Laura Smith, the newly elected Crewe MP who thrilled her audience at a Momentum fringe last night by calling for a general strike to bring down the government, has handily opened up the classic Labour history exam question. Was the 1926 general strike a good thing?

Jeremy Corbyn, who has been putting as much distance as he can between his unconstitutional backbencher and his conference speech on Wednesday afternoon, may not see the merit of having this discussion on the same day. Tom Watson, Labour deputy leader, who said on Wednesday morning that “most trade unions will tell you it [the general strike] was an absolute failure for the working class,” definitely didn’t.

It is dangerously facile to pretend that a radical party can ever embrace the unlawful or the unconstitutional

Most people – quite likely including most of those in the room listening to Smith – accept that you don’t overthrow a constitutionally elected government by unconstitutional means. But was Watson right, that the strike was an absolute failure for the working class?

It was certainly a disaster in the short term for the trade unions. There had been angry differences over the wisdom of bringing out the whole trade union movement in support of the miners, the workers’ aristocracy, many of whom earned significantly more than other unions’ members. The decision to call the strike off after just nine days was just as bitterly contested and laid the foundations for an enduring narrative of betrayal.

In its aftermath, a triumphalist Conservative government took its revenge. It ended the automatic opt-in to the political levy for trade unionists – threatening the Labour party’s viability – and tightened strike law to make all but the most narrowly defined industrial action illegal. Facing the threat of being bankrupted by demands for damages, for a time trade unions almost gave up industrial action. Union membership fell by 700,000.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Laura Smith’s emotive appeal to direct action thrilled the people in the room.’ Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

But history wouldn’t be any fun if it was that simple. The prime minister Stanley Baldwin, a politician now almost lost to history despite dominating the years between the wars, built his opposition to the strike around the central charge that it was a direct threat to the constitution. There was also the subtext that it was a Bolshevik plot dreamed up in Moscow – all the more vivid a charge in 1926, less than 10 years after the Soviet revolution.

The strike failed in its main purpose, which was to force the government to end the miners’ dispute by bringing back the wartime subsidies it had recently withdrawn. The TUC’s decision to call it off – partly because the union leadership was scared that more extreme views were beginning to win influence – splintered the left between the gradualists and the radicals.

Newspapers in the general strike 1926 Read more

But it also paved the way for electoral victory: the Labour leadership’s lack of support for the strike and its recognition that every voter, not just trade unionists, chooses the government, finally gave the lie to the sustained attempt on the right to persuade voters that Labour, the Communist party and the TUC were pretty much the same thing. To many voters, the conduct of the Tory party during and after the strike had been vindictive, while Labour had validated its claim to be a serious party of government. Three years later, in the 1929 general election, it emerged for the first time as the largest party at Westminster. In the long run, as someone once said, the strike was not a complete catastrophe for the working class.

Smith’s emotive appeal to direct action on Tuesday night thrilled the people in the room. But it is as true in 2018 as it was in 1926 that it is dangerously facile to pretend that the hard choices a radical party always faces can ever embrace the unlawful or the unconstitutional. Richard Burgon, the shadow cabinet minister who stood to applaud her, should be ashamed. At least Corbyn has had his moment to reassert his respect for democracy.

• Anne Perkins is a former deputy political editor of the Guardian