History of Police Strikes

The last time the police went on strike was 90 years ago, and the event was so momentous it won the police support from long-time enemies.

In 1918, the so-called Spirit of Petrograd, Sylvia Pankhurst, cried upon hearing that her long-time tormentors in the police force were themselves on strike. "The London police on strike? After that, anything can happen," she said.

As now, the government of the day was fielding competing public sector pay demands, and just a month before had denied MPs' requests for more pay (the current government did the same late last year). Today it is Gordon Brown; in August 1918 it was David Lloyd George.

Back then, a London policeman's wage was comparable to that of an agricultural worker or unskilled labourer. The cost of living had more than doubled during the first world war, but police had received a pay rise of only 3 shillings since 1914.

"We policemen see young van boys and slips of girls earning very much more than we get," said a policeman during the 1918 strike, "and, well, it makes us feel very sore."

This was compounded by large numbers of police officers having been sucked into the army, placing a greater strain on those left at home. They ended up working a 96-hour week, with leave restricted to one day a fortnight.

And so, two months before the end of the war, police officers went on strike for the first time.

On August 30 1918, around 12,000 marched on Whitehall. The next day, officers marched down Downing Street, a street the police had blocked to marching suffragettes. A Scotland Yard official watching the protest said the police were "mutinying in the face of the enemy".

The government couldn't believe it. Class unrest had already been spreading through different cadres of workers, and here were the government's disciplinarians joining in. The Guardian would later call them "Bolshevik bobbies".

The next day, Lloyd George returned from France and offered terms that ended the strike immediately. In 1919, the policemen of Liverpool were still dissatisfied and went on strike again. This time events turned violent, with four days of rioting.

Those 1918 terms sowed the seeds of the disagreement today: the police union was disbanded and the Police Federation put in its place.

Though a redoubtable organisation, the Police Federation is bound by statute (which is repeatedly refreshed – the last time in 1996) to compel its members not to strike.

Over the decades, governments have believed the police would never strike, relying on the goodwill of officers adhering to the maxim of Robert Peel, the creator of the modern police force, who said: "The police are the public, the public are the police."

"After 1919, the first use of the 'threat to ballot' weapon was in the 1970s under Callaghan," says Professor Robert Reiner, of the LSE. "What they're doing today, they haven't threatened to do since then."

According to recently released documents, James Callaghan told his home secretary he would rather resign as prime minister than give in to the threat of a police strike.

But Reiner believes the 1918/19 unrest is doubly instructive: "The police won't strike because they know the public are worried about the chaos it would cause." Although Reiner says the consequences of a strike "are variable".

Sometimes a strike produces calm, he says, sometimes violence. "In London 1918 there was no noticeable effect on crime and disorder, in 1919, just a year, later there was rioting."

[Via Guardian]