Editing Winter of Discontent (section)

{{short description|Winter of 1978–79 in the United Kingdom}}
{{About|the United Kingdom's winter of 1978–79}}
{{Use British English|date=February 2013}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=October 2020}}
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 | alt2 = British Prime Minister James Callaghan
 | caption2 = [[James Callaghan]], Prime Minister during the Winter of Discontent, pictured in 1977
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The '''Winter of Discontent''' was the period between late September 1978 and February 1979 in the [[United Kingdom]] characterised by widespread strikes by private, and later public sector [[trade union]]s demanding pay rises greater than the limits Prime Minister [[James Callaghan]] and his [[Labour Party (UK)|Labour Party]] government had been imposing, against [[Trades Union Congress]] (TUC) opposition, to control inflation. Some of these industrial disputes caused great public inconvenience, exacerbated by the coldest winter [[Winter of 1962–1963 in the United Kingdom|in 16 years]], in which severe storms isolated many remote areas of the country.<ref name=hay>{{cite journal |first=Colin |last=Hay |title=The Winter of Discontent Thirty Years On |journal=The Political Quarterly |volume=80 |issue=4 |date=2009 |doi=10.1111/j.1467-923X.2009.02052.x |pages=545–552}}</ref>

A strike by workers at [[Ford Motor Company|Ford]] in late 1978 was settled with a pay increase of 17 per cent, well above the 5 per cent limit the government was holding its own workers to with the intent of setting an example for the private sector to follow, after a resolution at the Labour Party's annual conference urging the government not to intervene passed overwhelmingly. At the end of the year a road hauliers' strike began, coupled with a severe storm as 1979 began. Later in the month many public workers followed suit as well. These actions included an unofficial strike by [[gravedigger]]s working in [[Liverpool]] and [[Tameside]], and strikes by refuse collectors, leaving uncollected rubbish on streets and in public spaces, including London's [[Leicester Square]]. Additionally, [[National Health Service (England)|NHS]] ancillary workers formed picket lines to blockade hospital entrances with the result that many hospitals were reduced to taking emergency patients only.<ref>[http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/28/newsid_2531000/2531007.stm  On This Day: 1979: Early election as Callaghan defeated], [[BBC]]. Retrieved 17 December 2007.</ref>

The unrest had deeper causes besides resentment of the caps on pay rises. Labour's internal divisions over its commitment to socialism, manifested in disputes over labour law reform and macroeconomic strategy during the 1960s and early 1970s, pitted constituency members against the party's establishment. Many of the strikes were initiated at the local level, with national union leaders largely unable to stop them. Union membership, particularly in the public sector, had grown more female and less white, and the growth of the public sector unions had not brought them a commensurate share of power within the TUC.

After Callaghan returned from a summit conference in the tropics at a time when the hauliers' strike and the weather had seriously disrupted the economy, leading thousands to apply for unemployment benefits, his denial that there was "mounting chaos" in the country was paraphrased in a famous ''[[The Sun (United Kingdom)|Sun]]'' headline as "Crisis? What Crisis?" [[Conservative Party (United Kingdom)|Conservative]] leader [[Margaret Thatcher]]'s acknowledgement of the severity of the situation in a [[party political broadcast]] a week later was seen as instrumental to her victory in the [[1979 United Kingdom general election|general election]] held four months later after [[1979 vote of no confidence in the Callaghan ministry|Callaghan's government fell to a no-confidence vote]]. Once in power, the Conservatives, who under Thatcher's leadership had begun criticising the unions as too powerful, passed legislation, similar to that proposed in a [[In Place of Strife|Labour white paper]] a decade earlier, that banned many practices, such as [[secondary picketing]], that had magnified the effects of the strikes. Thatcher, and later other [[Conservative Party (United Kingdom)|Conservatives]] like [[Boris Johnson]], have continued to invoke the Winter of Discontent in election campaigns; it would be [[1997 United Kingdom general election|18 years until another Labour government took power]]. In the late 2010s, after further Labour defeats, some British leftists argued that this narrative about the Winter of Discontent was inaccurate, and that policy in subsequent decades was much more harmful to Britain.

The term "Winter of Discontent" is taken from the opening line of [[William Shakespeare]]'s play ''[[Richard III (play)|Richard III]]''.<ref>{{cite thesis |last1=Henick |first1=Sam |title=Winter's not yet gone: Construction and Memory of the Winter of Discontent in Popular and Scholarly Discourse |date=September 2018 |doi=10.13140/RG.2.2.29868.92804 |url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327968247 |publisher=[[Columbia University]] |access-date=18 January 2021}}</ref>{{rp|28}}
It is credited to [[Larry Lamb (newspaper editor)|Larry Lamb]],<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Hay |first1=Colin |title=Narrating Crisis: The discursive construction of the 'Winter of Discontent' |journal=Sociology |date=1996 |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=253–277 |doi=10.1177/0038038596030002004 |jstor=42855681 |s2cid=144438273 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/42855681 |access-date=18 January 2021 |issn=0038-0385|url-access=subscription }}</ref>{{rp|254}} then editor at ''[[The Sun (United Kingdom)|The Sun]]'', in an editorial on 3 May 1979.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Martin |first1=Tara |title=The Beginning of Labor's End? Britain's "Winter of Discontent" and Working-Class Women's Activism |journal=International Labor and Working-Class History |date=2009 |volume=75 |issue=75 |pages=49–67 |doi=10.1017/S0147547909000052 |jstor=27673141 |s2cid=153937249 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/27673141 |access-date=18 January 2021 |issn=0147-5479|url-access=subscription }}</ref>{{rp|64}}