The defeat of the General Strike had a devastating effect on the workers' movement.
The confidence of the ruling class rose. On every front they went on the offensive. Unemployment benefits were cut by one shilling. The Boards of Guardians - too likely, especially where governed by Labour majorities, to give into the unemployed's demands - were stripped of their powers.
A war was waged against applications for unemployment benefits. From March 1927 until March 1928, 441,387 people were refused dole. The number of people applying for Poor Law relief soared to over 1¼ million. To get benefit the unempl oyed had to prove that they had been seeking work - although how a Welsh miner living in an area dependent on the coal industry and with no other jobs on offer could do this was never explained. The jobless had to trek miles each day, often on empty stomachs, to search for work they knew did not exist.
NO WORK Everywhere work was getting harder and harder to find. Between April and September 1927 the number of miners at work fell from 1,280,687 to 982,555. Even those at work were only averaging 4.6 shifts a week compared to 5.4 shifts twelve months before.
The working class, so confident and militant in the early days of May 1926, were bewildered and felt crushed. The right wing Labour and trade union leaders, frightened of the power of the working class upsurge that May 1926 had unleashIn his third article on the unemployed struggles of the 1920s and "30s, BOB PENNINGTON looks at what happened after the defeat of the General Strike, when the Labour and trade union leaders tried to save capitalism at the expense of the working class. ed, scurried back to the ruling class panting "never again. When the National Unemployed Workers' Movement asked for a meéting of the Joint Advisory Council they had established with the TUC, they were told that 'no useful purpose can be served by continuing (it) in existence'.
BETRAYAL
This rebuff came on the eve of the report of the Blanesburgh Unemployment Insurance Committee, which had been set up in 1925 by the Baldwin Government to consider the insolvency of the Government's Unemployment Insurance Fund. Mainly consisting of company directors and titled persons, it also had three members from the labour movement: the ex-miners' leader Frank Hodges, A.E. Holmes, and Margaret Bondfield. These so-called representatives of the working class revealed their true colours by signing the Committee's final report, which recommended cuts in benefits, reductions in contributions to the scheme - which favoured the employers - and non-payment to claimants involved in 'trade disputes.
This was not an isolated act of betrayal by the trade union and Labour bureaucrats. When more than a thousand unemployed men and women marched from the West Wales coalfield to the Swansea TUC in 1928, they were met by what the Daily Express described as an armed camp' of police. This was the result of arrangements made by the TUC Secretary Walter Citrine and Labour Party Secretary Arthur Henderson, together with the Chief Constable of Swansea.