In today's Daily Mail, Leo McKinstry attacks the strike by local government workers, taking particular issue with the union's evocation of the spirit of the 1926 General Strike. "Eighty years ago" he writes " the working class were facing real physical hardship. The coal miners...were battling against savage wage cuts and longer hours."

The Mail is of course correct to take a sympathetic view of the 1926 strikers. A shame that the paper could not find space to mention the role played in the strike by the Zinoviev letter of 1924, that purported to show that Russian Communists were organising and agitating in Britain. The letter terrified the middle classes and helped to harden attitudes against the working classes and the suffering miners. It was, of course a politically motivated forgery and published in the Daily Mail.

Also missing from McKinstry's article was a discussion of the immediate cause of the General Strike - a dispute involving printers at a newspaper which wished to run a leader denouncing the miners as a 'revolutionary movement'. The name of the paper? The Daily Mail.

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