10 May 1926: Troops in armoured cars on the streets of London | Image by: World Image Archive / Alamy

4 min read19 min

In this erudite and engaging study of the nine-day General Strike, in May 1926, David Torrance reveals a much more nuanced political history in place of the usual comic-strip class war between the toffs and the trade unionists.

But while it certainly shook the nation, did it bring it to the ‘edge of revolution’? It certainly raised constitutional questions, but was it a constitutional crisis?

As Torrance’s meticulous research reveals, at its heart was the vexed history of the coal industry compounded by decades of deadlock over miners’ wages in a country where coal was still king but coal owners had the power. Miners had the nation’s sympathy but it still took raw courage for other trade unionists to put their own jobs at risk. The ‘Triple Alliance’ they formed in 1926 – comprising miners, railwaymen and transport workers – had already failed miserably in an earlier attempt at a general strike in 1921.

In the end, not even that remarkable generation of trade union leaders – Ernest Bevin (Transport and General Workers Union), Jimmy Thomas (National Union of Rail) and Arthur Cook (Miners Federation of Great Britain) – could maintain the necessary solidarity.

These were, therefore, hardly revolutionary men or conditions. Yet, in those febrile post-war days haunted by the bloody memory of the 1917 Russian Revolution, they felt like revolutionary times to many, fed by political paranoia about the power of trade unions. In 1920, these fears were recognised in the Emergency Powers Act, passed by the coalition government led by David Lloyd George.

In this context, although the trade unions in 1926 acknowledged that they were hopelessly unprepared, they were incapable of halting the drift into a general strike. On 16 April, after protracted negotiations over miners’ wages had broken down, the mine owners (“the stupidest men in Britain” according to the Conservative politician Lord Birkenhead) posted lockout notices.

On 11 May, the strike ended in total surrender and confusion. The miners got nothing

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The drift might have continued had it not been for the printers at the Daily Mail refusing to run a leading article declaring a general strike a revolutionary moment rather than an industrial dispute. This was the justification the Cabinet needed to invoke the Emergency Powers Act and the General Strike started at one minute to midnight on 3 May 1926.

Many people volunteered to step into vacant roles and what followed for some, who had once only dreamed of driving trains, was the prospect (if voluntary) of “new and exciting jobs”. Some things went on as normal – namely cricket at Lords – proving to some that the nation still stood firm if divided.

While Hugh Gaitskell distributed the British Worker (the TUC’s antidote to the government’s British Gazette, edited by Winston Churchill, the chancellor of the exchequer), Chips Channon signed up “for England” as a special constable.

In a chapter packed with glorious detail, many people found inventive ways to get to work – by penny farthing or roller skates. For others however, there were no larks – only riots, arrests, hunger and even railway fatalities.

The political establishment also weighed in. King George V and church leaders urged reconciliation. Parliament sat day and night. The legality of the strike was a moot issue. Not surprisingly, Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin seized on Liberal MP Sir John Simon’s singular interpretation that the strike was utterly illegal because it involved more than one trade union.

The end to the strike was even more muddled than the beginning, with Jimmy Thomas in particular desperate for resolution. Independent of the Miners’ Federation, judged to be too intransigent, separate negotiations for an end to the strike were informally brokered with the general council of the TUC by Liberal MP, Sir Herbert Samuel. On 11 May, the strike ended in total surrender and confusion. The miners got nothing.

What did it all add up to? Had the leader of the opposition been allowed, like Conservative leaders, to broadcast to the nation, Labour’s Ramsay Macdonald would have been emphatic: “It never entered into the mind of the Trades Union Council to challenge the government… It is not a political strike nor has it in any sense a revolutionary significance.” Yet, as Torrance rightly concludes, ‘Who governs Britain?’ was to be a question which would challenge successive generations.

Baroness Andrews is a Labour peer

The Edge of Revolution: The General Strike that Shook Britain

By: David Torrance

Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum

If you subscribe to the theory that it’s better to fight 100 duck-sized horses than a single horse-sized duck, the SNP is knocking it out of the park today.

Because the papers just can’t make their minds up about the biggest story with which to attack John Swinney’s beleaguered party.

While the Sun leads with Sean Clerkin reigniting his police complaint over the missing fundraiser money, the Herald goes with Peter Murrell’s receipt of legal aid for his non-defence against embezzlement charges.

The Express and the Mail, on the other hand, focus on Swinney’s bombshell public admission of yesterday that the fundraiser money has in fact been spent.

In the Times, the big news is that Murrell managed to have almost £60,000 of thefts – most of them apparently for the benefit of Nicola Sturgeon – removed from his charge sheet in exchange for his early guilty plea.

Whereas the Daily Record takes some pity on the poor former CEO while also feeding its own unending obsession with “gangland” by leading on suggestions that the small, hamsterish executive might be picked on in HMP Edinburgh.

The Record is in fact remarkably charitable to the party all the way through today’s edition. Yesterday’s astonishing, unprecedented ruling of contempt of court against the Scottish Government over the Salmond inquiry is relegated to a tiny bar on the bottom of page 4 that doesn’t even mention the word “contempt”, (reporting merely that the government was “criticised” in the Court of Session) while Swinney’s admission that the fundraiser money was stolen is hidden away in a small side column on the left-hand page of its prison pity piece.

The Scotsman and Telegraph also go relatively easy, both of them putting Swinney’s fundraiser admission on the front page but in sidebars, not as the main splash.

And God bless the dear old National, a Scottish newspaper which tries to make the day all about Westminster MP Douglas Alexander, Westminster lord Peter Mandelson, NHS England and some Welsh Senedd minister nobody’s ever heard of.

Though they do reluctantly include the Swinney admission in a very thin flash at the bottom of the page, somewhat in contrast to the degree of prominence they gave their last big story about the fundraiser money.

So great work, SNP comms team. We’re sure things will calm down any day now.

Credit: Adobe Images

The infrastructure systems that support society, and for which all of us individually pay, are rightly the subject of continual public scrutiny. These infrastructure systems may be categorised as ‘economic’ (including transport, energy, water, waste, and information and computing technology) and ‘social’ (including health, education and justice). Contemporary concerns around the economic infrastructure systems focus on affordability, interrupted service delivery and the ageing of the physical infrastructure along with the adverse social, environmental and economic consequences that result. Many of society’s current challenges are considered to result from inefficient or ineffective infrastructure systems, with the economic infrastructures typically featuring as much as the social. The poor state of our roads (encapsulated by potholes), the unreliability and expense of public transport, the environmental pollution deriving from our combined waste (sewage) and surface water drainage systems, and solid waste systems that fail to eradicate littering and fly tipping are presented to our politicians and civil servants as issues requiring prioritised action. Civil engineers have the skills, experience, remit and above all responsibility for designing and delivering the necessary improvements.

The state of the economy is crucial to this discourse. Maintenance of our ageing physical infrastructures is viewed simply as a cost – a drain on resources, politically uninteresting and an expense that would, if spent otherwise, deliver political capital. This view is economically and societally damaging and does not accurately reflect the true situation. Timely maintenance is essential: there is a ‘rule of thumb’ that repair costs ten times as much as timely maintenance, and renewal ten times as much as repair. A simple example of this is a steel bridge: if protected against corrosion by timely, regular painting, it will last indefinitely. If we decide to take a ‘maintenance holiday’ and cease painting, before long we will be replacing the bridge. In roads, maintaining the tarmacadam ‘wearing course’, should avoid water ingress and damage to the sub-base, which results in large surface deformations (or rutting) that require expensive reconstruction. Refurbishment of existing infrastructure to a higher standard of capacity, resilience or service support may also be more cost-effective than conventional rebuilding or replacement. Effective maintenance, refurbishment and planned renewal as well as avoiding the considerable economic and social harm of major service disruption caused by emergency repairs can contribute to economic activity in terms of jobs and technologies, and should be embraced as an opportunity rather than a burden.

As a start, we need to change the language of the discourse from cost to value, and from expense to investment. Investment is naturally associated with creating something better and fit for the future; something forward looking, from which multiple benefits will accrue if creatively and systemically applied. The need for better operational infrastructure is there: climate hazards, uses that were unanticipated, and demand for capacity exceeding engineering solutions all of which reduce design life significantly. There are many opportunities now available both to deliver more sustainable and resilient infrastructure systems and manifestly improved infrastructure system services. This is the goal UKCRIC has set itself to deliver.

One of the most important innovations of the 19th Century was the provision of sanitation (the safe disposal of wastewater) alongside the supply of clean water, which served to dramatically improve the health of the UK’s population. Joseph Bazalgette’s brick-lined sewer and wastewater systems in London stand out as politically valuable investments, and are still the backbone of London’s wastewater system today. Their design, being egg-shaped to cater for different volumes of flow and allowing people to enter them for maintenance purposes, enabled their continuing use in the face of a vastly increasing population. An equally impressive super sewer, the Thames Tideway Tunnel, has recently been created to provide adequate far-future capacity, hence resilience for the system and to overcome one of the philosophical limitations of the original, which was not to separate foul water from surface run-off. However, more generally across the UK, the sewer and wastewater systems are in need of maintenance and often (at short notice) repair, yet this action and expense, although an investment, does not attract political cachet.

Rather than like-for-like pipeline replacement, a whole industry has grown up around the trenchless relining and upsizing of pipelines – examples of refurbishment and renewal. Refurbishment leads to enhanced operational and structural performance, making the pipe networks fit for the future and creating a whole new investment proposition. The inclusion of embedded sensors and/or autonomous sensing monitoring the system provides a further radical enhancement, enabling deterioration or damage to be identified immediately and rectified by maintenance before damaging and disruptive failure requiring a disruptive repair or renewal occurs. This delivers functional enhancement and resilience, evident additional value, a strong sense of investment rather than expense, and political kudos.

A newly constructed or full-width reconstruction of a road, with freshly painted road markings, is costly but can be presented as evidence of investment with associated political value. However, technology has developed to the point where full-width excavation of an asphalt road surface, heating and mixing with the addition of new materials to rejuvenate the asphalt, relaying and compaction can be carried out in an almost continuous, seamless process. A refurbished road would transform a cracked and potholed surface, with multiple utility cuts and evident signs of ageing, into something that looks newly constructed and provides a smooth riding surface. If this were combined with future proofing of the buried infrastructure – planned maintenance and refurbishment in advance of the surface rejuvenation, combined perhaps with the provision of additional capacity in the form of ducts for future use and a commitment to the future use of trenchless technologies in anything other than wholly exceptional circumstances – the investment case will be strengthened and the political value enhanced.

These things are all possible and could start to be implemented now: what’s stopping us is an adherence to out of date contractual arrangements and artificial systems boundaries.

(Martyn Goddard/Alamy)

4 min read27 min

Further, that attempts to update government services on which we all rely have had, to date, a history of failure – with PAC a chronicler of that history.

The evidence is compelling. Technical problems making the lives of court staff, already hit by backlogs, even harder; significant costs for emergency services from a delayed communications network; unacceptable risk for taxpayers stemming from National Savings & Investment’s (NS&I) modernisation programme – the list goes on.

But it is important to take lessons from success, as well as failure. A modernising government does not need to look far for a model to emulate – they just need to ring up the bank.

The PAC has scrutinised the Bank of England’s (BoE) renewal of the Real-Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS), and we were impressed. Few will have heard of RTGS – all of us would notice if it failed. It is a critical piece of infrastructure, underpinning all electronic sterling payment systems, settling around £790bn in transactions daily.

The nine-year RTGS renewal programme was implemented for £431m, launching in April 2025. Compare this to NS&I’s own programme, at £3bn+ and counting. The programme was reset in 2024 and rated as apparently unachievable, when it was supposed to have been largely delivered. Instead, it is a long way from completion, with core elements nowhere near ready.

What went right, and what went wrong? One way the BoE’s project stands out is its procurement, through a ‘competitive dialogue’. The BoE only established its preferred contractor having paid for advice from bidders. This allowed for system designs to be developed in consultation with the BoE as ‘intelligent customer’, and it proceeded with a fixed-price contract. This is perhaps a mechanism that the House of Commons’ authorities should consider in the Restoration and Renewal programme.

Compare this to NS&I’s poorly executed procurement. It split up its programme into multiple packages, awarding contracts without a good understanding of their interdependencies. Delays resulted in millions being paid in settlement agreements for cancelled contracts and additional payments to existing suppliers for work needed.

Another problem for NS&I was a lack of skills needed for such complex programmes. Most of its operations had been contracted out when the project began, so it had limited digital transformation experience going in. Finding recruitment difficult, it leant on consultants to fill the gaps, costing £43m.

One single thing that would help departments enjoy the BoE’s success is the breaking open of stifling hierarchies

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In contrast, the BoE empowered skilled digital professionals to support well-informed decisions. Initial governance drew on non-executive directors’ expertise with track records in digital payments. Responsibility for when the new system went live rested jointly with senior delivery and technical leaders. The old system had to be switched off before the new came into operation, and these two people had to make the vital decision whether it would definitely work. We have long called for digital specialists to be at the decision making top table – this high-stakes moment demonstrates why that is.

One single thing that would help departments enjoy the BoE’s success is the breaking open of stifling hierarchies. The BoE set a clear tone for a ‘no surprises’ culture – staff were encouraged to raise concerns early, and anonymously, through a ‘transparency channel’. It is painful comparing this to NS&I’s mindset, which it characterised as a ‘can-do’ attitude. This kind of ‘good news’ culture can prevent lessons being learnt. We heard staff felt decision making was slow and hierarchical, with decision making processes opaque and not understood.

Our committee will continue acting as the watchdog for the taxpayer’s pound, rooting out waste wherever we find it. But in the RTGS, we hope all can see that public sector delivery is not simply a depressing landscape of decline and failure. Hard-working public servants are out there demonstrating best practice. The BoE is lighting the way for the rest of government to follow. 

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown is Conservative MP for the North Cotswolds and chair of the Public Accounts Committee

Colin Jordan gives Nazi salute (Chronicle/Alamy)

6 min read12 min

We are now in the run-up to what promises to be a crucial by-election in Makerfield with the nation’s – and perhaps the world’s – media about to descend on the north-west of England.

We have no shortage of by-elections that appeared epoch-making at the time but are now footnotes. No shortage, either, of predictions based on their results that turned out to be not just wrong but laughably so.

The Fulham by-election of 1933 was said to signal that Britain was turning towards pacifism. Winston Churchill would like a word. The Darlington poll just before the 1983 general election was said to indicate that Labour was on course to regaining power. The landslide Tory victory was only a few months later.

Of course, sometimes they are important or revealing or both. In the early and mid-1990s, a series of huge swings from Conservative to Labour heralded Tony Blair’s arrival in Downing Street. Similarly, a string of Labour losses in the 1970s indicated that Mrs Margaret Thatcher would win in 1979.

Others that are footnotes ought to get more attention. An almost completely forgotten by-election in Kinross and West Perthshire in 1963 allowed the winning candidate, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, to replace Harold MacMillan as leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister. Ironically, Douglas-Home was afforded this opportunity by the great left-wing politician Tony Benn who had championed legislation allowing hereditary peers to renounce their titles, thus allowing first Benn and then Douglas-Home to sit in the House of Commons.

But when looking for parallels with today, one lesson from history is given by the patch I represented until recently and whose MP is now the admirable Calvin Bailey.

The 1965 Leyton and Wanstead poll came about in circumstances with something of an echo of Makerfield in that it offered the chance of a return to Westminster of a high-profile Labour figure. Labour had won the general election in 1964 by a slim majority. However, Patrick Gordon Walker, who was to be the new foreign secretary under prime minister Harold Wilson, had lost the constituency of Smethwick against all expectations. That particular result led to long and bitter arguments as Labour accused the Conservatives of running a racist campaign.

The accusations were vigorously denied by the Conservatives both locally and nationally.

What certainly did happen was that a deeply offensive slogan was found painted on various buildings across Smethwick but the culprits were never found.

As a result, Wilson had a foreign secretary without a constituency. The prime minister then persuaded the Labour MP for Leyton, Reg Sorensen, to accept a seat in the Lords, thus creating the by-election. Gordon Walker was the Labour candidate and polling day was set for 21 January 1965. The national and international media then descended on Leyton and, in the wake of the Smethwick contest, the far-right also arrived. The fascists were led by a particularly repellent individual named Colin Jordan. Unusually among the British far right, Jordan was not simply a fascist but an out-and-out Nazi. He styled himself ‘World-Fuhrer’ and was fond of dressing up in uniforms and performing Hitler salutes at any available opportunity.

The highlight of the campaign for the fascist interlopers was when they invaded a Labour-organised public meeting in what was then Leyton town hall. There was a huge fight, caught in part by a BBC Panorama team. Jordan managed at one point to climb onto the stage but, sadly for him, he was confronted by Denis Healey, a defence minister at the time, who hit Jordan so hard that he flew off the stage and landed back in the crowd.

“To put it bluntly, as a young man Healey was harder than a coffin nail”

According the Daily Telegraph’s obituary of Jordan, “Healey landed a heavy punch, knocking Jordan off the stage and sending him crashing into a watching journalist, breaking the reporter’s spectacles.”

The Panorama narrator asserts that “when he tried to grab the microphones, the minister of defence and Mr Walker, using conventional weapons proved the ultimate deterrence”.

Sadly, perhaps, the footage shows only a melee and then a grinning Walker with Healey close by, as Jordon and his goons are bundled out screaming racist abuse as they go.

Healey, we should remember, was not always the avuncular and elderly man we tend to remember. During the Allied invasion of Anzio in 1944, when British and US forces were confronted by Nazi and Italian troops, he was the beachmaster and therefore to a large extent ran the landings. To put it bluntly, as a young man he was harder than a coffin nail. In later years as an MP, it was often noted that critics in the House of Commons were slightly more guarded in their comments than would be the case with a less physically formidable opponent.

In the 1970s, he was still sufficiently lively to see off another attack at a public meeting by members of the National Front.

Jordan had the finances which allowed him to engage in his fantasies of world domination because he had married Françoise Dior of the world-famous Dior brand. Quite what Ms Dior saw in him remains a matter of conjecture, although it may be the marriage was to stop her from being deported as an undesirable alien. It wasn’t for his looks – Jordon had the face of a blind cobbler’s thumb and never particularly displayed much in the way of intellect or charisma. The Telegraph obituary notes that he never recovered from being fined for stealing three pairs of red knickers from Tesco in Leamington Spa in 1975. He claimed to be the victim of a Jewish plot.

Labour might have won the battle of the town hall but they very narrowly lost the by-election to the Tories – although Walker comfortably regained the seat the following general election and rejoined the government. The constituency and its successor have continued to elect Labour MPs since then, as the battle of Leyton slowly fades from memory and into history.

I sometimes wonder if that confrontation between Healey and Jordan had occurred more recently what might have been the consequences. There would undoubtedly be calls for the minister’s sacking and removal as an MP. Is that to be regretted? The short answer is yes.

Healey’s generation understood that fascism sometimes must be confronted physically. That does not mean that they viewed violence in a cavalier way. But leading figures in all the major parties were then of a generation who had had to go off and fight – and they understood why.