Frank McLynn, The Road Not Taken: How Britain Narrowly Missed a Revoloution, 1381-1926

As a historian, McLynn can be a bit partial and iconoclastic. He takes aim at quite a few shibboleths of English history. It’s hardly new to hear Henry VIII and Churchill denounced, but McLynn is very disparaging about Elizabeth I and Edward III, our perfect queen and perfect king - which makes an interesting change. It was a bit blah for me until the home ground of the 1926 strike was reached. McLynn was in no doubt that it was a truly revolutionary moment, and if the TUC hadn’t caved then the opportunity was there. Of course, as he himself states, the TUC never wanted a revolution and weren't prepared to go there. It's chilling to remember the state's response to the strike though - the black propaganda of the British Gazette, the encouragement of fascists to violence, the willingness for the military to shoot strikers. The General Strike was not intended by the strikers to bring about revolution, but the response of Baldwin's Government and its supporters showed that they thought that a possibility and they were prepared to kill ordinary British working people to avoid that. To Save The Nation. It's easy to draw parallels with the state's approach to striking miners at Orgreave and to anti-capitalist demonstrators more recently.