Editing Winter of Discontent (section)

===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>