|
|
|
Book Review
| John McIlroy, Alan Campbell and Keith Gildart (eds), Industrial Politics and the 1926 Mining Lockout: The Struggle For Dignity, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 2004. pp. xiv + 334. £45 cloth.
|
The General Strike of 1926 is understood, even beyond the confines of labour history, as one of the great events in British twentieth century history. The miners' lockout that provoked the strike, and which ground on for a bitter seven months after the infamous betrayal of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) executive, is less well known. It is also less documented. As the editors of this volume point out in their introduction, the lockout has simply been 'touched on in general surveys of the labour movement', covered by 'short accounts in histories of the mining movement', or featured in general histories of the Miners' Union. Prior to this book, only one full-length study had been produced, and that took 'a popular, journalistic approach'. For this reason alone there is cause to welcome an attempt at a definitive, scholarly, study of the lockout. More heartening still is the defiant Thompsonian tone set in the introduction:
Class formation, exhausting, endless, has had its triumphs as well as its failures. Success has always depended on the constant, creative efforts of cadres, clusters of committed activists in the colleges of class-building.
The advantage of this approach is that it posits history from below as a methodology that centres on working-class agency. The working class is not simply a marginalised and oppressed group that deserves to be given its voice. Workers make history, and the way in which they succeed or fail in their struggle to do so is the proper study of labour historians. |
1
|
|
Because this study takes this approach, it attempts to do two things. On the one hand, it contains detailed surveys of the politics of resistance as it manifested itself within the diverse regions of the British coal industry. The book contains a series of studies of the dispute as it unfolded in each region. In doing so, it draws on a wealth of micro-studies of the individual regions, many produced by its contributors. Contrasting with this focus on the rank-and-file, are chapters on the coal owners and the ruling-class crisis. It may come as a shock for the reader to go straight from a promise of a history from below to a chapter which focuses on the economic strategies pursued by cabinet ministers and the mandarins of the Bank of England (including our old friend Otto Niemeyer). Yet there is a method in this apparent contradiction. While much of the first chapter will be heavy going for economic illiterates, the thrust of its argument, that the economic crisis was a deliberate result of ruling-class strategy, is important. The common assumption that the market is (or, in another variant, should be) beyond human control is central to the belief that the miners' resistance was pointless and doomed to defeat. That was the essence of the bourgeois argument of the time — that wage reductions were unfortunate but unavoidable as the industry could not afford to operate without them. In this case, the condescension of history rests upon an economic myth. |
2
|
|
One of the central arguments of this book is the principle (to put it more crudely than its authors do) that sometimes it is better to resist, whatever the odds — that it is better to fight and lose than to succumb passively. This is demonstrated at one level by the description of the ruling-class response to the cost of victory. The mine owners may have scented victory and turned the screw tighter in the final negotiations, but their political masters were shocked by the economic and political cost of victory. The other theme is a celebration of the miners' resilience and courage as, in the immortal words of A.J. Cook, they fought the 'legions of hell'. The authors are aware of the strategic mistakes made by the miners' leadership, yet they avoid the old cliché about 'lions led by donkeys'. Though the critics of Thompsonian labour historiography might be alert for signs of crude 'rank and filism', the officials are treated with as much sympathy as the men and the women they represented (to whom a chapter is devoted). This is particularly the case with A.J. Cook, a figure who has been subject to more than his fair share of historical condescension. Few images could be more striking than Herbert Smith the politically moderate President of the union, responding to Stanley Baldwin during negotiations by removing his false teeth and cleaning them before uttering: 'Nowt doing.' |
3
|
|
This is, in short, a book that celebrates defiance and resistance but which also concentrates upon strategic questions at the heart of making and remaking the working class. Nothing could be more timely, either in Britain or here in Australia. |
4
|
| | | | |
| Victoria University |
ROBERT BOLLARD | |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|