Press Activity And The Battle For Public Opinion During The 1926 General Strike

In the 1920 s Britain witnessed dramatic changes in social organisation,democratic politics and popular culture.The working class grew in strength.They began to assert their presence and make their demands through a series of strike struggles.In this way,the working class attempted to share political power with other classes.At the same time,the way in which the new political citizens participated in politics changed with the expansion of the franchise.The previously serious newspaper was further marketed and attracted the general public,who were compulsorily educated and able to read and write.The paper gradually became public and played an important role in bridging government and the public.Thus Britain went into mass democracy in the modern sense.Although the First World War briefly united a deeply divided British society,the post-war period was marked by a highly unstable political system.Also,it witnessed a prolonged economic depression and social tensions that led to the outbreak of a general strike in 1926.During the 1926 General Strike,the printing workers were the first to stop working at the call of the Trades Union Congress.Newspapers were suspended from publication and the British society were unable to escape from an ‘information vacuum’.In order to gain the initiative and narrative of the strike,Churchill,who was more sensitive to public opinion,was the first to launch the British Gazette.It was a government newspaper making use of the authority and power of the government to disseminate the government’s views and opinions on the general strike throughout Britain.In return,the Trades Union Congress representing the striking workers,then launched The British Worker as their own outlet to head with the former.For nine days,the British Gazette and the British Worker fought a life-and-death battle on many fronts.The essence of the battle for opinion on the 1926 General Strike was an ideological battle over the legitimacy of ‘Britain’ and British identity.The newspapers,as the dominant mass media back then,were the original arena for this ideological battle.The British Gazette saw the 1926 General Strike as a political crisis that sought to subvert British constitutionalism and liberty.Because they believed it was a complex situation where British miners were inspired by the Soviet Red Revolution and were willing to subvert Britain’s centuries-old tradition of liberal constitutionalism for selfish interests.What they had done were thought to challenge the authority of Parliament,undermine British constitutionalism,unleash bloody riots and destroy people’s lives,destroy popular life and finally drive Britain into anarchist chaos.On the other hand,The British Worker insisted that the 1926 General Strike was merely an economic crisis triggered by a labour dispute.The suffering miners were forced to strike for their legal right to work and be paid.They thought what they had done were under the leadership of the Trades Union Congress,within the limits of the law.Ensuring a continuous supply of basic national livelihoods,they were organised,disciplined,powerful,patriotic and law-abiding British citizens fighting for freedom and justice.In contrast to the sense of political crisis shown by the government in the press,the unions and striking workers perceived the event as an industrial rather than an ideological conflict.In other words,they were very much in agreement with the original ideological discourse of ‘constitutional Britain’,and they did not want to be the antagonist and destroyer of ‘constitutional Britain’.In this way,their retorts were mostly directed at economic facts and hardly created a new ideological discourse.Instead,the retorts fell directly into Churchill’s rhetorical system.The battle of opinion ended in victory for the British Gazette,which gained cultural hegemony over the interpretation of the general strike.It gave a certain legitimacy to the government’s actions and thus the government was able to successfully bring the opposing side into the orbit of British constitutionalism and freedom.Simultaneously,‘educating’ and domesticating the British public became possible.As a result,the general strike was suppressed.The British Gazette thus became the quintessential profile of the British press and the transformation of the 20 th century British politics into a popular one.The creation of the British Gazette and the struggle for the narrative of the strike prompted both parties to rethink and reassess their propaganda policies and media relations.The Labour Party’s line of struggle were influenced and the conservative tradition in British politics became more consolidated.The political potential of the mass media became increasingly underestimated.Thenceforth,the practice was further integrated into the narrative of British nationhood and became a fundamental source for the construction of ‘Britishness’ as a political subjectivity.Also,the 1926 General Strike has become a key site of British national history and collective national memory and identity.At the same time,the British mass media itself changed dramatically with the political and social context of Britain.The political vulnerability of the mass media during the General Strike period deeply shocked the self-conscious British press and prompted it to rethink the balance between itself and politics.In this changed political and media environment,the task of effectively communicating with and integrating new political classes such as working class voters into the political system was fully considered.And the mass media cooperated with the gradual establishment of modern mass democratic politics in Britain.It brought about a ‘democratic culture’ to Britain.Despite its form and content remaining centred on middle-class views,it nevertheless became identified with the British public and evolved into the consensus underpinning of British political culture.