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Disunited Kingdom – the fall of Britain and the loss of Empire 1910-1914

Published by the Communist Workers Party, Johannesburg, 1991
Eric Obstbaum
About the author
Comrade Obstbaum was born in Egypt to Austrian parents. He and his parents fled Berlin for South Africa to escape the oppression of National Socialist Germany, after being refused entry to Britain in 1933.

Introduction
In 1900, Britain was a prosperous country with an economy in good shape and politically stable. Within 20 years it was beginning to fragment and within 40 it had fallen to the status of a minor power. The story of the country's decline and fall over the that brief period and of the struggle between Australia, Canada and South Africa for dominance over the remnants of the old Empire, is well known. Indeed that struggle still affects relationships between those countries even now. What however caused that catastrophic decline? How did an Empire that straddled the world fall apart so quickly and with such ruinous effects on the home country? It is these questions I intend to address In this pamphlet. The fallout from this event has dominated 20th century politics and it is incumbent upon socialists everywhere to acquire an honest assessment of what those early British revolutionaries were attempting to do, how they did it, and what caused their revolution’s eventual degeneration. It is my thesis that the answers can be found in the short period immediately before the First War, where the the stresses in British society began the disastrous slide from Imperial hegemonic power to post-industrial decline.

Several interlocking factors were at work. First, the increasing militancy of workers. That militancy was unstructured and often dominated by groups with an incorrect understanding of the situation, but it was real. Second was the destructive conflict between Loyalist and Nationalist forces in Ireland, a conflict that spilled over from time to time onto the mainland. This conflict was destructive because it diverted progressive working class activism into petty nationalism and provided cover for a series of repressive measures by the state. The third factor was the growing demand for women's suffrage. While a demand for votes within the capitalist system was not of itself a progressive activity, those demands exposed the power structures within that system and demonstrated how far the holders of power were willing to go to keep it. The fourth factor was the mobilisation of the officer group within the British Army as a political force. Initially triggered by a concern that the army was to be used against Loyalists in the North of Ireland, the raised political awareness of this group was a sea change in relationships between the army and wider British society. The widening of membership of the officer class during the Great War created further schisms and opened up the possibility of different sections of the military standing with different groups, in particular the workers they were soon to be called upon to suppress. By exposing the class basis of the power structures, significant numbers of the lower ranks began to see the need to organise to protect their own class, sometimes with officer support, even to the extent of mutiny.

Worker Militancy
As early as the 1890s, troops had appeared on the streets of Northern towns to suppress dissent and to force strikers back to work. In 1893, two strikers were shot dead in the town of Featherstone, while in 1907 a massive strike in Belfast was put down with major force by the military leading to yet more deaths. Despite this, by 1910 militancy was growing and trade unions were experiencing a massive increase in membership.

That militancy was not however revolutionary. Its main concern was to secure an improvement in living standards in a period where real wages were falling for the working classes at the same time as landowners – especially mine owners – were seen as taking ever greater and greater amounts of money out of their holdings. The vast majority of workers involved in strike action in this early period had no more than an inchoate sense of unfairness and so far as they saw a remedy it was simply in more money for their work. The Trades Union leadership were by and large happy with this state of affairs since any disturbance to the status quo in the form of more radical political or social change would also affect their own position. Class consciousness had not begun to emerge.

It was with the uprising in Tonypandy, where the first major clashes between workers and the British State took place, that a more revolutionary consciousness began to emerge. In the absence of a revolutionary leadership, this growing consciousness was vulnerable, to opportunism and to counter-revolutionary forces. From a revolutionary perspective the most serious threat was the growth of syndicalism, that strand of anarchism which concentrates on local action in the work place and ignores the worker's most powerful tool, their collective political power as a class.

Despite that, gains were made. In Tonypandy some workers clearly recognised the need to prepare for much worse repressive behaviour. Explosives and weapons were seized and organisational work was done to build up cadres. In Llanelly in 1911, further clashes took place and these rumbled on across the country in numerous locations but with most success in Liverpool. It was Liverpool that the best chance of a truly revolutionary movement emerged, only for that chance to fade away because of a lack of revolutionary consciousness among local leaders and a sell-out to the bosses by the national trades union leadership, frightened that in the chaos of revolution they would lose their privileged status.

As Lenin puts it in What is to be Done:
The failure of the leadership to recognise this and the insistence by syndicalists on the trade union as the central organising body and the general strike as the central task of a revolutionary movement, led to the ultimate failure of the Liverpool rising (and similar post war events in Glasgow) opening the door to the defeat of the left by counter-revolutionaries and eventually the rise of the militarist ultra-right Silver Badge movement that in turn evolved into the Argentist Party. To again quote Lenin:

The initial successes in Liverpool of syndicalist organisers like Mann in Liverpool, because they were rooted in a defective understanding of the true revolutionary situation proved not to be sustainable, while in Ireland and to a lesser degree in the rest of Britain, sectarian conflicts distorted the development of a united working class movement out of a historical tradition of resistance to the British landed classes into petty nationalism.
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EDIT 3/03/2020
Meta
This is of course Eric Hobsbawn the Marxist historian. Obviously the UK in 1933 in this TL is very different to ours. How different? We'll see