Harold J. Laski

When the issue in dispute seems to the trade unions so vital that only by a general strike can they defend their position adequately, they will, in those circumstances, defend their position whatever the law may be.

I do not forget that the German Republic was saved from the Kapp Putsch by a general strike.

A government which knew that its declaration of war was, where it intended aggressive action, likely to involve a general strike, would be far less likely to think in belligerent terms.

You cannot compartmentalize life; and where grave emergencies arise, the weapons to be utilized must be fitted to meet them.

Quite frankly, I should have liked to see a general strike proclaimed against the outbreak of war in 1914; and I conceive the power to act in that way as a necessary and wise protection of a people against a government which proposes such…

And there are certain types of political action by trade unions--a strike against war, for example--which I do not think they ought in the interest of the community itself, to abandon.

There is no hard and fast line between industrial action and political action.

I can see no justice in such a denial of freedom.

It means, ultimately, that the worker must labour on the employer’s terms lest the public be inconvenienced.

To limit the right to strike is a form of industrial servitude.

Without some alternative which attempts to secure attention for a just result--I know of no such alternative--the infliction of hardship on the community seems to me the sole way, even if an unfortunate way, to the end the trade unions…

When it is aroused, if, for instance, trains do not run, or coal is not mined, the public begins to have interest in the position, to call for action.

Effectively to do this, in a real world, it must inconvenience the public; that awkward giant has no sense of its obligations until it is made uncomfortable.

But when trade unions seek for what they regard as justice, one of their most powerful sources of strength is the awakening of the slow and inert public to a sense of the position.

Nor do I see why it is unconstitutional for Labour, as in 1926, to withdraw from work in an orderly and coherent way.

I cannot accept the position that government is always entitled to count on industrial peace, whatever its policy.

There is no danger that the general strike will ever be other than a weapon of last resort; the occasions when it can be successfully used will be of the utmost rarity.

It would be to announce to government that the ultimate weapon of Labour is one the use of which it need never fear.

To illegalize a general strike in that background is to say that the trade unions should have acquiesced in the defeat of the miners without an attempt to prove their solidarity with them.

But the fact was that Mr Baldwin and his colleagues simply acted as the mouthpiece of the coalowners.

The trade unions would never have called the strike had they seen in the policy of the government even the fragment of a genuine search for justice.

There are occasions when that coercion is necessary, and even essential.

To lay it down as law that, whatever the occasion, the weapon shall not be used, seems to me an unjustifiable interference with freedom.

No one acquainted with the character of the trade union movement but knows that a weapon so tremendous as the general strike will only be called into play on the supreme occasion.

I am not willing, for instance, to condemn the General Strike of 1926; on a careful analysis of its history, I believe that the blame for its inception lies wholly at the door of the Baldwin Government.