Wednesday 5th May the British Gazette:
‘…the democratic State cannot possibly submit to sectional dictation. It is bound to defend and assert, no matter at what cost, the national and constitutional authority … a General Strike … is a conflict between Trade Union leaders and Parliament. This victory His Majesty’s Government is definitely resolved to secure.
Ample force to preserve the laws and the life of the nation is at the disposal of the State. But force is not the instrument on which a British Government should rely. We rely on reason, on public opinion, and on the will of the people. In this crisis the organisers of the General Strike have made it their first care to paralyse public opinion by breaking down and muzzling the newspapers … Nearly all the newspapers have been silenced by violent concerted action. And this great nation, on the whole the strongest community which civilisation can show, is for the moment reduced in this respect to the level of the African natives dependent only on the rumours which are carried from place to place. In a few days, if this were allowed to continue, rumours would poison the air, raise panics and disorders, inflame fears and passions together, and carry us all to depths which no sane man of any party or class would care even to contemplate.
The Government has therefore decided not only to use broad-casting for spreading information, but to bring out a paper of their own on a sufficient scale to carry full and timely news throughout all parts of the country.
The “British Gazette” is run without profit on the authority and, if necessary, at the expense of the Government. It begins necessarily on a small scale, and its first issue cannot exceed 700,000 copies. It is proposed, however, to use the unlimited resources of the State, with the assistance of all loyal persons, to raise the circulation day after day until it provides sure and sufficient means of information and a guide for action for all British citizens.
Thursday May 6 the British Gazette
‘The General Strike is a challenge to Parliament’
‘Constitutional government is being attacked … Stand behind the Government, who are doing their part confident that you will co-operate in the measures they have undertaken to preserve the liberties and privileges of the people of these islands … The general strike is a challenge to Parliament, and is the road to anarchy and ruin.’
British Gazette, May 8th, 1926
FROM PRONOUNCEMENT BY LORD GREY of FALLODEN
The General Strike has raised an issue in which the question of miners’ wages is submerged. The issue is now not what the wages of miners shall be, but whether democratic Parliamentary Government is to be overthrown. It is by this democratic Government that liberty has been won and by this alone can it be maintained.
The alternatives are Fascism or Communism. Both of these are hostile and fatal to liberty. Neither of them allow a free press, free speech, or freedom of action, not even the freedom to strike. It may well be that the majority of those who decreed the General Strike did not intend, and do not desire, to overthrow Parliamentary Government, but their action has threatened it …
British Gazette, May 8th, 1926
… The people who suffer the least … are the capitalists and the plutocrats. They have at their command the whole apparatus of opulence, and the petty discomforts to which they are exposed are no more than pinpricks, easily endured, rapidly forgotten.
The real victims of a general strike are what is called the common people – the men and women who have to labour hard, day by day for their own livelihood, and that of their children, for whom cheap and regular transport between their homes and work is a prime necessity, and to whom any contraction in the supply or rise in the cost of the necessaries and simpler comforts of life means privation and even want. It is they who in the long run bear the burden and pay the price …
THE PREMIER BROADCASTS
The British Gazette, May 10th 1926
Mr. Baldwin, The Prime Minister, on Saturday evening, broadcast the following message to the Nation:
“The General Strike has now been in progress for nearly a week, and I think it is right as Prime Minister that I should tell the Nation once more what is at stake in the lamentable struggle that is going on.
There are two distinct issues – the stoppage in the coal industry and the General Strike. The stoppage in the coal industry followed nine months’ enquiry and negotiations. I did my utmost to secure agreement upon the basis of the Commission’s report …
What, then, is the issue for which the Government is fighting? It is fighting because while negotiations were still in progress, the Trade Union Council ordered a General Strike, presumably to try to force and the Community to bend to its will …
With that object, the Trade Union Council has decreed that the railways shall not run, that the unloading of ships shall stop, and that no news shall reach the public. The supply of electricity and the transportation of food supplies to the people has been interrupted.
The Trade Union Council declared that this is merely an industrial dispute, but the method of helping the miners is to attack the community. Can there be a more direct attack upon the community than that a body not elected by the voters of the country without consulting the people, without consulting even the Trade Unionist, in order to impose conditions yet defined, should dislocate the life of the nation and try to starve us into submission …”
THE CIVIC CONSTABULARY RESERVE
Appeal by the Government for a Civic Constabulary Reserve
There are at present two forces attached to the police in London … composed of patriotic citizens who are willing to give such time as they can spare to helping the police in their duty of keeping order and protecting the public. There are in these forces about 25,000 citizens. Owing, however, to the tactics employed by ill-disposed persons … it has become necessary to expand and organise a further force of loyal citizens … organised in units wearing plain clothes, but supplied with armlets, steel helmets and truncheons.
The following are eligible to join:
Officers and other ranks of the Territorial Army and the senior contingent of the Officers’ Training Corps … Ex-military men who can be vouched for at Territorial Army Unit Headquarters. Age limit 50 years. Pay will be at the following daily rates: Commander, 10/-; Inspector 7/6; Sergeant, 6/-; Constable, 5/- …
the British Gazette May10
“… we are now threatened it seems with a revolution … An attempted revolution, were it to succeed, the country would henceforth be ruled, not by Parliament, not by the Parliamentary Labour Party, not by the rank and file of the trade unions, not by the moderate members of the Trades Unions Council, but by a relatively small body of extremists who regard trade unions not as the machinery for collective bargaining within our industrial system, but as a political instrument by which the industrial system itself is to be utterly destroyed.”
British Gazette final issue May 13:
‘The most formidable and insidious attempt that has as yet been made to cripple the freedom of the Press, and to withhold essential news from the public has been frustrated. The British Gazette may have had a short life, but it has fulfilled the purpose of living. It becomes a memory; but it remains a monument.’
New Statesman May 15
‘One of the worst outrages that the country has had to endure – and to pay for it – in the course of the strike, was the publication of the British Gazette. This organ, throughout the seven days of its existence, was a disgrace alike to the British Government and to British journalism – in so far as British journalism can be said to have had anything to do with it.’