'as conditions and opportunity dicThe Labour Government of 1924 came and went. Some small improve ments in unemployment benetits were made. But by 1924 unemployment had decreased from the 1921 level of 17 per cent to 10 per cent, and some of the steam began to go out of the NUWCM.
The upturn in the economy, however, was only temporary - as the ruling class knew, In the summer of 1925 the mine owners demanded a wage cut, which was met by a threat of a general strike. The Tory Premier Baldwin, buying time, offered a nine-months subsidy to the coal industry; and the victory of Red Friday 31 July 1925, became enshrined in the annals of the British workers' movement Seeds of Defeat The ruling class had begun to prepare for battle. But the union leaders were drugged by complacency and fear of the social forces they had brought into play. In contrast to the planning and organisation of the ruling class, inertia and a danger ous optimism in the parliamentary system paralysed the labour moveThe seeds of the working class defeat in the General Strike of May 1926 were being sown. It was a defeat that would lead to poverty and misery for millions of workers and their families. The unity that the NUWCM had tried to build between the workers and the jobless was to be crushed on the anvil of that terrible defeat. From then onwards it went into the by-lanes of sectarian ism and the cul-de-sacs of isolation