Hello, my name's David Rumserman, and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today, it is the second part of my conversation with the historian Robert Saunders in our occasional

series when we look at important anniversaries, and we are talking on the 100th anniversary

of Britain's 1926 General Strike.

Today we explore how the strike ended, who won, who lost, and also how the winners turned into losers. But we also look at the

legacy of the general strike in the miners disputes of the 1970s and the 1980s. And we ask,

when, where, how might the idea of a general strike still have teeth today?

Robert, I was very struck by something you said in the previous episode that essentially for the

TUC, the money was going to run out after two weeks. A strike on this scale was extraordinarily

expensive. It makes one this scale was extraordinarily expensive.

It makes one think it was almost a lost cause from the start. In those terms, given in the end,

this was a contest between the union movement and the government, not the mine owners at this point.

This is the government now. The government's resources would outlast two weeks.

The union movement was always facing a very tight schedule

and the clock was ticking from day one.

Is it just hindsight that makes one feel this cause was lost from the beginning?

I think that view was quite widely shared among the

TUC leadership actually at the time. When the meeting is held formally to call the strike,

a lot of the reports on it stress there's almost a kind of funereal atmosphere. There's a sense

of kind of martyrs marching towards the gunfire and this is a generation that knows what marching

to the gunfire looks like this is a generation that knows what marching to the gunfire

looks like. Ramsey MacDonald tells the Daily Herald, I don't like General Strikes,

...