The Newsletter ought to ensure is in his local library and known to Young Socialists in his neighbourhood.

One of the most significant features of the 1926 struggle, it seems to me, was the way the middle classes, tremendously impressed by the might and majesty which the working-class movement then displayed, showed 2s those nine days went by definite signs of breaking away from allegiance to the capitalists. The mood of these sections was reflected in the resolution passed by the Tory city council of Newcastle-on-Tyne calling on the government to make peace with the workers, and in the famous appeal by the Archbishop of Canterbury for a negotiated settlement—suppressed by the BBC under government pressure! Less spectacularly but more directly it was voiced by Canon Donaldson of Westminster : ‘IT earnestly pray that the workers will stand firm. If they stand firm, they will win; but if they begin to doubt and quaver and to blackleg—all will be lost, and lost for a generation.’

That experience provided an object lesson in the way to win the support of the middle class. But the effect of the betrayal of the strike and of the epoch of disintegration and demoralization of the working-class movement that followed was proportionately severe.

The key to the thirties While the workers were still ‘winded’ from the betrayal of 1926, the great slump arrived, bringing unemployment on an campaign against “Trotskyism’ -vas intended to stun everyone within earshot into acquiescence in this treachery.

No excuse this time The People’s Front policy bought defeat wherever it was tried. That is something which needs pointing out again and again, now that the ‘New Left’ are trying to foist an essentially similar conception upon the nuclear disarmament movement, the movement against colonial oppression and so on. What also has to be said is that the excuse that existed in the 1930s for looking elsewhere than to the vorking class for salvatian does not obtain today, when the workers are undefeated, in a very strong position and full of fighting spirit.

As things are now, to carry forward ‘People’s Front’ notions into our present situation is to reveal a total lack of historical sense. This point is effectively made by Alasdair MacIntyre in replying to Edward Thompson, ex-Stalinist ‘New Left’ spokesman, in the Listener of February 25: ‘Mr. Thompson boasts that his present position is not a reversion to a mirroropposite of the old dogmas, which I imagine he takes mine to be. Certainly it is true that bis position is in no sense a reversion. It is, in the aspects revealed in his letter, a straightforward continuation of the old, lacking only the context of the ’30s which made that position slightly more excusable than it is now.’