By that logic, I'm guessing that my friend's beloved kittens, both of whom were born in April this year, and whose historic achievements include leaving our laps covered in cat hair, purr ~ obably don't exist either?
Am I allowed to ask you write a few paragraphs about the 1925 General Strike, please?
This is what I wrote about the analogue in TTL to Stanley Baldwin, which has information on the 1925 General Strike.
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Stanley Baldwin had a roughly similar political career, until the immediate years following the First Great War. In TTL, the British military defeat in the FGW in 1917 also led to the collapse of the wartime coalition between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. In the first postwar general election, the Labour Party, led by William Adamson, ultimately triumphed. However, Adamson’s government was weakened by continuing economic problems and growing unrest from the trade unions. The rule of law in Britain was also negatively affected in the immediate postwar years by the appearance of far-right groups, some of which were also led by FGW veterans. Some of these groups were utilized as strike-breakers, while other groups of this nature engaged in street fighting with anyone and any group imagined as an enemy.
During this time, Stanley Baldwin achieved leadership over the Conservative Party, and ultimately led the party to victory in a general election called in 1923. Baldwin focused on attempting to stabilize the British economy, made worse in TTL by reparations demands by the Central Powers. One of the seminal events of Baldwin’s tenure in government was the General Strike of 1925, analogous to our world’s General Strike of 1926.
As in our world, this General Strike affected the coal industry and transport, and was sparked by plans to reduce the wages of coal miners. Unlike in our world, the General Strike of 1925, which resulted in several weeks of disruptions to transportation in the United Kingdom in April-May 1925, was accompanied by a not-insignificant level of violence, both due to the responses by the police towards striking workers, and due to clashes throughout the country between far-right and far-left groups. As in the case of a number of interwar far-right groups, many far-left groups engaged in street violence were originally founded by veterans.
Baldwin’s government was gravely weakened by the 1925 General Strike, with Baldwin himself increasingly blamed by the general public for a breakdown of law and order, persistent economic problems, and the sense of national humiliation. Baldwin also faced a groundswell of anger from within his own party, with some Conservative figures in the government and the media accusing him of failing to take harsher action against the trade unions involved in the General Strike. Some historians have claimed that Winston Churchill’s own radicalization, and subsequent willingness to align himself with the Silver Shirts, can be dated to this period. Baldwin, weakened politically, led the Conservatives to defeat in the general election of 1927, to a resurgent Labour Party led by Ramsay MacDonald.
Baldwin attempted to maintain leadership of the Conservative Party as leader of the opposition to MacDonald’s government. However, he faced constant criticism from a growing number of far-right backbenchers from his own party. The stabilization of the British economy in the late 1920s, facilitated by the renegotiation of reparations to the Central Powers, led some in Britain to speculate that the Labour Party would hold power for some time to come.
It was during this era that Oswald Mosley successfully orchestrated the merger of a large number of smaller far-right groups into the Silver Shirt party.
The 1931 Business Collapse fatally weakened the Labour government. However, Baldwin would be unable to take advantage of these political developments. He was ousted as leader of the Conservative Party in an MP-led revolt led by Winston Churchill, who subsequently made the fateful decision to ally the Conservatives with the Silver Shirts, who appeared to enjoying a surge of support in traditional Conservative constituencies.
Baldwin resigned from Parliament following his ouster as party leader, and played no role in the Conservative-Silver Shirt Coalition that emerged following the 1932 general election. He grew to be horrified by the measures taken by the Coalition against its claimed “enemies” and the sharp curtailment of political freedoms. Baldwin kept his own views private. He died in 1947, and was said to have been a broken man, in the wake of Britain’s defeat in the SGW and the three German superbombings.
