Force and fraud: capitalist repression and the lessons from the 1920s

The British state’s assaults on the Palestine movement, Kurdish activists, Just Stop Oil members and others in 2024 and 2025 is a serious challenge to our right to protest and to organise.1 The arrests at the national demonstration for Palestine in London on 18 January 2025 underline an authoritarian shift under the Labour government. It has not just continued the last Tory government’s repressive laws and actions, it has intensified them. As John Rees from the Stop the War Coalition said, “Keir Starmer, who prides himself on being a human rights lawyer, has now turned into one of the most repressive prime ministers this country has ever seen”.2

Yet, the ferocity of such action, echoed or exceeded in many other countries, should come as no surprise. It builds on, for example, the attacks against Muslims that accompanied the “war on terror” after 11 September 2001.

Capitalism rules by force and fraud, by economic coercion, political control, social pressure—and violence. At the heart of the “rule of law” under capitalism is the original and genuine two-tier policing: soft on the rich and powerful, hard on workers, black people and the oppressed. In February 2025, 1,000 tractors gridlocked central London as farmers protested about having to pay inheritance tax like everyone else. The police genially assisted them and there were no arrests. Just Stop Oil or Palestine solidarity supporters who do the same are dragged off and jailed. In March 2021, police arrested and handcuffed women who gathered on Clapham Common for a vigil after the arrest of a cop for the murder of Sarah Everard. Zionist vigils for those killed on 7 October 2023 in Israel are treated as sacred.

Capitalism seeks to persuade and achieve consent for its rule, but the threat or actuality of the Taser, the jail and the gun are always present. Workers’ “good behaviour”—from a bosses’ perspective—does not normally have to be enforced by a truncheon or prison. We obediently rise from our beds and head for work because the alternative is poverty on meagre benefits or (in many parts of the world and for some in Britain) starvation. Most people, most of the time, accept that a world of rich and poor, powerful and weak, elite politics and oppression is normal. Even if they do not like it, they do not think there is any realistic way of changing it.

This is rooted in the media, most of the education system, most political parties and the lived experience that things do not, in fact, change much. As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci puts it:

The “normal” exercise of hegemony on the now classical terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterised by the combination of force and consent, which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating excessively over consent. Indeed, the attempt is always made to ensure that force will appear to be based on the consent of the majority, expressed by the so-called organs of public opinion newspapers and associations.3

Sometimes, the force has to be more overt. Frederick Engels writes that in the last analysis, state power “consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds”.4

On many protests, the state begins with a friendly face in the hope that opposition can be contained. On any demonstration in Britain, people are likely to be approached by the insufferable “liaison” officers in light blue bibs who chat about the weather to anyone talking to them. Their calm demeanour is designed not only to gather information but also to hide the fact that if protesters go “too far”, then the far less smiley ones with body armour and helmets are ready. As Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky explains, the state has perfected “the art of waging a combined struggle against the proletariat by every means from saccharine, professorial-clerical preachments to machine-gunning of strikers”.5

When strikes and protest movements on a large scale puncture the apparent acceptance of ordinary life, the state must make concessions, seek to buy off sections of those protesting or intimidate and crush them. In the early stages of the Palestine movement in Britain, the size of the movement humiliated the Tories. Home secretary Suella Braverman arrogantly announced that “Waving a Palestinian flag or singing a chant advocating freedom for Arabs in the region may be a criminal offence”.6 Hundreds of thousands of people ignored her and the police knew marchers would overwhelm them if they attempted to impose such restrictions. It was Braverman who had to resign just a few weeks after her attempted crackdown. Here’s an important lesson—large numbers, steadfastness and action in the streets and workplaces are the surest way to preserve our rights.

We won the right to march, organise, strike and vote through struggle. It is struggle that will defend us. The state’s hitmen salivate when they sense weakness or retreat. Repressive laws often follow a setback for our side. The Public Order Act of 1986, a real milestone against protest rights, followed the Tories beating the miners’ strike. The Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act 1927, which banned sympathy strikes and mass picketing, came after the union leaders had taken the general strike to defeat.

The present form of the repressive state and the battery of anti-protest laws have not always existed. It was constructed, with retreats and advances, as a response to the rise of a working class that threatened capitalist rule. And each time governments extended these laws to deal with an “emergency”, they frequently retained them for the future.

Two centuries ago, there was no police force in most of Britain. It was not until 1829 that an act established the Metropolitan Police, covering an area with a radius of seven miles from the centre of London.7 It took until 1856, before the County and Borough Police Act made it compulsory for all towns and counties to set up a full-time, paid police force. The fiction remains to this day that we do not have a national force but a patchwork of local ones that sometimes cooperate.

Before the government created cop forces, the state dealt with revolt from below with troops and para-military repression. The brutality against the Peterloo protesters in 1819 and the Rebecca movement in Wales and the Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s relied largely on soldiers and militias. Such repression was vicious towards protests but also highly dangerous for the ruling class. It raised confrontation to the highest level—state military forces. The police offered a force that could pretend to be part of the locality it held down.

Yet, the police has never been “soft”. In 1833, the Met showed its colours very swiftly when it attacked thousands of members of the National Union of the Working Class (NUWC), who were holding a mass meeting at Coldbath Fields in Clerkenwell, London. A leading police commander led baton charges against the crowd and arrested the NUWC leaders. In response, rioters stabbed three police officers and killed constable Robert Culley.

Gratifyingly, and showing how the new force was distrusted, a coroner’s jury ruled Culley’s death was justifiable homicide.8 The government appealed against this verdict and won in the High Court, but nobody was ever tried for Culley’s death. George Fursey was charged with the wounding of the other two officers—an Old Bailey jury acquitted him. The jury system, which allows a measure of democratic control, has frequently upset the cops and politicians. Because today juries sometimes agree with environmental protesters that the climate crisis justifies attacks on property, magistrates and judges now try to tell juries what they are “allowed to do” and to outlaw defendants’ evidence about the climate emergency.

Ruling classes do not learn immediately how best to use the iron fist as well as the smiley face. They learn “on the job” and are constrained by what they can implement, based on the scale and militancy of working-class fightback and other forms of dissent. The British ruling class has been learning how to do this for a long time—at home and in the empire.

This article concentrates on a crucial period when the British ruling class faced a serious challenge to its control: the opposition from mass strikes during the Great Unrest of 1910-14, the Suffragettes’ campaign for votes for women and the anti-imperialist revolt in Ireland posed deep problems. Combined with the need for “order” during the First World War—and after the Russian Revolution of 1917—the state had to refine and widen its repressive arsenal. The general strike (or rather its defeat) was central to furthering this process.9 Revolutionary socialist Duncan Hallas writes:

The general strike of May 1926 was a decisive turning point in British history—and it was an unmitigated defeat for the working class. It brought to an end a long, though not uninterrupted, period of working-class militancy, led to the prolonged dominance of the unions by their openly class collaborationist right wing and to the massive reinforcement of Labour Party reformism at the expense of the revolutionary left.10

That is a great summary, but we should add that it was also crucial for the development of state power.

During the First World War, the state targeted anyone who spoke out against the slaughter. This included the non-revolutionary Union of Democratic Control (UDC), founded to bring together MPs, academics and celebrities horrified by the outbreak of the fighting. Headed by figures such as the journalist ED Morel, its manifesto raged against the secret treaties and diplomacy it saw as central to the war, pushed for general disarmament and controls on the arms trade, and demanded an international body to secure inter-state agreements. It picked up a glittering range of liberals and wealthy supporters but also penetrated into the organisations of the working class. By October 1915, 48 out of 107 affiliated bodies came from the labour movement.11

The UDC provided an ideological direction for Labour Party members disoriented by their leaders’ support for the war. Its pamphlets sometimes came out under the imprint of the Independent Labour Party (ILP).12 The state saw it as a threat, a voice against jingoism and militarism that could disrupt war propaganda. Cops visited its activists’ homes and turned up at UDC meetings openly or secretly.

In the summer of 1915, police raided the National Labour Press, a printer for the ILP and UDC, and destroyed newspapers and pamphlets. An official body, the National War Aims Committee, was created to hold pro-war public meetings to counter the hundreds of UDC rallies taking place across Britain. In the Commons, captain Guest, joint parliamentary secretary to the Treasury, explained this was designed to counter the “considerable pacifist propaganda being fermented in certain industrial centres in England”.13 When this pro-war attempt failed, the state jailed ED Morel.

Only three days after a cabinet discussion in August 1917 laid stress on the “importance of taking more active steps to combat peace propaganda”, the military authority at Whitehall issued a summons to search Morel’s house. He was then arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned for six months within a fortnight for breach of an obscure regulation.14

A more long-term and powerful threat came from workers’ organisation. A 1915 act had banned strikes and forced workers to obtain their bosses’ permission before they could leave their job. Around 3.5 million workers producing armaments and military supplies were directly or indirectly controlled by the Ministry of Munitions. By the end of 1917, the government was employing more than 4,000 censors to cut, distort or eliminate anti-war newspapers, leaflets and books.

This did not halt the fightback against attacks on workers under the camouflage of the war effort. Laws that outlaw strikes and seek to smash protests work only when they can be enforced. Resistance can blunt or defeat them. London transport workers struck in 1915, 1917 and 1918, the last occasion being a strike for equal pay by women. The 1918 strike involved 10,000 workers and won a five-shilling (25p) a week bonus rise previously granted to men only:

On 16 August 1918, a meeting of women at Willesden bus garage decided, without consulting or even informing either the management or the trade union leaders, to strike the following day. The next morning Willesden stopped work. Workers there were immediately joined by women at Hackney, Holloway, Archway and Acton depots or garages, and thereafter the strike spread like wildfire.15

By 23 August, women bus and tram workers at Hastings, Bath, Bristol, South Wales, Southend and Birmingham joined in. About 18,000 women out of the 27,000 employed in the industry were out, and, in addition, women working on the tubes—supported by some men—stopped work on the same issue.

Before, in July 1915, some 200,000 South Wales miners won a pay rise after a five-day strike.16 The Clyde Workers’ Committee in Scotland, consisting of shop stewards and other workplace reps, was at the forefront of resistance. Most of the CWC leaders were revolutionaries including the chair William Gallagher, who was later to be a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The CWC was held responsible for the wave of strikes that gripped Clydeside for almost a year from February 1915 over the use of unskilled workers to do the work of craftspeople. The suppression of the CWC was the result of an offensive directed by the Ministry of Munitions, which led to the imprisonment and removal from Glasgow of much of its political and industrial leadership.

In February 1916, the police raided the Socialist Labour Press, smashed up the machinery and halted the forthcoming issue of the Worker, the newspaper of the CWC. This followed the publication of an article entitled “Should the Workers Arm?” in a previous issue. Cops then arrested CWC leader John MacLean, Gallagher and others. David Kirkwood, one of those seized, tells in his autobiography how four detectives armed with revolvers seized him.

There was real repression during the war, but in many ways the state was only now beginning to develop a complete approach to dealing with mass movements, workers’ organisations and revolutionary parties—it had not even wholly secured the total loyalty of its own forces. The National Union of Police and Prison Officers was founded by ex-inspector John Syme in 1919. Four years earlier, Syme was victimised for “undue familiarity with his men”. The union had a largely underground existence until 1918, when it launched strikes over pay and the sacking of a constable for union membership. The strike spread quickly in parts of London, with most of the Met involved.

Flying pickets forcibly entered some stations in search of strike-breakers, and there were assaults on special constables who had been drafted in to take over strikers’ work. On 31 August 1918, a mass meeting of around 1,000 at the Finsbury Park Empire was followed by a march to Whitehall. The government panicked. Prime minister Lloyd George took personal charge of settling the strike, conceding big pay rises. Union membership soared five-fold to 50,000.

However, a second strike in 1919 was a failure, except in Liverpool. Historian Ken Weller comments:

The police in those days were far less isolated from the working class than is the case today, whether it was standard of living, style of life or their fundamental values system. While this in no way undermined the role of the police as an institution in defending the established order, it is an interesting fact that there had been considerable police unrest in both 1872 and 1890, both years of industrial unrest in their own right. The police on both occasions tried to form unions.17

The government learned its lesson, ensuring the loyalty of its cops by granting special privileges, such as higher pay than most workers, building houses away from working-class areas, which were rented cheaply to police, and replacing the union with the thoroughly reactionary Police Federation. The cops have always been a racist, anti-worker force. After the strikes of 1918, this was qualitatively reinforced, ensuring the existence of the institutionally sexist, racist and homophobic force that we have now. The police is a battering ram against the working class, not one whose officers can be “workers in uniform”.

In 1883, the government set up the police Special Branch in an effort to beat back Irish Republicans fighting British imperialism. In 1913, it was given a new leader in the form of Sir Basil Thomson. “Educated” at Eton and Oxford, Thomson served in the colonial service in Fiji, Tonga (of which he was imposed as prime minister) and British New Guinea, followed by a spell as governor of a number of prisons. In 1913, as assistant commissioner of police, it “fell to his lot to combat Suffragettes”. Thomson was a ferocious anti-Communist, writing that since the end of the First World War, he had been “concerned with the red propaganda from Moscow, which had fascinated the labour extremists in England”. He added, in antisemitic fashion, that there was a “yearning appetite for a share of the Bolshevist fund which was being spent in Western Europe to ferment the world revolution so ardently desired by the Moscovite Jews”.18

The end of the war did not see the removal of the emergency laws passed during it. In 1920, wartime legislation fed into the Official Secrets Act and the Emergency Powers Act. The second of these authorised the king to declare a state of emergency when strikes threatened the supply of “food, water, fuel or light, the means of locomotion or the essentials of life”.19 Other regulations gave the authorities powers to close down meetings and demonstrations.

The British Communist Party (CP), created in January 1921, soon saw state repression. In May of that year, police raided the party’s offices and arrested Albert Inkpin, the general secretary. Police ransacked the offices, seized literature and cash, stripped pictures off the walls and left only the ashes of Eleanor Marx Aveling that were in an urn. Inkpin was charged for owning Communist literature and convicted by the lord mayor who heard the case. He was sentenced to six months hard labour for three offences under the Defence of the Realm regulations and three months with hard labour for other offences.

In May 1924, the Communist Workers Weekly claimed:

Scotland Yard’s most important function is the protection of the supreme murderers, robbers and criminals—the capitalist class itself. The methods of the Special Branch are many. In addition to its own agents, members of working class organisations are regularly bribed to betray information. Telephone lines are tapped, microphones are concealed in meeting places.20

This was followed by the prosecution of the Workers Weekly’s acting editor JR Campbell using the Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797. Under this law, it was an offence to seduce any member of the armed forces from their “duty to the crown”.21 Unused for over a century, in 1912, the government revived the act to confront militant trade unionism and the Syndicalist newspaper of urging troops not to shoot strikers.

The Synicalist’s printer and publisher were convicted and imprisoned for nine months with hard labour. That was under a Tory regime—but the 1924 cases happened with the first Labour government in office. In the run-up to the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the 1914 war, the Workers Weekly published an open letter:

Soldiers, sailors, airmen, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, the Communist Party calls upon you to begin the task of not only organising passive resistance when war is declared or when an industrial dispute involves you but to definitely let it be known that neither in a class War nor a military War will you turn your guns on your fellow workers but instead will line up in our attack on the exploiters.22

On 5 August 1924, police arrived at the party offices to arrest Campbell and spent two hours searching the premises, removing all the branch files. The case was so central that the cabinet discussed it the next day. Internal opposition meant ministers looked for a way out, and the attorney general suggested that Campbell could write a letter saying he was not really the editor. When Campbell appeared in court, the prosecution drew back from taking the case forward. Predictably, the right-wing press attacked the government for being soft on Communism. MPs passed a motion from the Liberals calling for an inquiry into what had happened, and because prime minister Ramsay MacDonald argued this was a vote of no confidence in the government, it triggered a general election—and a Tory victory.

A year later, in October 1925, Cambell and 11 other leading Communists faced fresh charges under the incitement to mutiny act. After an 11-day trial at the Old Bailey, a jury—heavily directed by the judge—found all the defendants guilty after just ten minutes of discussion. The court sentenced those with previous convictions to 12 months in jail and the others to six months.

The Communists replied with defiance. Those receiving the lesser term all refused an offer by the judge of a non-custodial sentence in return for a declaration that they would not engage in further political activities similar to those that formed the basis of the charges. As Communist Willie Gallagher commented, they were jailed “for refusing to leave the Party”. The jailings took out top Communists from activity during the general strike. When the state tried to halt all Communist meetings by denying premises or open-air venues, the party’s members resisted. In June 1925, in Greenock, to the west of Glasgow, the Communist Young Pioneers defied a refusal by magistrates to allow a street procession. They marched through the town with a band playing and a banner flying, followed by a large crowd. They held a protest meeting at which speakers included comrade Taylor, a twelve-year-old. The police dispersed the meeting and arrested some protesters, but the activists’ spirits were unbroken.

The Communists saw themselves at war with capitalist society and its legal institutions. In some ways similar to Just Stop Oil members and Palestine Action people today, they expected to be repressed and organised to survive in an incredibly hostile atmosphere. The difference to 2025 is that they consciously appealed to a movement rooted in millions of workers. Despite state assaults, the Cambell case and the aftermath, the Greenock example and the Ammanford strike (see below) represent inspiring examples of how to meet repression. It was only after the defeat of 1926 that the state felt able to unleash the full weight of its assaults—and to be wholly confident of success.

At the beginning of the general strike, the government granted itself emergency powers, similar to those adopted in wartime. These measures, directed to make scabbing easier and crush picketing, did not break the action. So, in the strike’s second week, the police launched brutal assaults in areas including Glasgow, Edinburgh, Hull, Newcastle, Middlesbrough, Leeds, Doncaster Preston and London. And the courts followed up the attacks.

A document in the Trades Union Congress archives records that ten days after the strike began the judges and magistrates were showing their class loyalties:

Blyth, Northumberland, 11 May: Seven young miners sentenced to one month each in jail for having threatened to impede a newspaper van. Other miners received sentences varying from one to nine months for stopping buses and placing a telegraph pole across the road. Fulham, West London police court: Three men were sentenced to 21 days hard labour for circulating a pamphlet containing a paragraph relating to an alleged mutiny among the Welsh Guards. Birmingham: Raid on Monday on the offices of the strike committee. Some 80 leading labour representatives were charged with publishing a false statement.

These are the actions of a ruling class that fears its hold is slipping away. Elsewhere in the same Trades Union Congress (TUC) document, it gives the key reason why these rulers managed to retain control—the failures of union leaders. Their acceptance of the capitalist framework and the capitalist state meant they were on the wrong side when it came to real battles. Some union leaders openly scabbed:

Seamen’s Union: Mr Justice Astbury had before him Tuesday a motion by the National Sailors and Firemen’s union for an injunction against officials of certain branches to restrain them from calling out their members on strike. Judge Astbury granted the injunction and stated in his judgment that the so-called general strike was illegal.23

The union tops used the ruling class courts against their own members to halt strike solidarity.

The seamen’s union was exceptionally right wing. Repression was fostered by the determination of nearly all the union leaders to keep the strike passive and to head off any political confrontation with the government. Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein summarise:

To talk about maintaining order and preventing conflict at a time when the ruling class has gone on the offensive, locked out one million miners and systematically organised scabbing on the solidarity strike in their defence, is effectively to leave capitalist “order” intact. Compare this to the Petrograd Soviet’s slogan in 1905: “8 hours and a gun”.24

Retreat did not lead to “moderation” from the enemy. The government used Regulation 22 of the Emergency Powers Act 1920 to stop meetings called by miners’ leaders during the lockout.

In October, AJ Cook scheduled a meeting in Staffordshire, and 15,000 people turned up. Yet, 1,000 baton-wielding cops stopped the event going ahead. Cops broke up other gatherings in Yorkshire, South Wales and Leicestershire. In most coalfields, the most violent months were September and especially October as it became obvious the rest of the union leaders had abandoned the miners. By September, there were police at every point on foot and motor around Mansfield’s pit villages in Nottinghamshire. Police and strikers fought on 18 separate occasions. Glyncymmer colliery near Port Talbot saw one of the most vicious confrontations—witnesses described strikers lying on straw bales stained with blood. Information released in 1927 showed that at least 7,960 people were charged with offences arising out of the general strike and the lockout that followed. Around 1,160 of these related to the days of the general strike itself. In other words, the vast majority of charges came during the lockout and after the sell-out by union leaders. The state was always going to attack its enemies, but it was encouraged and became more confidently ruthless once the trade union leaders retreated.

Throughout the strike, union leaders presented the state as a friend of workers and opposed any sort of confrontation with the police. The British Worker of 6 May printed its “Message to Workers”, which called on every striker to “be exemplary in his conduct and not to give any opportunity for police interference”.25 It advised pickets “to avoid obstruction and to confine themselves strictly to their legitimate duties”. By 9 May, the British Worker had not printed a single item of news on police arrests of strikers and pickets although the Gazette—the government outlet—and the BBC were announcing them daily. The British Worker’s view of “exemplary conduct” was revealed as “special football and cricket matches, indoor attractions, whist drives”. Most exemplary of all was the Cardiff strike committee’s appeal approvingly quoted: “Keep smiling, refuse to be provoked, get into your garden, look after the wife and kiddies. If you do not have a garden, get into the country, the parks and playgrounds. Do not hang around the centre of the city”.26

On 6 May, Sir John Simon, the leader of the liberals, former attorney general and home secretary, informed the House of Commons in the most “authoritative” terms that the general strike was illegal, that every striker in breach of contracts could be sued in the County Courts for damages and that “every trade union leader who had advised and promoted this course of action is liable in damages to the uttermost farthing of his personal possessions”.27 Such a prospect terrified the general secretaries and their coteries. It was not just their cherished bureaucratic machinery that was under threat but their own homes, bank accounts and (for some) their stock and shares.

When the movement does not stand up for those who are on the frontline, the state is freed up to exact revenge. Sentences linked to 1926 were harsh. A fine of five pounds was too much for people who had been without any income for months. One man was sentenced to a month in prison for pulling a government notice off a wall. A miner was sentenced to three months hard labour for advising workers not to sign up as special constables. The home secretary refused to consider an amnesty for the general strike prisoners, but he did remove a fine of 14 shillings (70p) imposed on a coal company for selling goods without a permit.

The Communist Party was a particular target of repression. Between 1,000 and 1,250 party members were arrested during the strike. Police targeted party offices and the production of the Workers Weekly. Those who sold the paper were also in the frame. One Labour backbench MP complained that “the police and the magistrates seem to think they are quite absolute, they can do almost anything they wish”.28 Hallas comments:

There were 9,000 arrests all told. Over 13 percent were CP members (24 percent of the CP membership) as compared with an arrest rate of 0.2 per cent for TUC affiliated trade unionists as a whole (4,365,619 affiliated members in 1926). Not many of the convicted CP members were likely to get work again for many a year. Moreover, the entire top leadership of the CP had already been arrested, tried for sedition and sentenced to six or 12 months’ imprisonment in October 1925; “perhaps the greatest compliment that capitalism could have paid to the role of the Communist Party in preparing the working-class side for the coming general strike,” says Klugmann and he is right. The ruling class feared the [CP] in 1925-26.29

The Minority Movement, the CP-inspired rank-and-file initiative of the 1920s, made bold calls about preparing for a major battle against repression during struggles. Its conference of March 1926, which claimed to represent around one million workers, demanded planning on a militant basis:

To form workers’ defence corps, in order to protect working class speakers from bourgeois terrorism, to protect trade union headquarters from fascist incendiarism, to defend strike pickets against police interference, and finally, build up a powerful working-class force capable of defending the political and industrial rights and liberties of the workers.30

However, these words were never put into practice. Instead, the CP’s softness towards the left union leaders and its slogan of “All Power to the General Council!” of the TUC overwhelmed the readiness to use strong methods against state attacks. The movement and the CP turned their backs on the positive examples of resisting the state’s assaults.

Fighting the state: the 1925 Ammanford coal strike

The 1925 anthracite strike in the western part of the South Wales coalfield gives a different example. Driven by rank-and-file initiative and organisation, it showed how workers can terrify the repressive authorities. It was overshadowed and overtaken by national events later in the year and then the general strike and lockout of 1926. Yet, the struggle by 30,000 anthracite miners was “a landmark of immeasurable significance in the development of a sophisticated trade union consciousness among the whole of the South Wales miners”.31

It showed workers’ defiance of the police, the potential for offensive resistance to beat back the state—and the betrayals by union leaders, which undermined the fightback. Historian Hywel Francis writes:

More than any other disturbances in the whole inter-war period, those in the Ammanford district in 1925 saw the miners take the offensive in meeting organised police “violence” with their own “violence”. Colliery managers, coal-owners, newspaper reporters and police were abused and physically attacked. Even the Deputy Chief Constable of Carmarthen was beaten to within an inch of his life. One manager while on the way to his colliery was met with a typical comment: “The only way he’ll get through this picket line is on a stretcher”.32

Fearful of the response, at one point, police refused to arrest strike leaders because they would prove to be too eloquent in court in their condemnation of the police and the owners. WJ Davies, a young miner from Pantyffynnon, along with three others gave themselves up at the police station after one notable confrontation. The police refused to arrest them despite Davies nonchalantly announcing he had “beat[en] up” a policeman.33

The strike began when new major owners took over the mines and tried to sweep away traditional conditions won through previous struggles. By 14 July 1925, the second day of the strike, all miners in the relevant coalfield were out except for some in the Dulais Valley and Vale of Neath. A strikers’ mass meeting in the town of Ammanford voted to set out immediately to close down the working mines.

That night, about 400 strikers set out at 10pm. They picked up people as they marched through the night and by the time they reached Crynant, 21 miles from where they began, the crowd was 15,000 people strong. Strikers and scabs fought at Crynant station, with strike breakers from Neath drawing knives. Pickets gave the scabs “cwpl o bunts” (a couple of punches) after which they stopped work for the remainder of the strike and were compelled to walk the six miles back to Neath. The police made an appearance at the station but was completely outnumbered: “About 20 had arrived…quaking in their boots, absolutely cringing and begging the crowd to go away”.34

The following day, there was just one pit left in the Anthracite District still working—the Rock Colliery at Glynneath. Dulais Valley miners joined the thousands from the Amman and Swansea Valleys in marching over the Hirfynydd mountain to picket the Rock miners. In response, the cops planned to reverse the setback of previous days and smash up the pickets. Police allowed some of the marchers through their cordon at the Rock and then 100 officers ambushed them: “For ten minutes, all you could hear was the clash of batons on the skulls of miners”.35 One young miner from Cwmtwrch, the sole supporter of a widowed mother and eight children, was so badly beaten that he spent a long period in hospital and never worked as a miner again. The cop responsible was not forgotten. On the next occasion, when he played rugby against one of the Swansea Valley teams, he received such leg injuries that he suffered permanent incapacity. The cops’ assault failed. Rock miners joined the strike.

From 28 July until 6 August 1925, Ammanford and some surrounding villages were under the virtual control of the strike committee. The South Wales Daily Post reported that Gelliceidrim Colliery was rushed by a crowd of miners, some with hoods to hide their faces—”Mob law prevailed for a time”, claimed the reporter. At Saron Colliery, officials were attacked, shots were fired, a man in the colliery yard was hit by a bullet and a quantity of explosives was discharged. Similarly, at Park Colliery, explosives were discharged and telephone wires cut. There was also a large demonstration at the Emlyn Colliery, Penygroes, as well as at Cross Hands, where a crowd led by Edgar Lewis, the local checkweigher, “terrified” the police.36 The Anthracite Coalowners appealed to the chief constables of Carmarthen, Glamorgan and Brecon for help. On 30 July, there were riots at several places. Evan Llewellyn, who was later given a 17-month prison sentence, was one of many who openly incited riotous behaviour:

I don’t care a **** if there are 20 police. I will stand in front of all their bullets. We want to stop everyone going to work. They are not going to work while we are starving. What are the police? If they obstruct you, fight them.37

Then came the Battle of Ammanford on 5 August 1925. Ianto Evans recalled:

Crowds of workers lined the streets demanding that a march be made to the Ammanford No. 2 Colliery…where an electrician had sneaked in on the pillion of a motor cycle… The police were concealed inside the colliery premises ready and waiting. Nothing daunted the crowd. They marched up and demanded that this man be removed. The Deputy Chief Constable led a force of police in the attack and was promptly laid out. Then the fun started.38

Some 200 Glamorgan police had been billeted at a Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen brewery and rushed to the scene. The strike committee came prepared. When the cops in their 12 buses passed the town of Pontamman, strikers showered them with boulders and stones. Every bus window was smashed. A battle took place from 10.30 pm until 3 am, with heavy casualties on both sides. With the police unable to break resistance, the coal owners gave in on almost all the strikers’ demands. Uncompromising resistance to repression had defended and escalated the strike. The power of resistance in the workplace, backed up by unflinching readiness to hit back against state forces, had won.

Retribution followed soon. The government prosecuted 198 miners, and the courts jailed 58 of them for up to 18 months. The miners saw it as “naked and class justice”.39 Miner JM Phillips recalls in 1972: “The law is always on ‘their’ side, the owners. When it comes to a question of a court it’s the same as Justice Matthews said, ‘The Law Courts of Britain are open to all, like the doors of the Ritz Hotel’”.40

Miners never expected justice from a grand jury drawn from a landed proprietor class. The jury foreperson was F Dudey Williams-Drummond, commander of the British Empire, estate agent to Lord Cawdor. Also on the jury were two colonels, two majors, a captain, a knight and a parson. However, solidarity maintained the fightback:

There were wild scenes of excitement and enthusiasm throughout the trials and when prisoners were ultimately released. A shilling (5p) a week levy on all Ammanford miners allowed the payment of a minimum wage rate to all the prisoners’ dependents. There were token strikes involving at least 16 pits in the anthracite coalfield in February 1926, as a protest against the sentences. On almost every day of the trials, busloads of miners and their families travelled to Carmarthen to cheer the prisoners and sang hymns and the Red Flag outside the courtroom.41

The local battle fused with the broader picture. In early 1926, 12 Communist Party leaders were imprisoned, and a nationwide campaign within the workers’ movement coupled demands for their release with a general amnesty for the 58 miners. In February 1926, a TUC delegation met with the home secretary to ask for the release of the remaining prisoners. Despite what the home secretary called the deputation’s “conciliatory and very courteous” attitude, he rejected all calls to reduce the sentences.42

The TUC leaders were so shocked by the totality of the rejection that they pleaded with the home secretary not to publish the contents of the letter—for fear of how rank-and-file workers would react. Their precious role of mediation and balancing was under threat from the state, which spurned their pleas, and by the ferocity of workers’ action.

The Ammanford miners even formed a Defence Corps towards the end of the strike. As Francis writes:

They had their own sophisticated strategy involving espionage, sabotage, ambush, vigorous pickets and long marches. The deliberate attempts to escalate the strike immediately and so produce a short dynamic campaign was so uncharacteristic of a period that experienced protracted, unimaginative, almost predictably unsuccessful strikes. So many of the strike organisations of the time were obsessed by the necessity for a static jamboree-like atmosphere of soup kitchens and jazz bands.43

“The bourgeoisie does not want to die”

The betrayal of 1926 was the crucial opening for the capitalists to go on the attack. The repression of the 1930s against the unemployed movement and the attacks on anti-fascists were made easier because the Labour and trade union leaders retreated.

Writing in 1939, Trotsky summed up both the desperation of the capitalists and the cowardice of the reformists:

The bourgeoisie does not want to die. It has transformed all the energy inherited by it from the past into a violent convulsion of reaction. Force not only conquers but, in its own way, it ‘convinces’. The onset of reaction not only wrecks parties physically but also decomposes people morally. Many Messrs. Radicals have their hearts in their shoes.44

The Tory government went on an all-out attack against the National Unemployed Workers Movement (NUWM). In July 1931, in Castleford, West Yorkshire, the police attacked a NUWM demonstration, killing Arthur Speight. The following day the leadership of the local NUWM were all jailed for six months or more.

However, even in such circumstances, a fightback from below could win. John Newsinger writes, “Despite this repression, the fight went on. As winter approached, Liverpool was one of the centres of resistance. Police responded to protests by breaking into people’s homes, wrecking furniture and beating up men, women and children, calling them ‘parish-fed bastards’”.45 At this time, local Public Assistance Committees had the discretion to improve the benefit levels; in Liverpool they were increased by 25 percent. At the same time, the local NUWM leaders were all jailed. Christopher May got three years in a youth detention centre, and Joe Rawlings and Leo McGee were both sentenced to two years in prison.

In October 1932, there were protests in Belfast, uniting Protestant and Catholic unemployed. Cops shot dead two men, Samuel Baxter and John Keenan. But once again, benefit rates increased dramatically. The same month also saw the NUWM stage its great hunger march. As protesters converged on London, the police attacked them once again. The huge crowd of over 100,000 people that greeted marchers at Hyde Park drove the police off after fighting that spread way beyond the park. On 1 November, some 30,000 people accompanied a delegation of the marchers as they attempted to hand a petition in at the House of Commons. The police confiscated it. That same day, the government began a crackdown on the NUWM leadership in an attempt to destroy the movement.

Wal Hannington, the NUWM leader got three months in jail and Sid Elias, its chair, got two years. The treasurer, 78-year-old class-struggle veteran Tom Mann, was arrested and told that he was being bound over. This would have barred him from political activity, so he refused, and judges sentenced him to two months in jail. In the course of 1932, some 400 NUWM members were jailed. Yet, protests continued throughout 1933 and into 1934.

In short, every time the state attacks, our only protection is our numbers, our militancy and our refusal to be divided. Do not rely on the Labour and trade union leaders because they will betray you—that is the key lesson from the 1920s.

Charlie Kimber is a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party.

Notes