Thus, J. H. Thomas, trying to show how "peaceloving" the General Council had been, said: "We wanted to stop week-end speeches … I did not want any speeches from the miners' side, because it might have rendered it more difficult to get peace. The suggestion we made was deliberately designed for the purpose of creating the right atmosphere."
Thomas did not mention my name, but everyone understood he was referring to my campaign amongst the miners and other workers urging them to prepare against the capitalist offensive. This was the way Thomas was speaking to the bitterest enemies of the working class, at a time when a million miners had already been locked out.
Later in the same speech, Thomas appealed to the capitalist members of Parliament "to avert what I believe is the greatest calamity for this country." He was referring (in advance) to that magnificent General Strike which will go down to history as the greatest effort of organised labour!
At the very moment when he knew the Government had all its strike-breaking plans prepared and even preparation to use the Constitution against the workers, when he knew that the General Strike was being represented as "an attack on the Constitution," Thomas was presenting the Tories with free arguments and giving away the workers' revolver by saying: "I have never disguised that in a challenge to the Constitution, God help us unless the Government won!"
Then J. R. MacDonald made one of the most sickening speeches in the history of the House of Commons. He spoke in superior tones of the miners' fight against wage reductions, longer hours and district settlements as a "dogma"; he assured the Prime Minister tearfully that the General Council had spent hours in private trying to persuade the miners, "striving to get security, to get confidence, to get people to believe in each other." He had the audacity to suggest that Herbert Smith was ready to accept even a reduction in wages as part of a settlement on the basis of the Coal Commission's Report, and calling it "a great contribution to peace"; and finally he declared to the assembled Capitalist M.P.'s "with the discussion of general strikes and Bolshevism and all that kind of thing, I have nothing to do at all. I respect the Constitution as much as Sir Robert Horne."
What a speech for the Leader of the Labour Party on the eve of a General Strike!
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