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"Martin López, Tara"
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The winter of discontent myth, memory, and history
In the midst of the freezing winter of 1978–79, more than 2,000 strikes, infamously coined the “Winter of Discontent,\" erupted across Britain as workers rejected the then Labour Government’s attempts to curtail wage increases with an incomes policy. Labour’s subsequent electoral defeat at the hands of the Conservative Party under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher ushered in an era of unprecedented political, economic, and social change for Britain. A potent social myth also quickly developed around the Winter of Discontent, one where “bloody-minded\" and “greedy\" workers brought down a sympathetic government and supposedly invited the ravages of Thatcherism upon the British labour movement. 'The Winter of Discontent' provides a re-examination of this crucial series of events in British history by charting the construction of the myth of the Winter of Discontent. Highlighting key strikes and bringing forward the previously-ignored experiences of female, black, and Asian rank-and-file workers along-side local trade union leaders, the author places their experiences within a broader constellation of trade union, Labour Party, and Conservative Party changes in the 1970s, showing how striking workers’ motivations become much more textured and complex than the “bloody-minded\" or “greedy\" labels imply. The author further illustrates that participants’ memories represent a powerful force of “counter-memory,\" which for some participants, frame the Winter of Discontent as a positive and transformative series of events, especially for the growing number of female activists. Overall, this fascinating book illuminates the nuanced contours of myth, memory, and history of the Winter of Discontent.
eBook
Crosscurrents
In 1991 Conservative author Eamonn Butler remarked that the Winter of Discontent was so traumatic for the British public that ‘the awful details […] are often blotted from people’s memory.’² He spoke too soon. They would continue to be evoked. Almost 20 years after Butler declared the memory of the Winter of Discontent a disturbing event securely relegated to irrelevance, historian Niall Ferguson openedThe Shock of the Globalin 2010 with an introduction titled ‘Crisis, What Crisis?’ before detailing James Callaghan’s media blunder upon returning from Guadeloupe in 1979. Ferguson took the headline as expressive of the apparent chaos
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The Floodgates Open
A little more than two weeks after James Callaghan announced to the TUC Conference in Brighton that there would be no autumn election, the mounting pressure building up against the 5 per cent wage limit came to a head among workers at Ford Motor Company. On September 22 the first workers at the Halewood plant outside of Liverpool walked out on strike, triggering not only industrial action at other plants in the UK, but also creating an important precedent for other trade unionists. As the eight-week strike wore on and the negotiated rates were increasingly in excess of government policy,
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Unseemly Behaviour
Local authority strikes, like that of the Liverpool gravediggers, represented only one of the myriad actions deployed in British public sector unions’ co-ordinated actions during the Winter of Discontent. One key aspect of these disputes in particular, the involvement of women, has been relatively ignored in the literature.¹ Women working for local authorities, from school meals workers to assistants in care homes for the elderly, began to reveal themselves as a robust industrial force in the midst of these upheavals. For decades, local authorities in Britain experienced a rapid growth in female employment. From 1949 to 1974, employment in local
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The Second Stalingrad
As the reality of the Ford workers’ successful breach of the incomes policy set in among those in the Labour government, so too did one of Britain’s coldest winters on record. In January of 1979, the average temperature was -.04ºC, making the winter of 1978–79 one of 50 coldest since records began.¹ Blizzards that greeted New Year’s revellers inspired theGuardianto proclaim ‘The Big Freeze Tightens Its Grip,’² while theFinancial Timesgrimly reported the deaths of 23 people throughout the UK, France, and West Germany as a result of the ‘Arctic weather conditions.’³ The harsh weather intensified
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‘Celia’s Gate’ and the Strikes in the NHS
With disputes among Ford workers and lorry drivers in the immediate recesses of memory, public sector strikes like those among gravediggers and school meals workers added to the continuing pressure on the British public and the Labour government. All of these disputes, nevertheless, came to a resounding crescendo with action taken in the NHS. Already emboldened by her attacks on secondary picketing, Thatcher appeared on theJimmy Young Programmeon January 31, 1979, directly challenging the striking workers in the health service. ‘Some of the unions are confronting the sick […] If someone is inflicting injury, harm, and damage on
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Ghosts of the Past
On January 23, 1979, a concerned Mancunian acerbically addressed British Prime Minister James Callaghan in theManchester Evening News. In the letter ‘Hardly all mod cons, but […] HOW ABOUT A STAY UP HERE JIM?’ the author extends a dubious invitation to share the author’s view of Manchester’s local factories, which are supposedly empty due to strikes.¹ Seizing upon the frigid scene of the city weeks after experiencing its worst blizzard since the First World War,² the author warns of ice-covered roads, but sarcastically concedes that, ‘I believe we do have a plentiful supply of grit and sand in Manchester
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Freezers of Corpses and Sea Burials
During a sermon in early 1979, a vicar shared his apocalyptic vision with his parishioners:
When gravediggers will allow corpses to mount up rather than carry out their duty, I detect the undermining of the whole structure of our society. This civilization of our[s] has taken thousands of years to reach a point where the dignity of the human being has reached a high level of care and concern. I shall not witness its destruction through inertia.¹
Such denunciations of callousness and impending anarchy characterize the overall reaction to a strike of 56 gravediggers and crematoria workers in Liverpool. The
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The Winter of Discontent
On the eve of January 1, 1970 British journalists waved a ‘haggard goodbye’ to the 1960s. For those steeped in the energy of blossoming social movements, the decade was one of unprecedented shows of solidarity amongst British youth, and the next decade was the one where they had the chance to ‘make the world a better place.’¹ Yet, by the time the 1970s came to a close, little was left of this enthusiasm and hope. On December 7, 1979 punk band the Clash released a startling epitaph for the decade in their song ‘London Calling’:
All that phoney Beatlemania has
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