02.04.2026

Fridays black and red

Marking the centenary of the 1926 General Strike, Jack Conrad charts the transition from an aristocratic Con-Lib two-party system to the bourgeois Con-Lab two-party system. Though the first Labour government was a tame affair, it set the stage for an historic clash of class against class

April 15 1921, Black Friday, marked a terrible defeat for the working class. The Triple Alliance collapsed and the miners were left to fight alone. After a bitter, 11-week lockout, their Fed surrendered and the miners were forced into accepting swingeing pay cuts.¹ Other sections inevitably went down too. Trade union membership, which had reached a record 8,340,000 in 1920, nearly halved to 4,250,000 in 1923. As we concluded in the previous article in this series, a “strategic defeat”.²

Despite that, in the aftermath of Black Friday, the working class turned towards the Labour Party in an attempt to defend itself. Prime minister David Lloyd George had thrown down the working class industrially, only to see it spring up in political form. His nemesis had arrived. The general elections of 1922, 1923 and 1924 gave successive boosts to the ongoing realignment in British politics. The two-party Liberal-Tory system was mutating into a two-party Labour-Tory system via an unstable and transitionary three-party Liberal-Labour-Tory system.

At the beginning of the 1850s Marx thought that the Tories - the party of great landlords, the established church, country squires, protectionism and invented tradition - would soon go extinct. After that the division in British politics would be between free trade liberalism and (Chartist) socialism.³ He assumed too a quick development of revolution in Britain and mainland Europe. Faced with the unmitigated horror of oncoming working class rule, landed interests would rush for safety into the arms of the Liberal Party, thereby making it the sole party of the propertied classes.⁴ The idea that they, or even a good few of them, would come over to the side of the proletariat is risible.

Of course, Marx’s prediction was made at the very onset of the 1851-73 boom, a period of prosperity which yanked the rug from under the feet of physical-force Chartism and propelled skilled workers along the path of self-improving craft unionism. The aristocracy thereby continued to dominate high politics, albeit as a hereditary caste, rather than a class. The Liberal Party evolving from the Whigs, becoming the aristocratic party of the industrial bourgeoisie.

For the sake of the argument, it must be emphasised, even with the 1832 Reform Act the numbers of voters remained tiny. Only with the 1867 Reform Act did better-off workers get the vote. Universal male suffrage was achieved in 1918 (women having to wait till 1928 before they finally achieved full parity with men).

Hence, with the relative decline of the British global hegemon and the dawning of mass electoral politics, the Liberal Party’s carefully constructed rainbow coalition suffered a series of strategic fissures and defections. First to cleave away were the Irish. Next the trade unions. Then the capitalists. Terrified by working class militancy and the rise of the Labour Party, the captains of industry hurled themselves backwards into the arms of the old order. The Conservative Party was thereby transformed into the preferred party of bourgeois property. The Liberals limped on as an increasingly marginalised third party and Labour emerged as the main party of social reform.

Those who over recent years have sagely announced the imminent demise of the Labour Party and/or the Conservative Party because of bad election night performances ought to ponder the death of the great Liberal Party.⁵ It had little to do with the failings of this or that leader, the lack of a grand narrative, let alone poor communication skills: rather the tectonic movement of economic, national and social forces. Though today showing all the tick-box signs of advanced decay, the Tory and Labour parties remain historically constituted class parties. In other words, even though seemingly on their death bed, they can suddenly find a new lease of life (eg, the Corbyn membership surge, or, looking to the future, a Tory-Reform pact or merger). The passing of such parties will surely come only with radically changed objective circumstances - eg, breaking the trade union link, ending the first-past-the-post system, the forging of a mass Communist Party, etc.

In office

Anyway, not least due to the efforts of Andrew Bonar Law, the Tories broke with David Lloyd George’s Lib-Con coalition government. His excuse was that its continuation created “an amalgamated ‘bourgeois bloc’, which leaves the socialists as the sole alternative”.⁶ Meeting at the Carlton Club in October 1922, the Conservative Party agreed to fight independently. Though Labour won enough seats to make it the official opposition for the first time, this was, in fact, all part of a grand manoeuvre.

Especially with the followers of HH Asquith and Lloyd George at loggerheads, the Liberal Party could, within the unstable, three-party system, now be used as a sacrificial chess piece. Bonar Law and other Tory grandees envisaged killing off the Liberals through, on the one hand, absorbing its rightwing and, on the other, encouraging, pressurising, its left wing into throwing in its lot with Labour. That would leave the Tories as the dominant party, while thoroughly diluting Labour’s already diluted ambitions. The nation would thereby be saved from socialism, albeit by actually putting Labour into office.

JCC Davidson - later the chair of the Conservative Party - argued that a continuation of the Lib-Con coalition would be a “dishonest combination”, because it would supposedly force both parties to abandon their “principles” (as if they were guided by principles, not interests). No less to the point, he warned, “to deprive Labour of their constitutional rights” is “the first step down the road of revolution”.⁷

So Labour’s leader, Ramsay MacDonald, was assiduously courted. He was invited to the right sort of London clubs and the right sort of country house weekend parties. So, after the 1923 general election, when the Tories, despite remaining the biggest party, lost their majority, George V invited MacDonald, not Stanley Baldwin, to the palace (he was to be given Liberal ‘confidence and supply’ support).

No surprise, MacDonald’s minority government proved eminently worthy of the establishment’s trust. And, because it was not just a ready pupil, but a teacher’s pet, the first Labour government was treated as a “great joke for the popular press”. Ministers learned to speak posh, grabbed the fat salaries, donned top hats and tails and carried out an undeviating imperialist policy at home and abroad. Labour, in fact, did everything to prove itself ‘fit to govern’. For example, Philip Snowden’s first budget omitted the promised levy on capital, and, in the witty words of Robert Graves, “did nothing more newsworthy than provide a ‘free breakfast table’ by reducing the import duties on tea, coffee, sugar and chicory”.⁸ In fact, the Labour government’s only notable legislative achievement, the Wheatley Housing Act, amounted to no more than a homeopathic remedy for capitalism’s rapidly mounting ills and contradictions.

Naturally, industrial action was automatically condemned. Indeed, when London tram workers struck for higher pay, the anti-trade union Emergency Powers Act was invoked. This meant that the military would be deployed. A special cabinet committee, consisting of Arthur Henderson, Sidney Webb, Josiah Wedgewood and JH Thomas, was established to oversee strikebreaking operations. Only the speedy ending of the strike, “coupled with a strong private protest from the general council of the TUC, who were said to have hinted at the possibility of a general strike if the act was enforced, smoothed the matter over”.⁹

The TUC and Labour Party NEC might protest against the government’s anti-working class measures. But, in what was to become a standard response, ministers brushed all objections aside. Workers had to stop ‘being greedy’. The Labour government was not for one class, but the whole nation. Strong-arm measures had to be used, because the “epidemic of labour revolts” was frighteningly reminiscent of “what was happening in Russia in 1917 against the Kerensky government”.¹⁰

Moreover, cravenly, all foreign office material was referred to Baldwin for ‘bi-partisan’ consultations. And underlining his commitment to continuity, MacDonald agreed to give government portfolios to former Liberals - eg, Lord Chelmsford, an ex-colonial governor, and Lord Haldain, the former war minister and architect of Britain’s World War I centralised war machine. He entered the ‘socialist’ government as chair of the Committee of Imperial Defence. Even more remarkably, Lord Chelmsford, a lifelong Tory and former viceroy of India, was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty.

Clearly then, the first Labour government was a kind of popular front. In point of fact, that description, though it is of somewhat later coinage, neatly fits the Labour Party itself. Labour being a “bourgeois workers’ party”: its social base lies in the organised working class, but the politics of its leadership, including the bureaucrats heading the trade unions, are thoroughly bourgeois.

Lenin, is, of course, often credited with both concept and phrase. After all he supported the Labour Party’s affiliation to the Socialist (Second) International, all the while stressing its paradoxical class nature. In ‘Leftwing’ communism he argued in exactly the same spirit. While the Labour Party was composed of workers, it was led by reactionaries who acted fully in the interests of the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, communists should join. A line he defended at the 2nd Congress of Comintern. And, of course, in Imperialism and the split in socialism (1916) he repeatedly uses the phrases ‘bourgeois labour movement’ and ‘bourgeois labour party’.¹¹ Needless to say, he freely acknowledged, both the concept and phrase originated with Engels. Most readers of this paper will be all too familiar with Engels’ widely quoted letters to August Bebel (1883) and Friedrich Sorge (1891).¹²

Therefore, quite correctly, Comintern - under the leadership of Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev - argued that communists in Britain should help put Labour into office … in order to expose it (despite that being the very same goal, though for very different reasons, tacitly pursued by the Tories and actively facilitated by George V). Indeed, it could be said that both the British establishment and Comintern wanted to support a Labour government ‘like the rope supports the hanged man’. Still heresy for permanently childish leftists today.

Resignation

The decision to recognise the Soviet Union and begin trade negotiations did ruffle anti-Bolshevik sensibilities. But it was on a different, though related, issue that the Labour government “chose to invite defeat”. Ralph Miliband is right to say that, in view of his government’s “meticulous observance of constitutional rules and procedures”, there is a “certain irony” that MacDonald left office over his opponent’s claim that it had been “guilty of grave constitutional impropriety”.¹³

The issue was the decision not to proceed with the prosecution of JR Campbell, editor of the CPGB’s Workers’ Weekly. After he was charged with inciting mutiny for his ‘Open letter to the fighting forces’ - he had exhorted soldiers and sailors to “let it be known that, neither in the class war, nor in a military war, will you turn your guns on fellow workers” - there was a storm of protest from all sections of the workers’ movement.¹⁴ All of a sudden, the director of public prosecutions thought better of it, supposedly because of Campbell’s magnificent war record. Anyway, for whatever reason, the case was dropped.

Delivering a schoolmasterly whack over the knuckles, the Liberals and Conservatives tabled a censure motion in the House of Commons. MacDonald had been wounded in such parliamentary skirmishes before. Now, though, with Labourite reformism standing exposed and a viable alternative developing on the left in the form of the CPGB, he felt a compelling need to rally the official labour movement around him and use the communists as a scapegoat. So he treated the matter as one of confidence. He resigned. Thus ended the first Labour government.

On October 24 1924, in the closing straight of the subsequent general election campaign (polling was only five days away), the foreign office released the so-called ‘Zinoviev letter’. It was published in The Times and the Daily Mail. Purportedly it revealed a dastardly Moscow plot to subvert British civilisation. Addressing the central committee of the CPGB, Gregory Zinoviev, president of the Comintern, was said to have issued instructions to bring to bear the greatest pressure to ensure ratification of trade treaties with the Soviet Union. There were also bloodcurdling references to communist cells in the army and preparations for the revolutionary seizure of power.

Incidentally, in January 1999 the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, under Robin Cook, published its own heavily sanitised official account of the ‘Zinoviev letter’. After an 11-month study its chief historian, Gill Bennett (with the assistance of Moscow archivists), concluded that the document was probably forged by white Russians (SIS/MI6 assets). They wanted to “derail the treaties” between Britain and the Soviet republic. MI6 assured the foreign office that the document was genuine. Securocrats were also responsible for leaking it to the Conservative Party. The Bennett study names Joseph Ball (MI5), who joined Tory central office in 1926, and Desmond Morton (MI6), a close friend of Winston Churchill’s. He was appointed a personal assistant during World War II. Stewart Menzies, a future head of MI6, later admitted passing the ‘Zinoviev letter’ to the Daily Mail.¹⁵

Yet no matter how transparent a forgery it was, it did the trick. Though the Labour vote increased, the Liberal vote collapsed in a panicked, middle-class stampede to the Conservatives. The Tory vote soared by two million and gave them 152 extra MPs and, in Allan Hutt’s phrase, an “oppressively swollen” majority¹⁶ (an “oppressively swollen” majority, it needs stressing, obtained through naked fraud). The 1924 election was rigged. A violation of any kind of democracy. The Tory government was clearly the result of a conspiracy hatched between MI5 and MI6 securocrats, foreign office grandees and Conservative Party insiders, presumably with the full blessing of Buckingham Palace.

Of course, in terms of high politics all this is of the utmost importance. Obviously not for anarchists and various leftists. For them one election is like another and all elections are fake, a spectacle, a distraction. They hoodwink the docile plebs and serve to produce the illusion of popular control. Meanwhile wealth and power go untouched.

Communist take a very different approach. We consider it obligatory, apart from the most exceptional circumstances, to participate in elections, no matter how unfair, no matter how bogus they are. Our overriding aim is to organise and mobilise the widest masses. And with that in mind, the results of the 1924 general election provided ample opportunity, not only to declare the Tories’ “oppressively swollen majority” illegitimate, but to energetically popularise the demand for the opening of MI5/MI6 files to reveal the truth about the ‘Zinoviev letter’ and along with that, the rooting out of all individuals directly or indirectly responsible for what amounted to a criminal coup to stop the re-election of MacDonald’s government.

We have in mind, of course, something like the Bolshevik slogan ‘publish the secret treaties’. A demand with its beginnings in early March 1917 when Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin, having returned to Petrograd from their Siberian exile, took over editing Pravda. Kamenev’s editorial ‘Without secret treaties’ reached out to ‘honest’ defencists - that is the great majority of revolutionary-minded workers, soldiers and peasants - by calling for the abrogation of the grubby tsarist diplomatic deals concluded with Anglo-French imperialism (ie, Russia would gain control over Constantinople and the Turkish straits in the event of the central powers being defeated).

However, it was Gregory Zinoviev, still in Berne, who recognised the full agitational potential of the issue after reading the telegram sent to Russian ambassadors by the provisional government’s foreign minister, Paul Miliukov. Zinoviev knew that the narod would be outraged by the idea that the war was being fought, not to defend the country against German and Austrian aggression, but to expand Russia’s imperial reach. By the end of March 1917 ‘publish the secret treaties’ featured at the centre of the Bolshevik’s agitational campaign against the provisional government and the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary ‘agreementist’ parties. It was, says Lars T Lih, the sister slogan of ‘All power to the soviets’.¹⁷

Stage-setting

In any case, with the 1924 Conservative landslide and, in April 1925, a return to the gold standard, the stage was set for a set-piece confrontation between the working class and capital - a confrontation which again found the miners in the front line. For long the sick man of British capitalism, the coal industry was in a particularly bad state. In pursuit of an elusive profit margin, on June 30 1925 the mine owners issued a demand for the repeal of the seven-hour day and a return to eight hours. Also they proposed drastic wage reductions and the abolition of the principle of the minimum wage. The miners refused to surrender their hard-won gains and appealed to the TUC.

Surprisingly, a special meeting of the general council on July 10 1925 pledged its “complete support” for the miners, and “undertook to cooperate wholeheartedly with them in their resistance to the degradation of the standard of life of their members”.¹⁸ This implicit threat of a general strike was the cause of much celebration amongst militant workers … and it sent shivers throughout the ruling class establishment.

Why this sudden determination by the TUC to stand firm against the government? Some have suggested it was due to changed composition. JH Thomas, the railworkers’ general secretary, had stood down from the general council to become a Labour minister. He and other inveterate rightwingers had been replaced by left reformists such as Alonzo Swales, George Hicks and Alf Purcell.

However, as John Foster says, the “key factor” was “pressure from below”, spurred on by the erosion of wages, rising unemployment and an improved bargaining position for British workers because of the French occupation of the Ruhr.¹⁹ This pressure from below was given organisational form and a political cutting edge by the National Minority Movement, launched in August 1924 by the CPGB and its allies.²⁰

In that sense it was the CPGB which was responsible for the TUC discovering a backbone. If the TUC did not take the lead, its leaders were well aware that the CPGB wanted to do just that. Without the TUC, Ernest Bevin said he feared “unofficial fighting in all parts of the country” and “anarchy”.²¹ Ramsay MacDonald admitted that he too was haunted by similar visions: “Had no general strike been declared, industry would have been almost as much paralysed by unauthorised strikes.”²²

As it turned out, the government was not yet ready. Faced with the miners’ intransigence and TUC willingness to threaten a general strike, Baldwin’s government decided to undertake a swift tactical retreat. On July 31 1925 - Red Friday - it announced a royal commission of inquiry into the coal industry and agreed to subsidise the mine owners for nine months, after which the commission was to deliver its report.

Baldwin was, as a result, subjected to a relentless whispering campaign conducted by FE Smith (Lord Birkenhead) and Winston Churchill - aided and abetted by the Rothermere press. They wanted to get Lloyd George on board, with a view to reviving the anti-socialist ‘bourgeois bloc’.²³ Churchill, now the chancellor, declared that the concessions granted to the miners were the “worst of all options”. The government had been humiliated. The gold standard was thrown into jeopardy. Churchill became the leading advocate of preparing to defeat the general strike when it came.

In that same anti-socialist spirit, the die-hard Tory, Lord Salisbury, submitted a long cabinet memorandum:

The precedent we are setting leads straight to nationalisation. I need not say that, to a government pledged as we are, this conclusion is absolutely unacceptable ... Is there any ground on which, in our retreat, we could hope to make a stand; and if there be such ground, which I do not perceive, have we the strength to hold?

For good reason or bad we retreated because we did not venture to fight. We have not only thought it right to give way to force, but we have condoned the breaking of their contracts by the allied unions, and we have actually agreed to pay a large sum for the arrangement. Whatever our ultimate intentions, there is no doubt that this is how the trade unions themselves and the world regard that event. Who will believe us, after the experience of the last few days, when we say we will die in some ill-defined ditch rather than accept the nationalisation of the coal industry, the nationalisation of every other distressed industry ... the moral basis of the government seems to me to have dropped out.²⁴

In other words, the government had to robustly re-establish its right to govern the governed.

1. Nowadays there are sections of the left - the Socialist Party in England and Wales in particular comes to mind - which have made the ‘no cuts’ slogan into a kind of shibboleth. Nothing could be more stupid. Sometimes the balance of class forces simply means that, apart from those determined on suicide, we have to accept cuts to wages, meal breaks … or council budgets, simply because we have no choice in the matter. There is no principle that communists must never retreat. Indeed we must learn how to retreat, as we must learn how to attack.↩︎

2. J Conrad ‘Black Friday betrayal’ Weekly Worker March 19 2026 (www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1577/black-friday-betrayal).↩︎

3. See K Marx and F Engels CW London 1979, pp327-32.↩︎

4. It should be emphasised that both the Tories and Whigs were aristocratically led. It is just that the Whigs/Liberals - championed the economic interests of the industrial bourgeoisie for their own sectional advantage. They wanted government office - not least because of the enormous scope that there was in making a financial killing through corruption. Another important point: long before the 1850s, the basis of aristocratic wealth had ceased being feudal and become capitalist. In Capital Marx distinguished between industry and agriculture, but declared that “in the ‘categoric’ sense the farmer is an industrial capitalist as much as the manufacturer” (K Marx Capital Moscow 1970, p750n).↩︎

5. For the Tories: J Ross Thatcher and friends: the anatomy of the Tory Party London 1983; G Wheatcroft The strange death of Tory England London 1998; P Burton-Cartledge The party’s over: the rise and fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak London 2021 and 2023; M Field The end of an era: the decline and fall of the Tory Party London 2025. For Labour: E Hobsbawm (et al) The forward march of Labour halted? London 1981; D Kavanagh (ed) The politics of the Labour Party London 1981.↩︎

6. J Barns and K Middlemas Baldwin: a biography London 1969, p252.↩︎

7. RR Jones Memoirs of a Conservative: JCC Davidsons’s memories and papers, 1910-37 London 1969, p253.↩︎

8. R Graves and A Hodge The long weekend London 1991, pp153-54.↩︎

9. A Hutt The post-war history of the British working class London 1937, p85.↩︎

10. Arthur Henderson as reported by Sidney Webb in M Cole (ed) Beatrice Webb’s diaries: 1924-1932 London 1952, p18.↩︎

11. VI Lenin CW Vol 23, Moscow 1977, pp105-20.↩︎

12. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 47, New York NY, pp52-55; and CW Vol 49, New York NY 2001, p238.↩︎

13. R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1973, p115.↩︎

14. Ibid.↩︎

15. The Guardian February 3 1999.↩︎

16. A Hutt The post-war history of the British working class London 1937, p98.↩︎

17. See Lars T Lih ‘Biography of a sister slogan’ Weekly Worker April 5 2018.↩︎

18. A Hutt The post-war history of the British working class London 1937, p109.↩︎

19. J Foster ‘Imperialism and the labour aristocracy’ in J Skelley (ed) The general strike: 1926, London 1976, p42.↩︎

20. The Minority Movement was led from the beginning by communists - Harry Pollitt was its most famous leader. The NMM proved to be an imaginative and in many ways brilliant application of the united front tactic advocated by the 4th Congress of Comintern (see J Riddell Towards the united front: proceedings of the fourth congress of the Communist International - 1922 Chicago IL 2012). Organising the militant minority in the trade unions, its object was to bypass the petty sectionalist prejudices of the trade union bureaucracy and hasten the day when capitalism could be overthrown. Though having affiliations from sections of the official trade union structure, the Minority Movement was in essence an anti-trade union-bureaucracy movement. Organised along industrial lines, there were, for example, miners, metal workers and transport minority movements. Each in its own way was seen as a precursor to a powerful single union in its industry. However, especially viewed in hindsight, that was not its true significance. Initially the NMM counted some 200,000 affiliated members. At its peak 957,000. Given that the CPGB had no more than 5,000 members at the time, a considerable achievement. However, these figures also show that the CPGB had an immediate constituency of well over a million (if we take into account non-union members, housewives, the unemployed, etc). Strategically the task was to merge with this mass and thereby become a party on the scale of Germany, France and Russia. If this had been done working class state power would have been within reach.↩︎

21. Quoted in A Hutt The post-war history of the British working class London 1937, p134.↩︎

22. R MacDonald Socialist Review June 1926.↩︎

23. winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1915-1929-nadir-and-recovery/present-dangers-of-the-socialist-movement.↩︎

24. Quoted in J Foster ‘Imperialism and the labour aristocracy’ in J Skelley (ed) The general strike: 1926 London 1976, pp41-42.↩︎