AUTHORS of a new history of the 1926 general strike have come to Glasgow to discuss The Future in our Past.

Hosted by Glasgow TUC at a packed Unity Books, chair Keith Stoddart opened the meeting by displaying a small medal given to T&G strikers for service in the strike and contrasting it with the large leather-boxed version handed to scabs by the state for their services rendered.

Authors Callum Cant and Matthew Lee described how they worked to piece together local strike committee archives from Bedlinog in Wales to Swindon and from London to Glasgow to give an on-the-ground account that sets the scene for the confrontation and also charts the growing support for the strike and local resistance to TUC officalis bringing it to a close.

Mr Cant told the meeting: “The general strike was not a tactic invented out of thin air. It was not something come up with by the intellectual elite.

“It’s something that emerges out of the actual experience of working-class people under capitalism. It’s an organic product of that process of that struggle.”