Editing Winter of Discontent (section)

==Legacy==

Following Thatcher's election win, she brought the [[post-war consensus]] to a halt and made drastic changes to trade union laws (most notably the regulation that unions had to hold a ballot among members before calling strikes) and as a result strikes were at their lowest level for 30 years by the time of the [[1983 United Kingdom general election|1983 general election]], which the Conservatives won by a landslide.<ref name="83electionyoutube">{{cite web|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7noHkLaZ5VI| archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090707212435/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7noHkLaZ5VI&feature=related| archive-date=2009-07-07 | url-status=dead|title=Conservative Party Election Broadcast (1983)|publisher=[[YouTube]]|date=23 October 2008|access-date=2012-03-28}}</ref>

American historian Tara Martin López has noted how many later memories of the Winter of Discontent exaggerate what occurred and confuse events of that time with other industrial disputes and their consequences during the 1970s. In ''[[The Filth and the Fury]]'', a 2000 documentary about [[punk rock]] band the [[Sex Pistols]], surviving members [[Steve Jones (musician)|Steve Jones]] and [[John Lydon]] recall 1975, around the time of the band's founding, for "a garbage strike that went on for years and years and there was trash piled ten-foot high". One of López's own students in her classes at the [[University of Manchester]] identified the Winter of Discontent with the [[three-day week]], which had actually been implemented during the 1974 miners' strike. She wrote: "The embeddedness of a memory infused with a mix of errors, political fact and evocative images is particularly interesting in understanding the Winter of Discontent because it intimates the broader historical significance of this series of events."<ref name="Lopez 9–10">{{harvp|López|2014|pages=9–10}}</ref>

===Within the Labour Party===

The Winter of Discontent also had effects within the Labour Party. Callaghan was succeeded as leader by the more left-wing [[Michael Foot]], who did not succeed in unifying the party. In 1981, still believing the party to have been too firmly controlled by the unions, William Rodgers, the former transport minister who had tried to mitigate the effect of the hauliers' strike, [[Limehouse Declaration|left with three dozen other disaffected Labourites]] to form the more centrist [[Social Democratic Party (UK)|Social Democratic Party]] (SDP), a decision he recalls reaching with some difficulty.<ref>{{cite web|title=Rodgers, William (b. 1928)|url=http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/oral-history/member/rodgers-william-1928|publisher=[[The History of Parliament]]|access-date=18 June 2020}}</ref> Similarly disillusioned, especially after a GMWU official assured him "we'll call the shots" after the winter ended, Tom McNally, Callaghan's advisor who had recommended the news conference that produced ''The Sun''{{'}}s "Crisis? What Crisis?" headline, left Labour for the SDP.<ref name="Lopez 194–195">{{harvp|López|2014|pages=194–195}}</ref>

Some of the union officials involved, on the other hand, never changed their positions on the strikes. "I would have to say if we had to do it all over again today, I would do it all over again", [[Rodney Bickerstaffe]], later general secretary of NUPE and its successor UNISON, said in 2006.<ref name="Lopez 194–195" /> Ian Lowes, leader of the Liverpool gravediggers, concurred: "We had no choice". After the strikes, feeling betrayed by government denunciations of the strikers, he, too, moved away from the Labour Party—but further left. He found himself agreeing with the [[Trotskyist]] positions of ''[[Militant tendency|The Militant]]'' newspaper distributed to strikers, and soon formally joined the local branch of the Militant Tendency, leaving them six years later when the [[Militant in Liverpool|Liverpool City Council, controlled by Militant]], followed local governments across Britain in contracting out work normally done by government workers.<ref>{{harvp|López|2014|pages=192–193}}</ref>

During [[1997 United Kingdom general election|the 1997 general election]], with the Tories the besieged incumbent party, Conservative campaign operatives began claiming that Labour, once back in power, would again take its direction from the TUC and repeal all the laws Thatcher had passed to curb the tactics unions had used in 1979. Labour leader [[Tony Blair]] wrote an opinion piece for ''[[The Times]]'' denying all those charges and explaining that Labour had no plans to allow unballoted strikes, secondary pickets or closed shops, among other things, again. "I have staked my political reputation and credibility on making it clear that there will be no return to the 1970s", he wrote. "Indeed there is little appetite among trade unions for such a thing."<ref>{{cite news |last=Blair |first=Tony |author-link=Tony Blair |date=31 March 1997|title=We won't look back to the 1970s |page=20 |newspaper=[[The Times]]}}</ref>

===Response by the British left===

After Labour's steep losses, including many seats the party had held for decades, in the [[2019 United Kingdom general election|2019 election]], during which Conservatives had again linked left-wing party leader [[Jeremy Corbyn]] to the 1970s and the Winter of Discontent, Matt Myers wrote in ''[[Jacobin (magazine)|Jacobin]]'' that the British left had, by ceding to the right its narrative of that era, failed to confront "neoliberalism's founding myth, [which] continues to place a fundamental obstacle in the way of socialist advance in Britain ... The defeats of the 1970s have been internalized—even by those that had once been the most powerful counterforces to neoliberalism." This in his opinion came despite Labour's hold on the youth vote, much more in its favour than it had been in 1983, when voters aged 18–24 preferred Thatcher. The corresponding overwhelming lead of the Tories among older voters, whom he described as "passive beneficiaries of socialist transformation", in Labour's view, rather than "active subjects" made it easy for the right to appeal to their desire to protect the much greater wealth they had accumulated compared to the country's youth by evoking the 1970s.<ref name="Jacobin piece">{{cite news |last=Myers |first=Matt |title=Why the Tories Say We Want to Go 'Back to the 1970s' |url=https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/02/tories-boris-johnson-1970s-britain-corbyn-thatcherism |newspaper=[[Jacobin (magazine)|Jacobin]] |date=February 2020 |access-date=14 July 2020}}</ref>

Some leftists have joined the criticism of labour actions during the Winter of Discontent. [[Paul Foot (journalist)|Paul Foot]], a lifelong socialist, described the strikes as "bloody-minded expressions of revenge and self-interest". John Kelly, another left-leaning academic, wrote that they were "an example of an almost purely [[economism|economistic]] and defensive militancy".<ref name="Commune post">{{cite web |last=Cohen |first=Sheila |title=What 'went wrong' with the winter of discontent? |url=https://thecommune.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/what-went-wrong-with-the-winter-of-discontent/ |website=The Commune |date=17 December 2010 |access-date=16 July 2020}}</ref>

Recognising the era's endurance as an albatross around Labour's neck, some leftists have attempted to rehabilitate the Winter of Discontent as the inevitable result of the Callaghan government's incomes policy. "[It] hardly fell out of a clear blue sky; rather, it was the culmination of a long series of strikes and struggles against drastic attacks on workers' standards of living", Sheila Cohen wrote for ''The Commune'' in 2010.<ref name="Commune post" /> ''[[Red Pepper (magazine)|Red Pepper]]'', in a page on its website devoted to refuting the Tory narrative of the 1970s, echoes this and further blames the [[Bank of England]]'s loosening of credit restrictions during and after the Heath government as driving inflation so high, rather than union pay demands; it also attributes the economic rebound under Thatcher to the revenues from [[North Sea oil]] instead of her labour law reforms.<ref name="Red Pepper post">{{cite web |last=Medhurst |first=John |title=The myth of the 1970s |url=https://www.redpepper.org.uk/the-myth-of-the-1970s/ |website=[[Red Pepper (magazine)|Red Pepper]] |date=23 October 2014 |access-date=16 July 2020}}</ref>

Cohen also saw the Winter as having offended the ruling class through its demonstration of working-class power. "These prosaic struggles of tanker drivers, gravediggers and dustmen also displayed the only power that workers can have; they withdrew their labour, with a force and to an extent that seriously challenged the organisation and structure of society." Two years later, in the wake of the [[Great Recession in Europe#United Kingdom|Great Recession]] and the [[United Kingdom government austerity programme|austerity measures]] introduced by Conservative Prime Minister [[David Cameron]], who had succeeded Brown at the [[2010 United Kingdom general election|2010 election]], [[Nick Cohen]] was not so sure that the strikes of 1979, which he agreed were the last time the working class was able to inconvenience the wealthy, should be remembered so badly: "With organised labour now emasculated, managers and owners can reward themselves without restraint and governments can stagger from blunder to blunder without a thought for those who must suffer the consequences."<ref>{{cite news |last=Cohen |first=Nick |title=Once We Were Bolshie, Now We Are Servile |newspaper=[[The Observer]]|date=9 December 2012}}</ref>

===As 21st-century Conservative talking point===

In 2008, another ''Times'' piece raised the spectre of the Winter of Discontent in warning Labour, then in government with [[Gordon Brown]] as prime minister, not to allow the TUC to set the party's agenda again. Militant union rhetoric at the party's 2008 conference, [[Rachel Sylvester]] wrote, made it "a quaint but rather pointless vision of the past: [[Jurassic Park (film)|Jurassic Park]] with an [[ABBA|Abba]] soundtrack, a T-rex dressed in flares."<ref>{{cite news |last=Sylvester |first=Rachel |title=Labour beware, the dinosaurs are not extinct |url=https://www.thetimes.com/article/labour-beware-the-dinosaurs-are-not-extinct-kmptqxp0txc |newspaper=[[The Times]] |date=9 September 2008 |access-date=7 July 2020}}</ref> Five years later, at the first Margaret Thatcher Annual Lecture given after her death, [[Boris Johnson]] lamented that British youth were getting an overwhelmingly negative impression of the late prime minister from "[[Russell Brand]] and the BBC" that those old enough to remember what came before her election did not. "[In 1979] Red Robbo [i.e. [[Derek Robinson (trade unionist)|Derek Robinson]]] paralyzed what was left of our car industry and the country went into an ecstasy of uselessness called the winter of discontent: women were forced to give birth by candle-light, Prime Minister's Questions was lit by paraffin lamp and [[Blue Peter]] was all about how to put newspaper in blankets for extra insulation."<ref>{{cite web |last=Johnson |first=Boris |author-link=Boris Johnson |title=The Third Margaret Thatcher Annual Lecture |url=https://www.cps.org.uk/files/factsheets/original/131128144200-Thatcherlecturev2.pdf |page=3 |date=2013 |access-date=12 July 2020 |archive-date=30 October 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201030051409/https://www.cps.org.uk/files/factsheets/original/131128144200-Thatcherlecturev2.pdf |url-status=dead }}</ref> Two years later, with [[2015 United Kingdom general election|another election]] looming, Johnson again claimed that [[Ed Miliband]], Labour's then-leader, would take Britain back to the 1970s if he became prime minister.<ref>{{cite news |last=Mason |first=Rowena |title=Labour will take Britain back to 'nasty 1970s', says Boris Johnson |url=https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/31/boris-johnson-labour-britain-nasty-1970s |newspaper=[[The Guardian]] |date=31 March 2015 |access-date=13 July 2020}}</ref>

After losing that election, Miliband was succeeded as Labour leader by [[Jeremy Corbyn]], a surprise winner of the leadership election identified with the left wing of the party, who had been a NUPE activist before his election to Parliament in 1983; he was popular among younger voters. In the [[2017 United Kingdom general election|2017 general election]], the first contested with him as leader, the party did better than expected, gaining 30 seats, its first seat gains in 20 years. ''[[Daily Telegraph]]'' columnist Philip Johnston attributed this to Conservatives' failure to use the Winter of Discontent against Corbyn as an example for his youthful base of what his policies would likely lead to a repeat of. "It appears that the economic arguments we had as a nation in the Eighties will have to be joined all over again."<ref>{{cite news |last=Johnston |first=Philip |title=The Tories' biggest problem? No one remembers the winter of discontent anymore |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/05/tories-biggest-problem-no-one-remembers-winter-discontent-anymore/ |newspaper=[[The Daily Telegraph]] |date=5 July 2017 |access-date=13 July 2020}}</ref>

Two years later, in ''[[The Independent]]'', Sean O'Grady recalled his experience of that winter, as a child. While conceding that some memories of it exaggerated its severity, "[t]here was a mood in the country that we couldn't carry on like this" and thus Thatcher was elected. O'Grady warned readers that if reforms to labour laws that her government had enacted in the wake of the Winter of Discontent were repealed, in addition with the enactment of legislation desired by unions to make it easier to organize, Britain could see a repeat of 1979. "We learned hard lessons about this sort of thing in that exceptionally cold and harsh winter of 1978–79", he wrote. "Don't let Britain have to learn those painful lessons again, the hard way."<ref>{{cite news |last=O'Grady |first=Sean |title=Opinion: Corbyn aims to put unions back on top again. Have we learned nothing from the Winter of Discontent? |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/winter-of-discontent-jeremy-corbyn-trade-unions-margaret-thatcher-a8741256.html |newspaper=[[The Independent]] |date=22 January 2019 |access-date=13 July 2020}}</ref>

{{blockquote|"When deployed by the Right against the Left 'the 1970s' is a malleable field to which all the worst elements of the nation's past are consigned", Myers observed in ''Jacobin''. Yet, "the more the specter of 'the 1970s' is raised in British political discourse, the less the reality of the past is actually discussed ...  For modern British Conservatism, the 1970s can thus serve as an empty signifier, its power dependent on eternal repetition of a memory from which even those who lived it are excluded."<ref name="Jacobin piece" />}}