As regular readers know I have done a lot of research into the Great Unrest of 1911: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/11/great-unrest-1910-11-part-1.html I have been in contact with people involved in commemorating this period of strikes and rioting, notably in Liverpool which experienced effectively a general strike. It is ironic that precisely 100 years on we are seeing much the same kind of riotous activity. As I have noted that, in contrast to the early 2000s when people on history discussion boards discussed any reference to the Great Unrest as a fantasy or a counter-factual, elements of it are even appearing in prime time television, such as reference to the shootings during a riot in Llanelli in 1911 on 'The One Show' on BBC1.
What then are the similarities and the differences between what we are seeing now and what was witnessed in 1911? The basis is very different. The unrest in 1910/11 had its roots in strikes by coal miners, railway workers and merchant sailors. In 2011 there are no such strikes going on. The coal industry has been all but destroyed in the UK and our coal, where needed still, is imported. A lot of freight that arrives in the UK is carried by foreign vessels, whereas in 1911, the UK was the dominant country for sea freight. The railways were as fragmented as they were in 1911 since the privatisation of the 1990s. However, at present railway workers seem not to have any reason to strike. Consequently, unlike in 1911, there is not an established pattern of unrest on which the riots can be based. A lot of this stems from the hammering of the trade unions during the 1980s under Thatcher and the loss of any collective identity among workers. Thatcher's greatest success in weakening the unions was not the legislation restricting their behaviour, much of which Labour tried to introduce in the past anyway, it was her success in getting us simply to think of 'me first'.
Another factor that is different to 1911 is the lack of radical rhetoric. In 1911 Labour MPs notably Keir Hardie went around not only supporting the riots as an expression of legitimate working class unrest which they generally were not, but publicly calling on soldiers to mutiny if their commanders ordered them to fire on rioting working class people. In contrast this time we have supposedly left-wing Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney one of the most deprived areas of London calling for a London-wide curfew, something that was not even imposed (outside Liverpool) even in 1911 and would appear as if we were under foreign occupation. No-one in the Labour Party will even try to squeeze out some reference to this unrest being a representation of the anger of the public over a mixture of issues, notably continued police mistreatment of ordinary people, especially from ethnic minorities and youth unemployment at a level higher even than the worst days of the 1980s. Without channelling there is a danger that the unrest will turn to racial violence as it did in South Wales in 1911 and could easily do in many parts of London. This may not be black/white violence but as happened in Cardiff a century ago, targeted at people seen as taking jobs, so aimed at Poles and other EU citizens who have settled in London and who we know the CBI favours as employees over UK young people. This seems to be an unforeseen danger that needs to be addressed now.
Another difference to 1911 is the fact that the weather is not as hot. The summer of 1911 was exceptionally hot and this always provides a context for rioting. However, neither is it raining heavily, so the weather may not provoke rioting but it is not discouraging it either at the moment.
Rioting in 1911 was generally carried out by people unconnected to the strikes going on at the time and it focused on much the same things as this time: attacking the police (especially those brought in from outside the area) and looting. Looting is especially popular at times of economic hardship and conspicuous consumption that we are experiencing at the moment. The largest similarity between 1911 and 2011 is the economic context. It is noted that in 1911 a lot of anger stemmed from the fact that real wages were falling but consumption by the wealthy especially of very visible luxuries was increasing. We are in a very similar position now. Real pay has been declining for forty years now and even those people in graduate professions cannot afford a fraction of what their parents in such jobs could have done.
Everyone is suffering from the inexorable rise in petrol costs, utility prices and housing both in terms of buying houses and, in particular, rent, which seems to have had a new burst of climb since the recession started. The disruption to household incomes by redundancy and unemployment further impinges on disposable income as well as income used to pay for the essentials. I have been unlucky, but my circumstances are probably not atypical, with over half my monthly income paying for somewhere to live, to light and heat it, to fuel my car and to eat. I do not go on holiday, my car is 15 years old, I do not eat in restaurants and do not go to the cinema. You can put up with a dull life and battling for every penny, but after a while it impacts on you. I am lucky, there are millions of people in the UK far worse off than me, but if I am disgruntled can imagine how many of them/you feel? Whilst most ordinary people struggle we still keep seeing the obscene salaries and consumption of the privileged. Bankers pay continues to be high and yet we are still suffering the consequences of their failed greedy gambles and will be for decades to come especially in terms of lost social care and local facilities such as libraries being closed down. As in 1911 the obvious greed of the wealthy is painful and pricks us, made easier by the constant flow of information to us through every medium available. Whilst the trains may be slower and less frequent than they were in 1911, information travels far faster these days to people in all walks of life and all ages.
There are a number of other similarities to 1911 not just the conspicuous consumption in a time of hardship. The drafting in of police to cities is just like in 1911. There are promised to be 16,000 police on the streets of London tonight; 10,000 of these brought from outside the capital; nine constabularies are sending officers to London. In some ways this is a reverse of 1911 when the Metropolitan Police provided officers to other parts of the country, but that was only because London remained quiet and the unrest was located in other cities. However, it seems likely that cities will draw on constabularies in neighbouring more rural counties. The UK has far fewer constabularies than in 1911, but we still have a very decentralised system. I wonder if cities in the North East will bid to buy in police from the Cleveland Constabulary given that their former Chief Constable and Deputy Chief Constable, arrested this week for corruption, seem happy to sell their officers to the highest bidder.
The call from the local authorities for troops to be on the streets of Croydon is just like the hysteria of 1911. Fortunately local magistrates are no longer in a position simply to summon a local unit as they were 100 years ago. Given how many people whine about Winston Churchill as Home Secretary centralising the despatch of troops in 1911 to tackle unrest, that is more the system we have now. The issue, ironically, is unlike in 1911, Britain is currently fighting in two wars. Whilst we no longer have imperial possessions to defend and the commitment in Ireland is far from what it was in 1911, the British Army would be pretty stretched if it was mobilised to police the streets. In 1911 the Territorial Army was not trusted to oppose rioters, but in 2011 given class fragmentation and the dependence the UK has on its part-time soldiers, they may, in fact be called up to combat unrest. However, I would imagine even now they would be sent to areas outside those in which they were recruited to avoid any questions about opening fire on family members for individual soldiers. Of course, these days the odd tank or armoured car can achieve what a squadron of hussars would have been needed to do in 1911, so they could be spread thinner. They are also no longer dependent on the railway system to reach the scenes of unrest. However, experiences with civil unrest in Northern Ireland in the 1970s show the hazards of such action.
I am more familiar with the King's Regulations of 1908 than I am with the current Queen's Regulations, and I would be interested to hear what the procedure is for the military called on to deal with unrest. I cannot believe it is to simply fire into the front row of rioters but with the power of modern rifles and sidearms, even firing over their heads would cause a hazard. Of course, the British police, since the 1980s have possessed anti-riot equipment pretty much undreamt of in 1911. There would be no need for police to fall back on furled raincoats, instead they have baton rounds, tear gas, shields of different types and in some locales, water cannon. Cameron ought to be alert to coming down too hard on the rioters if he wants to secure his political legacy. Misremembered accusations that Churchill had striking miners shot were to haunt him politically even forty years after the event.
Whilst it is clear that 2011 is not a re-run of 1911, there are similarities which furthermore makes me ask why no-one in power was ready for the unrest which broke out this month. As I have noted before, I believe that they probably did foresee and are happy for it to run its course. Cameron is clearly enjoying sounding off as the authoritarian leader in the media and no doubt taking steps to further reduce liberty in the UK. Perhaps, I am simply giving him credit for foresight that is undeserved and he is simply even more incompetent than I believed.
Showing posts with label Winston Churchill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Winston Churchill. Show all posts
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
Saturday, 8 November 2008
The Great Unrest 1910-11. Part 1: Introduction
About seven years ago I became interested in the widespread strikes and numerous riots, known at the time as 'The Great Unrest' which occurred in the UK in the years before the First World War. Most people know of the difficulties faced by the Liberal Government of that era in dealing with the campaigns for women's suffrage and for Irish independence. However, the industrial unrest and the numerous riots which occurred at the same time, and were often related to the strikes, are far less well known. The extent that these events have been forgotten was revealed to me in when I was a regular contributor to the BBC 'what if?' message boards. When I wrote about the period of serious unrest across the UK especially 1910-11, people accused me of having made it up and asked, that given they were knowledgeable about history, why they had not heard of these events. I can only think the reason is because the image of a 'golden era' before the First World War is still pandered to. In the long run women won the vote and most of Ireland achieved independence so this upheaval can be seen as leading to an advancement of the liberal British state, very much in the Whig history pattern. However, the issues of the industrial unrest, provoked in part by conspicuous consumption and falling real wages, of the kind we are seeing currently, was an unresolved situation. For an introduction to 'The Great Unrest' I always advise people to read 'The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901-1914' by David Powell (1996) which also covers the Irish and female suffrage issues too. You can find a lot on the labour unrest of the period on local history websites about what happened in this period in particular towns; especially prominent were the events of South Wales, Liverpool and Hull.
Anyway, I decided to write a proper article on the unrest, looking at how the government responded to it. Partly this was because I had believed the myths that I had heard that Winston Churchill as a Liberal and Home Secretary at the time had ordered the shooting of striking coal miners. As I investigated, I found a very different picture to what I had expected and in fact heroes of mine in the labour movement came out of it in quite a bad light and stirring up trouble which led to the riots. There was an assumption by many labour leaders that workers had a legitimate right to riot and be violent, though in fact the people who suffered most in those riots were generally other ordinary people. This was connected to something else that annoyed me which was that many of the books had been written in the mid-1980s and were heavily influenced by the events of the Thatcher regime and especially in the governmental response to the Miners' Strike 1984-5. It annoyed me that these authors had not been able to be more objective and had let contemporary politics influence their analysis of the past.
To produce the article I spent months going to the National Archives at Kew in London and reading all the files from the time. I also read everything I could that has been written on the events. I produced the article with full academic footnoting of a British style. I tried to get my finished article published both in the UK and in the USA. The Americans thought my article was too parochial. The British felt it was not sufficiently analytical or they disliked me challenging the established 1980s perspective on the events or did not find the government policy aspect interesting. I did think of posting it on online history websites but the ones that seemed interested in this kind of topic seem to be hosted by extreme left-wing groups and they always want a particular language and perspective. I imagine they support a worker's right to riot and so would be unhappy with my conclusions and also the fact that I show that a lot of the rioting had nothing to do with the strikes occurring at the same time and was usually carried out by people unconnected with the striking industry. My views of the actions of the Army which seemed surprisingly measured would also not go down well in such contexts.
So, as a result, if you are interested in reading what went on in Britain 1910-11 to the extent that King George V feared he would ousted, I am going to post the article over a number of postings. I produced many various versions trying to appeal to different magazines and have picked the best from each. Rather than keep it as the integral articles I wrote, I am doing it as episodes looking at different features, for example, the establishment of government policy, the unrest in South Wales, the Liverpool General Strike, etc. The numbers refer to the pages in books, articles and government documents which I referred to and these are listed at the end of each posting.
This section is the introduction to the article and gives information about the level of strikes occurring at the time.
Introduction
This article explores the consequences of the juxtaposition of two trends in British politics and society in the years preceding the First World War. The first is the rise in violent unrest related to industrial action, particularly in the 1910s. This is set against the continuity in governmental policy, from the 1890s to the 1910s, towards serious industrial unrest despite the increasingly severe nature of the upheaval. The strikes and their associated riots led many to perceive a slide towards revolution or civil war. The apparently dire nature of the ‘Great Unrest’ meant that, whilst remaining with the framework for action that had been well established, exceptional responses were felt to be both necessary and justified in these particular circumstances.[1] However, despite the fact that many in the labour movement opportunistically used the rioting to exclaim virulent class-war rhetoric, in fact the riots had little to do with the strikes which in themselves were focused on bread-and-butter gains for workers.
Whatever the true nature of the strikes and the riots the government still faced a challenge in tackling their impact on the public. A study of the practical difficulties in dealing with this challenge forms the core of this article. Whilst the role of Winston Churchill as Home Secretary has been rehabilitated, a harsh attitude towards the application of the government’s policy on the ground remains unchallenged. This article challenges the view that became established in the 1980s, that there was a sharp break around 1910-12 to the approach to responding to strike-related riots is challenged. This article also explores, in an overarching way, the often neglected aspects of the upheaval such as the racial violence, the hostility to ‘imported’ police and the difficulties faced by local authorities. Finally the article outlines the overlooked area of how the experience of the immediate pre-war years shaped preparations for the anticipated wartime unrest.
Background: A Peak of Unrest
Unrest in the 1910s is seen as reaching a peak unmatched since the 1840s. Strikes rose from 389 in 1908, seen as a year of recession, to 872 in 1911 and 1459 in 1913. The scale of the strikes increased too. In 1909 only 170,000 British workers had struck, in 1911 the figure was 831,000 and the following year 1.23 million. The numbers of workers in a particular industry involved in the disputes was also high, 91 percent of transport workers and 62 percent of miners participated in the strikes between 1910-13. The scale of strikes grew away from locally-focused disputes, as shown by the first national rail strike in 1911 and the first national coal strike in 1912.[2]
Explanations for the upheaval vary, but there are a number of core occurrences which may help provide an answer. The period 1911-1914 had the lowest unemployment since 1901. It was 3 percent in 1911 compared to 7.8 percent just three years before, thus, workers felt themselves in a stronger position as there were fewer unemployed to draw on to work as blackleg labour.. However, real wages were not rising and up to a third of the population was on or below the poverty line. This impacted on living conditions, the infant mortality rate in 1914 being 139 per 1000 births, seven times the level today. Almost a third of men who volunteered for the Army in 1909-10 were rejected on grounds of ill-health.[3]
Historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Friedhelm Boll and James Cronin portray the outbreak of unrest as matching a pattern of strike waves that had occurred throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Such peaks were associated with growth in trade unionism. British trade union membership was rising in the years before and during this peak of unrest.. It climbed 60 percent 1910-14 and the growth was particularly strong among transport workers and general labourers. There were 2.02 million trade unionists in 1900 but 4.15 million by 1914.[4]
Cronin highlights that, despite the stronger opposition from the employers, there had been a qualitative break-through in the way the unions organised themselves. Ironically the problem was viewed by ministers such as Sydney Buxton, the President of the Board of Trade, as being that union leaders had lost control over their rank-and-file members. Key grievances included non-recognition of even well-established unions by employers and the fact that in a time of conspicuous prosperity for the middle and upper classes real wages for workers were falling.[5] As discussed below, there was a widespread perception that the unrest had political objectives, but as Powell importantly notes though the break down of relations in a number of industries did threaten disruption, the strikes themselves were concerned ‘with specific grievances rather than with more millenarian ideas’. The TUC favoured co-operation over confrontation and even the Triple Alliance, formed in 1914, was seen as a method of maintaining industrial discipline rather than for syndicalist or other political goals.[6]
In 1896, the Conservative Government had passed the Conciliation Act to encourage boards of conciliation and by 1913 there were 325. Ronald Sires argues these enabled greater government intervention. Though voluntary conciliation remained the most popular approach, the government found itself drawn into strikes which impinged on the national infrastructure, such as in the transport and coal mining sectors. Seeing its role as protecting the nation’s economy, the government intervened to get talks established for the rail industry in 1907 and 1911 and in the national coal strike of 1912.[8] One can see a number of factors combining to provoke industrial unrest. However, this does not explain the level of violence seen during the strikes that broke out in 1910-3 and there were other aspects that have to be considered to obtain an overall picture of the volatile state of parts of British society at the time. It had been the government’s choice to become involved in encouraging conciliation between the sides in disputes, but it also faced a stronger, older, imperative in safeguarding law and order in the face of unrest.
References
[1] Anthony Babington, Military Intervention in Britain from the Gordon Riots to the Gibraltar Incident, (London, 1990), p. 142. Despite popular complaint about the imposition of ‘martial law’, the government's law officers stated that action by troops in suppressing riots was what was legally expected of all citizens in standard peacetime circumstances.
[2] James E. Cronin, ‘Strikes and the Struggle for Union Organization: Britain and Europe’ in Wolfgang J. Mommsen & Hans-Gerhard Husung, ed., The Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany, 1880-1914, (Boston, 1985), p. 56; Friedhelm Boll, ‘International Strike Waves: a Critical Assessment’ in Mommsen & Husung, p. 89.
[3] Henry Pelling, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain, (New York, 1979), pp. 149-151. Despite the title of the book it includes a chapter ‘The Labour Unrest 1911-14’; Noel Whiteside, ‘The British Population at War’ in John Turner, ed., Britain and the First World War, (Winchester, Massachusetts, 1988), pp. 86-7; Parliamentary Paper, Cd. 5477, ‘Report on the Health of the Army for the year 1909’, no. LI, p. 1 and Parliamentary Paper, Cd. 5599, ‘Report on the Health of the Army for the year 1910’, no. LII, p. 1, both collected in Parliamentary Papers. Accounts and Papers, 1911. Vol. XLVII (3).
[4] Cronin, p. 62; Boll, p. 83; Steve Peak, Troops in Strikes. Military Intervention in Industrial Disputes, (London, 1984), p.27.
[5] Cronin, pp. 65-6.
[6] David Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901-1914, (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 127-8.
[7] Michael Bentley, Politics without Democracy, 1815-1914, (London, 1996), p. 324; Alun Howkins, ‘Edwardian Liberalism and Industrial Unrest: a Class View of the Decline of Liberalism’, History Workshop, vol. 4, (1977), p. 157; G.R. Searle, The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration 1886-1929, (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 94, 99; George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, (London, 1966), pp. 186-7.
[8] Powell, p. 124; Ronald V. Sires, ‘Labour Unrest in England 1910-1914’, in Journal of Economic History, vol. XV, no. 3 (1955), pp. 255-6, 264.
Anyway, I decided to write a proper article on the unrest, looking at how the government responded to it. Partly this was because I had believed the myths that I had heard that Winston Churchill as a Liberal and Home Secretary at the time had ordered the shooting of striking coal miners. As I investigated, I found a very different picture to what I had expected and in fact heroes of mine in the labour movement came out of it in quite a bad light and stirring up trouble which led to the riots. There was an assumption by many labour leaders that workers had a legitimate right to riot and be violent, though in fact the people who suffered most in those riots were generally other ordinary people. This was connected to something else that annoyed me which was that many of the books had been written in the mid-1980s and were heavily influenced by the events of the Thatcher regime and especially in the governmental response to the Miners' Strike 1984-5. It annoyed me that these authors had not been able to be more objective and had let contemporary politics influence their analysis of the past.
To produce the article I spent months going to the National Archives at Kew in London and reading all the files from the time. I also read everything I could that has been written on the events. I produced the article with full academic footnoting of a British style. I tried to get my finished article published both in the UK and in the USA. The Americans thought my article was too parochial. The British felt it was not sufficiently analytical or they disliked me challenging the established 1980s perspective on the events or did not find the government policy aspect interesting. I did think of posting it on online history websites but the ones that seemed interested in this kind of topic seem to be hosted by extreme left-wing groups and they always want a particular language and perspective. I imagine they support a worker's right to riot and so would be unhappy with my conclusions and also the fact that I show that a lot of the rioting had nothing to do with the strikes occurring at the same time and was usually carried out by people unconnected with the striking industry. My views of the actions of the Army which seemed surprisingly measured would also not go down well in such contexts.
So, as a result, if you are interested in reading what went on in Britain 1910-11 to the extent that King George V feared he would ousted, I am going to post the article over a number of postings. I produced many various versions trying to appeal to different magazines and have picked the best from each. Rather than keep it as the integral articles I wrote, I am doing it as episodes looking at different features, for example, the establishment of government policy, the unrest in South Wales, the Liverpool General Strike, etc. The numbers refer to the pages in books, articles and government documents which I referred to and these are listed at the end of each posting.
This section is the introduction to the article and gives information about the level of strikes occurring at the time.
‘Cossack Action of the Tsar Liberals’?: the British Government’s Response to Strikes and Riots 1910-11
Introduction
This article explores the consequences of the juxtaposition of two trends in British politics and society in the years preceding the First World War. The first is the rise in violent unrest related to industrial action, particularly in the 1910s. This is set against the continuity in governmental policy, from the 1890s to the 1910s, towards serious industrial unrest despite the increasingly severe nature of the upheaval. The strikes and their associated riots led many to perceive a slide towards revolution or civil war. The apparently dire nature of the ‘Great Unrest’ meant that, whilst remaining with the framework for action that had been well established, exceptional responses were felt to be both necessary and justified in these particular circumstances.[1] However, despite the fact that many in the labour movement opportunistically used the rioting to exclaim virulent class-war rhetoric, in fact the riots had little to do with the strikes which in themselves were focused on bread-and-butter gains for workers.
Whatever the true nature of the strikes and the riots the government still faced a challenge in tackling their impact on the public. A study of the practical difficulties in dealing with this challenge forms the core of this article. Whilst the role of Winston Churchill as Home Secretary has been rehabilitated, a harsh attitude towards the application of the government’s policy on the ground remains unchallenged. This article challenges the view that became established in the 1980s, that there was a sharp break around 1910-12 to the approach to responding to strike-related riots is challenged. This article also explores, in an overarching way, the often neglected aspects of the upheaval such as the racial violence, the hostility to ‘imported’ police and the difficulties faced by local authorities. Finally the article outlines the overlooked area of how the experience of the immediate pre-war years shaped preparations for the anticipated wartime unrest.
Background: A Peak of Unrest
Unrest in the 1910s is seen as reaching a peak unmatched since the 1840s. Strikes rose from 389 in 1908, seen as a year of recession, to 872 in 1911 and 1459 in 1913. The scale of the strikes increased too. In 1909 only 170,000 British workers had struck, in 1911 the figure was 831,000 and the following year 1.23 million. The numbers of workers in a particular industry involved in the disputes was also high, 91 percent of transport workers and 62 percent of miners participated in the strikes between 1910-13. The scale of strikes grew away from locally-focused disputes, as shown by the first national rail strike in 1911 and the first national coal strike in 1912.[2]
Explanations for the upheaval vary, but there are a number of core occurrences which may help provide an answer. The period 1911-1914 had the lowest unemployment since 1901. It was 3 percent in 1911 compared to 7.8 percent just three years before, thus, workers felt themselves in a stronger position as there were fewer unemployed to draw on to work as blackleg labour.. However, real wages were not rising and up to a third of the population was on or below the poverty line. This impacted on living conditions, the infant mortality rate in 1914 being 139 per 1000 births, seven times the level today. Almost a third of men who volunteered for the Army in 1909-10 were rejected on grounds of ill-health.[3]
Historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Friedhelm Boll and James Cronin portray the outbreak of unrest as matching a pattern of strike waves that had occurred throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Such peaks were associated with growth in trade unionism. British trade union membership was rising in the years before and during this peak of unrest.. It climbed 60 percent 1910-14 and the growth was particularly strong among transport workers and general labourers. There were 2.02 million trade unionists in 1900 but 4.15 million by 1914.[4]
Cronin highlights that, despite the stronger opposition from the employers, there had been a qualitative break-through in the way the unions organised themselves. Ironically the problem was viewed by ministers such as Sydney Buxton, the President of the Board of Trade, as being that union leaders had lost control over their rank-and-file members. Key grievances included non-recognition of even well-established unions by employers and the fact that in a time of conspicuous prosperity for the middle and upper classes real wages for workers were falling.[5] As discussed below, there was a widespread perception that the unrest had political objectives, but as Powell importantly notes though the break down of relations in a number of industries did threaten disruption, the strikes themselves were concerned ‘with specific grievances rather than with more millenarian ideas’. The TUC favoured co-operation over confrontation and even the Triple Alliance, formed in 1914, was seen as a method of maintaining industrial discipline rather than for syndicalist or other political goals.[6]
One key change was how involved the government was becoming in industrial disputes. Lloyd George in fact felt that the period if strikes and lockouts should be over and saw the future in a corporatist approach to disputes. In contrast the unrest drew the government ‘willy nilly into industrial conflicts’ facing it with embarrassing challenges. Whilst the Liberals’ social and industrial agenda have been portrayed as being ‘patchwork’, divorced from an overarching philosophy, the government had passed social welfare legislation covering a range of aspects from workmen’s compensation, an eight-hour day for miners and the creation of trade boards. In 1911 this was followed by the Health Insurance Act. This legislation, though aimed at benefiting workers meant that the government had had to have an interest in the industries covered by these laws.[7] This particularly applied increasingly to conciliation.
In 1896, the Conservative Government had passed the Conciliation Act to encourage boards of conciliation and by 1913 there were 325. Ronald Sires argues these enabled greater government intervention. Though voluntary conciliation remained the most popular approach, the government found itself drawn into strikes which impinged on the national infrastructure, such as in the transport and coal mining sectors. Seeing its role as protecting the nation’s economy, the government intervened to get talks established for the rail industry in 1907 and 1911 and in the national coal strike of 1912.[8] One can see a number of factors combining to provoke industrial unrest. However, this does not explain the level of violence seen during the strikes that broke out in 1910-3 and there were other aspects that have to be considered to obtain an overall picture of the volatile state of parts of British society at the time. It had been the government’s choice to become involved in encouraging conciliation between the sides in disputes, but it also faced a stronger, older, imperative in safeguarding law and order in the face of unrest.
References
[1] Anthony Babington, Military Intervention in Britain from the Gordon Riots to the Gibraltar Incident, (London, 1990), p. 142. Despite popular complaint about the imposition of ‘martial law’, the government's law officers stated that action by troops in suppressing riots was what was legally expected of all citizens in standard peacetime circumstances.
[2] James E. Cronin, ‘Strikes and the Struggle for Union Organization: Britain and Europe’ in Wolfgang J. Mommsen & Hans-Gerhard Husung, ed., The Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany, 1880-1914, (Boston, 1985), p. 56; Friedhelm Boll, ‘International Strike Waves: a Critical Assessment’ in Mommsen & Husung, p. 89.
[3] Henry Pelling, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain, (New York, 1979), pp. 149-151. Despite the title of the book it includes a chapter ‘The Labour Unrest 1911-14’; Noel Whiteside, ‘The British Population at War’ in John Turner, ed., Britain and the First World War, (Winchester, Massachusetts, 1988), pp. 86-7; Parliamentary Paper, Cd. 5477, ‘Report on the Health of the Army for the year 1909’, no. LI, p. 1 and Parliamentary Paper, Cd. 5599, ‘Report on the Health of the Army for the year 1910’, no. LII, p. 1, both collected in Parliamentary Papers. Accounts and Papers, 1911. Vol. XLVII (3).
[4] Cronin, p. 62; Boll, p. 83; Steve Peak, Troops in Strikes. Military Intervention in Industrial Disputes, (London, 1984), p.27.
[5] Cronin, pp. 65-6.
[6] David Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901-1914, (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 127-8.
[7] Michael Bentley, Politics without Democracy, 1815-1914, (London, 1996), p. 324; Alun Howkins, ‘Edwardian Liberalism and Industrial Unrest: a Class View of the Decline of Liberalism’, History Workshop, vol. 4, (1977), p. 157; G.R. Searle, The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration 1886-1929, (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 94, 99; George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, (London, 1966), pp. 186-7.
[8] Powell, p. 124; Ronald V. Sires, ‘Labour Unrest in England 1910-1914’, in Journal of Economic History, vol. XV, no. 3 (1955), pp. 255-6, 264.
Sunday, 13 April 2008
What If Winston Churchill Had Died Younger?
My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Other Roads:
Alternate Outcomes of the Second World War’ It is available for purchase on
Amazon:
UK readers might prefer to access it through:
Canadian readers can access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Roads-Alternate-Outcomes-Second-ebook/dp/B00J44F2L0/ref=sr_1_25?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1395342737&sr=1-25
Australian readers can access it through: http://www.amazon.com.au/Other-Roads-Alternate-Outcomes-Second-ebook/dp/B00J44F2L0/ref=sr_1_25?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1395342887&sr=1-25
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