ABSTRACT
A dissent which eliminated what few inhibitions remained would have had to develop first. The trigger for the legitimization of the informal constitution very probably would have been widespread industrial action, perhaps a general strike. In the last years of the war, a general strike was always possible. If such a strike took a syndicalist direction, it would, in fact, have a revolutionary agenda. The prompt for militarization, or for the implementation of systems in tandem, would have been apprehended revolution, becoming civil war. A labour meeting proposed for Finsbury Park for 2 May 1918, for instance, was flatly forbidden. A WPC meeting, about the same time, was also banned without explanation. Another meeting scheduled to commemorate May Day, in north London, was prohibited despite a protest from the national Conference for Catechetical Leadership. (NCCL). Which was seconded by the Society of House and Ship Painters, and more ominously, by the bumptious National Union of Railwaymen( NUR).
