Britain’s forgotten general strike

 

AUGUST 1, 2025

Jeff Slee reviews The General Strike of 1842, by Mick Jenkins, published by Lawrence & Wishart.

This is an unusual book review, because this book in question was published in 1980. It is now out of print, but it can be bought online.

I have written this review because, although I have a fair knowledge of British working class history, I only recently found out we had a General Strike in August 1842. It was probably the first ever General Strike anywhere in the world, and the most massive industrial action in this country in the 19th century. This book is an inspiring and eye-opening account of it.

The 1842 General Strike is little covered in most of the standard histories of the British working class, such as GDH Cole’s and Raymond Postgate’s The Common People (first published in 1938) and Henry Pelling’s History of British Trade Unionism (first published in 1963).  Engels, who came to England in December 1842 – after the strike – was mistaken when he wrote in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) that the General Strike was largely instigated by the “rich manufacturing bourgeoisie”, as part of its opposition to the landowning aristocracy and in particular its aim of abolishing the Corn Laws which, as Wikipedia says, “protected landowners’ interests by levying taxes on imported wheat, thus raising the price of bread at a time when factory-owners were trying to cut wages.”

Yet, as Mick Jenkins’s book shows, the strike was an important event in the history of our class.

The Working Class in 1842

In 1842, the industrial revolution was still ongoing. The working class was growing in numbers, in self-organisation and in experience. Cotton, the biggest industry, employed about 350,000 workers – mainly around Manchester, the centre of the industrial revolution. Other industries – coal, engineering, wool –  employed about half a million workers across the UK. Workers had already held localised strikes against pay cuts, protests where they destroyed machinery that was replacing jobs (the Luddites) and created early trade union organisations. 

Working class radicals were also campaigning for universal male suffrage, and a large demonstration for this had been violently dispersed by the army in St Peter’s Square Manchester in 1819 – the Peterloo Massacre (covered in The Peterloo Massacre by Joyce Marlow, Harper and Collins, 1971, and in the 2018 film by Mike Leigh). The Reform Act of 1832 had extended the right to vote to property owners, including the bosses of the new industrial companies, but less than one in five men – and no women – had the right to vote. The People’s Charter was launched in 1838 and soon became the main political demand of working class militants.

The Strike

The strike started in Manchester and the towns around it, against wage cuts and against unemployment.  As well as these aims, the strike also, as Mick Jenkins clearly explains, had a very clear political aim – universal suffrage so that Parliament would include workers’ representatives.

 It rapidly spread to include half a million workers, perhaps half the UK’s industrial workforce: cotton workers of course; coal miners from Scotland and the North East to South Wales; pottery workers in Staffordshire; engineering workers in London and elsewhere; and woollen weavers in Somerset and Norfolk.

The strike was led by skilled workers – mechanics, toolmakers, etc., who were self-educated and literate. Many of the strike leaders were also leading figures in the Chartist movement, though other Chartist leaders such as Feargus O’ Connor were less keen on uniting the industrial and political struggles.

The strike was organised through strike committees which held mass meetings; maintained discipline and order; collected and distributed food; issued permits to work where they decided this was necessary; and built support for the strikers amongst shopkeepers and others in their towns.

Mick Jenkins’ narrative draws on an impressive range of contemporary sources, including the Northern Star, the widely read Chartist newspaper; the Manchester Guardian, then as now the paper of the liberal bourgeoisie; records of the trials of the strike leaders; government documents; and ministers’ letters.

The Significance of the Strike

In his introduction to the book, John Foster (then and now one of Britain’s leading Marxist historians) explains the significance of the strike for the way the British trade union movement developed. In Britain in 1842, wage workers formed the majority, unlike the rest of Europe which was still largely agricultural and feudal. Governments both Whig and Tory, the bourgeoisie, the landowners, all feared that universal male suffrage would lead to the transfer of state power to workers’ representatives – a political revolution. As John Foster wrote, the strike’s “unification of wage demands with the demand for universal suffrage raised working class struggle to the level of class struggle for the revolutionary transformation of society.”

While the army and the newly-created police force were. used against the strikers, it was not they but hunger, and concessions on wages by employers, that eventually forced the strikers back to work.

After the strike, the state hled what John Foster describes as a “monster show trial” of the strike and Chartist leaders for 1843. The intention was to give them the harshest punishments for defying the state. But between the strike and the trial, government policy shifted from repression to conciliation. At the trial, none of the 31 defendants found guilty were sentenced. The government acknowledged the hardships suffered by industrial workers, and some concessions were made to alleviate the worst poverty and hunger, and to tolerate and incorporate trade unionism – but for skilled workers only. In return for which, the leaders of the Chartists, and the leaders who emerged in the trade unions after 1842, accepted the separation of economic and political demands, the authority of the bourgeois state, and accepted that agitation for better pay and conditions should be done within the capitalist system. In one word, reformism.

Jeff Slee is a retired rail worker and former RMT National Executive Committee member.

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Top Ten Reads for Days of Sun, Sand and Subversion

An eclectic selection for beach reading provided by Mark Perryman.

The summer: a time for the beach, sunshine, sunglasses and in between whatever takes our marine fancy for a holiday read. A bit of escapism, something for the fast-approaching start of the new football season, a challenge to prejudices old and new, words to inform, and inspire. My  selection aims to provide all of this, and more.

Red Menace: Joe Thomas

Joe Thomas was a beach read discovery last summer via White Riot, a novel that brilliantly weaved its way around the late 1970s growth of the National Front, a resistance led most spectacularly by the Anti Nazi League and Rock against Racism.  And then into the early 1980s featuring the rising number of young black men dying in police custody. It’s a political thriller with a left wing bent, the added twist being it is written from the perspective of a spycop. Oh my!  Red Menace is the second in a promised trilogy, this time taking us from the Broadwater Farm riots in Tottenham to the Wapping Picket Line. I’m not sure there’s ever been novels written with such political insight and rollicking plot lines. A writer top of my pile, second summer running.

Red Menace from here

Pitch Invasion: Karen Dobres

Karen Dobres is the face, brain and unstoppable energy behind the reinvention of non-league Lewes FC as the global trailblazing Equality FC.  To declare an interest, I’m a supporter of Lewes FC and don’t always entirely agree with the detail of the direction Karen would take the club, or indeed football, in. But that’s not the point. It’s the direction that is right, arguing over the detail shouldn’t distract from that. Where the two collide is the almost unremarked upon dominance of women’s football by the same ‘big’ clubs as the men’s game. And in the process, the almost complete extinction of autonomous women’s clubs of the sort of the glorious Doncaster Belles. Pitch Invasion provides the kind of rounded view that, if focused, could resist both these unwelcome developments.

Pitch Invasion from here

Planet Patriarchy: Beatrix Campbell and Rahila Gupta

Two long-standing feminists, writer Beatrix Campbell and Chair of Southall Black Sisters Rahila Gupta, deliver an outstanding and up-to-date analysis of patriarchy, worldwide. Much has changed in and around feminism since the heady days of the 1970s’ ‘second wave’. But as this politically spiky duo reveal, much hasn’t. Their survey of the inequality and discrimination women face globally proves that, but also the enduring commitment to change all this of its foe, feminism, a movement founded on sisterhood, solidarity and resistance. The sheer variety of expressions of this mix the authors uncover is quite breathtaking, the scale of what societies produce to deny these women liberation staggering. A potent mix for a powerful read.

Planet Patriarchy from here

The Activism of Art: Dipti Desai and Stephen Duncombe

Stephen Duncombe is one of those rare writers who combines the study of how culture shapes politics with an accessible way of describing how. The often indecipherable  language of cultural studies academics is stripped bare, to produce a new common sense. In his latest book, co-authored with Dipti Desai, these two wonderfully gifted writers chronicle the intersections between art and politics that the sheer scale of the dullness of the conventional versions of ‘doing politics’ from the parliamentary to the protest ignores, at their and our peril. In this regard, a book not simply to read but also to practise.

The Activism of Art from here

Sound System: Dave Randall

If there’s one space where the fusion of the cultural and the political has revealed the popular potential of the mix it is music.  Dave Randall is both a professional musician and a skilled interpreter of his mix.  In Sound System, sub-titled “The political power of music”, he has written an intellectual how-to guide for a movement of change in which a soundtrack is every bit as vital as the more customary baggage of worthy texts. Historical, international and practical: the three ingredients of not only this very fine book but the reasons for the huge impact of the current most obvious example of what the book might aspire to: Kneecap.

Sound System from here

The Carnation Revolution: Alex Fernandes

The kind of political fusions in their different ways that Dipti Desai, Stephen Duncombe and Dave Randall describe take their most vibrant forms in revolutionary moments. The trouble is, despite the worst efforts of Saturday morning Socialist Worker paper-sellers, those moments for most of us are either few and far between, or far away, or both. Yet for those heading to the Algarve coast for the beaches and sunshine, or Lisbon for a summer city break, Portugal was the setting of a revolution just a generation ago. The Carnation Revolution by Alex Fernandes records in thrilling detail how in 1974 Europe’s last remaining fascist regime was brought to an end: daring deeds, the courage of crowds, the rebellion of young army officers. Those were the days: a regime and its empire ended by R-E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N.

The Carnation Revolution from here  

The Fiery Spirits: Popular Protest, Parliament and the English Revolution: John Rees

Detailing the leadership and ideas that would lead to the deposing of King Charles (no, not that one) and his eventual execution in 1649 (ditto), The Fiery Spirits is a hugely readable account in the tradition of a ‘people’s history’ of Christopher Hill and others. This was English republicanism on the march, at war with all things regal. Yet, as John Rees details, this was a movement that knew it needed to make allies, to use the inspiration of their republican, revolutionary ideals to inspire others. No, despite the execution, it didn’t end the monarchy but it did strip them of almost all their powers, if not riches. Which left me asking after reading this very fine book: time (minus the execution) to finish the job? 

Fiery Spirits from here

A People’s History of the Anti Nazi League (1977-1981): Geoff Brown

If English revolutions are in historically short supply, the same, thankfully, cannot be said of mass movements on these shores that effect social change. In the 1930s, the Popular Front against Moseley and his black-shirted British Union of Fascists, the International Brigades who went to Spain to defend the Republic against Franco’s fascists.  In the 1950s, the rise of CND, in the 1960s the Vietnam War and in the 1970s opposition to Apartheid South Africa via stopping their cricket and rugby tours. The Anti Nazi League absolutely stands in this tradition, as detailed by Geoff Brown in his ‘people’s history’. Unselfishly galvanised by the organisational skills of the Socialist Workers Party the ANL worked because it was unimaginably bigger and broader than the self-styled ‘revolutionary left’. And everyone could be a part of it, from wearing a ‘School Kids Against the Nazis’ badge, pogoing at a Rock against Racism gig, dishing out leaflets, going on marches and, if push came to shove, stopping the fascists, the National Front, in their tracks.  Geoff Brown chronicles this  rich and plural variety which not only makes a very good read but powerfully illustrates all kinds of lessons for how we resist today the rise of the populist right and their attendant far right too.   

A People’s History of the Anti Nazi League from here 

Palestine A-Z: Kate Thompson

If the Anti Nazi League and Rock Against Racism were the movements that provided a generational moment in the late 1970s, the Miners’ Strike did the same in 1984-85.  Likewise, the Iraq War 2001- 2005, the student tuition fees protests of 2010, #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo (fill the gaps with your own memories and experiences) and now without any doubt Gaza. This last has by no means ended and the abject betrayal of Palestine by the political and wider establishment, most notoriously by this Labour government, has created a cleavage which (quite rightly) won’t be closed in a hurry. But this cannot be an excuse for narrowing the cause to the fully signed-up left.  Palestine is absolutely not a left/right issue: the cause crosses all such divisions – it must appeal, not only to those who will march and those who don’t. The potential is huge and broad yet nowhere near reached.  Kate Thompson’s delightful A-Z will convince anyone why it needs to: if not, how?

Palestine A-Z from here

FIVE STAR CHOICE

The Leopard In My House: One Man’s Adventure in Cancerland: Mark Steel

My ‘five star’ choice for this summer’s top beach read is a comically inspirational real life read out of real-life potential disaster: cancer. No, it doesn’t sound like quite the book for long-awaited summer hols but in the hands of the one and only Mark Steel anything is possible.  Cancer touches the lives of all sorts, ages and sizes, it requires all the skills the NHS can provide to detect and diagnose. The treatment is often lengthy, sometimes intrusive.  Most cancers can be moderated, few extinguished entirely, some, too many, prove lethal. Men on the whole aren’t very good talking about much, or indeed, any of this. Mark Steel is, and provides bucketfuls of laughs along the (happy ending alert) road to recovery. An absolutely superb beach read.  Five gold stars fully deserved.

The Leopard In my House from here  

Note No link in these reviews are to Amazon; if you can avoid buying from tax-dodging billionaires please do so. 

Mark Perryman’s new book, The Starmer Symptom, is published by Pluto in August, here.