General Strike Centenary Commemorations

Warinder Juss Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Laurence Turner]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention and for sending me a copy of the documentary on the Cramlington train wreckers ahead of this debate. It was moving to see those men in their later years. It is telling that the general strike tends to be remembered as local history, and there will be much to say throughout this debate about the general strike in Birmingham and elsewhere.

[Warinder Juss (Wolverhampton West) (Lab)]

Speaking of local history, Wolverhampton, Bilston and District trades unions council has prepared a book on the 1926 general strike. In my hon. Friend’s experience, has he found that workers usually go on strike only as a last resort? Does he agree that the right to protest and to withdraw labour are part of the important civil liberties that we enjoy against abuses of authority and power, and that they should therefore be protected?

[Laurence Turner]

I agree with my hon. Friend, and it is only right to say that he, through his role on the GMB executive and as one of the delegates to the national policy forum in opposition, was one of the people who helped draw up the reforms to employment rights that have been passed by this Parliament.

The general strike raised profound questions about the proper balance of state power and the rights of dissenters at times of civil contingency, and we should ask them again and with urgency in each generation. It is difficult to capture the essence of the world that created the strike: the depths of poverty in the older mining districts; the extreme social control exercised by employers in the villages put up around the more lucrative and newly exploited seams; and the critical dependence of the nation’s economy upon a coal industry that killed one in 1,000 of its workers each year and seriously wounded one in 10.

When working people rallied across occupational boundaries to defend the miners in 1926, they showed extraordinary solidarity, and their unions channelled national power to a degree perhaps unseen before, even if they were unsteady in exercising it and uncertain of its limits.