Prelude to the General Strike

Prelude to the General Strike - 1925 Wool & Worsted Lockout and Red Friday by Iain Dalton

On 31 July 1925, the looming miners’ lockout was called off at the last minute as the Tory government announced a nine month subsidy to the mining industry.

But alongside this threatened dispute which would have involved over one million workers, other strikes and lockouts took place as part of a generalised attack on the pay and conditions of many workers in Britain. Over 150,000 textile workers in Yorkshire were locked out for three and a half weeks, sailors struck in Britain, spreading around the globe, and Anthracite miners in South Wales engaged in pitched battles with the police.

These struggles served as a prelude to the showdown nine months later in the 1926 General Strike when millions of workers would take part. The lockouts and strikes of the summer of 1925 showed the tremendous capacity of workers to struggle against everything their capitalist bosses could throw at them but also foreshadowed the reasons the General Strike was defeated the following year.