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.What a brilliant creature he is!” Birkenhead noted: “Winston’s position with the Prime Minister and the Cabinet is very strong.” But the effect of high parity soon made itself felt, especially in the coal industry.It had been Britain’s biggest and still employed 1,250,000 men.But many of the pits were old, dangerous, and underequipped.The owners, said Birkenhead, were “the most stupid body of men I have ever encountered.” In July 1925, claiming that export orders were down as a result of the new higher parity of sterling, they asked the unions to accept a sharp cut in wages—otherwise they would impose a lockout.The unions flatly refused to accept lower wages or improve their productivity.They would turn a lockout into a strike, and with the railwaymen and the transport workers coming out in sympathy, the strike would become general.For once Churchill was far from belligerent.He was not anti-union at this stage.He had voted for the 1906 act which gave unions exemption from actions for tort (civil damages) despite F.E.’s powerful argument that to create a privileged caste in law was against the Constitution and would, in the end, prove disastrous.Rather than have a general strike, Churchill would prefer to nationalize the mines, or at least the royalties on coal, the government making up any deficit by a subsidy, which he as chancellor would provide.In the meantime he proposed a royal commission to inquire into an agreed solution for the stricken coal industry.“That will at least give us time to prepare,” he said.This proved a shrewd move.The prospect of a general strike had been mooted for a generation and inspired terror in many.It was an uncontrolled monster and, once unleashed, where would it end? In a revolutionary socialist government, even a Communist-type regime?If Churchill had no special animus against the unions, the prospect of Bolshevism in Britain filled him with horror.“Of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst,” he had said, “the most destructive, the most degrading.” They “hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims.” The Russian regime was “an animal form of barbarism,” maintained by “bloody and wholesale butcheries and murders, carried out by Chinese-style executions and armoured cars.” This was true enough: even under Lenin, there had been 3 million slaughtered.Churchill warned that a soviet in London would mean “the extinction of English civilisation.” It was therefore legitimate to do everything to prepare for a general strike, in terms of police and troop plans, emergency supplies, and legal measures.The commission reported in March 1926, accepting his proposal for nationalizing royalties as well as some cuts in wages.The miners, most of whom had already been on strike for a number of months, rejected any cuts: “Not a minute on the hour nor a penny off the pound.” Churchill introduced his second budget in April in a stiffening mood.A week later, in May, the general strike began and he took charge of the business of defeating it.At once he changed back into his earlier activist persona of the Sidney Street siege and the battle of Antwerp.He organized convoys led by armored cars to get food supplies into London.He appealed for volunteers and had a tremendous response from Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates who worked in gangs to replace de liverymen and from young society ladies who operated telephone switchboards.It was class warfare: the upper and middle classes showing class solidarity on the lines of the trade unionists.Above all, Churchill kept up the supply of information to replace the lack of newspapers caused by a printing strike.His original plan had been to commandeer the British Broadcasting Corporation and run a government radio.But Sir John Reith, its director general, flatly refused to let him on the premises and ran a strictly neutral emergency service.So Churchill seized the Morning Post presses instead and the reserve supplies of newsprint built up by the press barons, and contrived to produce and distribute a government propaganda sheet called the British Gazette, which reached an eventual circulation of 2,250,000.Churchill, having been put in charge of the negotiations, brought about a settlement, which represented a victory for the forces of order.As Evelyn Waugh put it: “It was as though a beast long fabled for its ferocity had emerged for an hour, scented danger and then slunk back into its lair.” Churchill had enjoyed himself hugely.His enthusiasm embarrassed his more sophisticated colleagues and evoked jeers and fury from the Labour Party, but in a debate on the strike he dispelled the rancor with a witty and hilarious speech which dissolved the Commons in tempests of laughter.Then he went back to his good behavior: moderation and emollience.But he, with the help of Birkenhead, produced and got passed a Trade Disputes Act which stripped the unions of their more objectionable privileges and held good until 1945, when the Labour Party got an overwhelming majority and, to Churchill’s dismay, gave the unions, by statute, virtually everything they wanted.Churchill’s tenure of the exchequer had more serious consequences in a field where he might have been expected to be more sensible: defense.Here he changed his persona completely.From the first lord of the Admiralty who had built up the fleet to over a thousand warships, he reverted to his father’s policy of stinginess to the armed services, adding a good deal of rhetoric of his own.He was particularly hard on plans to replace aging warships with new ones such as “silly little cruisers, which would be no use in war anyway.” Given his earlier foresight about airpower, he showed no interest in pushing for a class of large aircraft carriers to replace battleships.When in charge of the War Office under LG, he had taken a lead in the government’s adoption of the Ten Year Rule, an official assumption there would be no major war in the next ten years, renewed and extended annually.This made exceedingly difficult getting higher spending estimates adopted.It meant Britain emerged from the twenties seriously underarmed for a world power.What made matters worse was that Japan, hitherto a staunch friend of Britain’s, had changed from an ally into a potential enemy.From the 1860s Japan had been transforming itself into a modern power.The Prussians had trained and armed its army and the British its navy, with all its warships being built in British dockyards until the Japanese were taught to design and build their own
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