winter of 1978–79 in the United Kingdom with union strikes demanding pay rises greater than the Labour government allowed, exacerbated by severe storms
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 unions demanding pay rises greater than the limits Prime Minister James Callaghan and his 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 in 16 years, in which severe storms isolated many remote areas of the country.
A strike by workers at 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 gravediggers working in Liverpool and Tameside, and strikes by binmen (or dustmen, as they were then known) leaving uncollected rubbish on streets and in public spaces, including London's Leicester Square. Additionally, NHS ancillary workers formed picket lines to blockade hospital entrances with the result that many hospitals were reduced to taking emergency patients only.
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 Sun headline as "Crisis? What Crisis?". 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 general election held four months later after 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 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 Conservatives like Boris Johnson, have continued to invoke the Winter of Discontent in election campaigns; it would be 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.
It has been credited to Larry Lamb, then editor at The Sun, in an editorial on 3 May 1979. However, it was used earlier by Lord Lipsey in a 1978 Downing Street note and was credited to him in several obituaries.
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 unions demanding pay rises greater than the limits Prime Minister James Callaghan and his 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 in 16 years, in which severe storms isolated many remote areas of the country.
A strike by workers at 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 gravediggers working in Liverpool and Tameside, and strikes by binmen (or dustmen, as they were then known) leaving uncollected rubbish on streets and in public spaces, including London's Leicester Square. Additionally, NHS ancillary workers formed picket lines to blockade hospital entrances with the result that many hospitals were reduced to taking emergency patients only.
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 Sun headline as "Crisis? What Crisis?". 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 general election held four months later after 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 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 Conservatives like Boris Johnson, have continued to invoke the Winter of Discontent in election campaigns; it would be 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. It has been credited to Larry Lamb, then editor at The Sun, in an editorial on 3 May 1979. However, it was used earlier by Lord Lipsey in a 1978 Downing Street note and was credited to him in several obituaries.
Background
The Winter of Discontent was driven by a combination of different social, economic and political factors which had been developing for over a decade.
Divisions in Labour Party over macroeconomic strategy
Under the influence of Anthony Crosland, a member of the more moderate Gaitskellite wing of the Labour Party in the 1950s, the party establishment came to embrace a more moderate course of action than it had in its earlier years before the Second World War. Crosland had argued in his book The Future of Socialism that the government exerted enough control over private industry that it was not necessary to nationalise it as the party had long called to do, and that the ultimate goals of socialism could be as readily achieved by assuring long-term economic stability and building out the social welfare state. His "revisionist" views became Labour's perspective on the post-war consensus, in which both they and the Conservative Party agreed in principle on a strong government role in the economy, strong unions and a welfare state as foundational to Britain's prosperity.
In the 1970s, following the surge in radical left-wing politics of the late 1960s, that view was challenged in another Labour figure's book, Stuart Holland's The Socialist Challenge. He argued that contrary to Crosland's assertions, the government could exercise little control over Britain's largest companies, which were likely to continue consolidating into an oligopoly that, by the 1980s, could raise prices high enough that governments following Keynesian economics would be unable to ensure their citizens the opportunity for full employment that they had been able to since the war, and exploit transfer pricing to avoid paying British taxes. Holland called for returning to nationalisation, arguing that taking control of the top 25 companies that way would result in a market with more competition and less inflation.
Holland's ideas formed the basis of the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) promoted by Tony Benn, then Secretary of State for Industry in the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan as they considered responses to the 1976 sterling crisis. The AES called on Britain to adopt a protectionist stance in international trade, including reversing its recent decision to join the European Common Market, and impose no incomes policies to combat inflation. Benn believed that this approach was more in keeping with Labour's traditional policies and would have its strongest supporters in the unions, with them vigorously supporting the government against opposition from the financial sector and "commanding heights" of industry. It was ultimately rejected in favour of the social contract and extensive cuts in public spending as the condition of an International Monetary Fund loan that supported the pound after the sterling crisis.
The left wing of the Labour Party, while critical of the revisionist approach and the Social Contract, was not universally supportive of the AES either. Many thought it did not go far enough, or avoided the issue of nationalisation. Feminists in particular criticised it for its focus on traditionally male-dominated manufacturing jobs and ignoring the broader issues that the increasing number of women in the workforce faced, preferring a focus on broader social issues rather than just working conditions and pay, the traditional areas unions had negotiated with employers.
1960s–70s labour law reforms
In 1968 Wilson's government appointed the Donovan Commission to review British labour law with an eye toward reducing the days lost to strikes every year; many Britons had come to believe the unions were too powerful despite the country's economic growth since the war. It found much of the problem to lie in a parallel system of 'official' signed agreements between unions and employers, and 'unofficial', often unwritten ones at the local level, between shop stewards and managers, which often took precedence in practice over the official ones. The government responded with In Place of Strife, a white paper by Employment SecretaryBarbara Castle, which recommended restrictions on unions' ability to strike, such as requiring strikes take place after a member vote and fining unions for unofficial strikes.
The Trades Union Congress (TUC) vigorously opposed making Castle's recommendations law, and Callaghan, then Home Secretary, led a cabinet revolt which led to its abandonment. Callaghan did not believe it would be effective in curtailing unofficial strikes, that the proposals could not pass, and the effort would create unnecessary tension between the government and the unions that were key to its political strength.
New Prime Minister Edward Heath hoped that the new law would not only address the strike issue but the steep inflation plaguing the British economy (along with other industrial capitalist economies) at the time, eliminating the need for a separate incomes policy by having a moderating effect on pay increases demanded by unions. Ongoing union resistance to the Industrial Relations Act led to a House of Lords ruling in their favor over demonstrations and widespread unofficial strikes following the Pentonville Five's imprisonment for continuing to picket a London container depot in violation of a court order, which undermined the legislation. Coal miners officially went on strike for the first time in almost half a century in 1972; after two months the strike was settled with the miners getting a 21 per cent increase, less than half of what they had originally sought.
Heath turned to an incomes policy; inflation continued to worsen. The incomes policy was abandoned in 1973 when that year's oil embargo nearly doubled prices within months. To meet demand for heat in the wintertime, the government had to return to coal, giving the National Union of Mineworkers more leverage. The government declared a state of emergency that November, and at the beginning of 1974 limited all nonessential businesses to three days of electricity each week to conserve power. Miners, who had seen their rise from two years before turn into a pay cut in real terms due to the inflation the government had not brought under control, voted overwhelmingly to go on strike in late January.
Two weeks later, the government responded by calling an election, running on the slogan "Who Governs Britain?". At the end of the month the Conservatives no longer did; Labour and Wilson returned, but without a majority. They were able to pass the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, which repealed the Heath government's Industrial Relations Act.
In October Wilson won a majority of three seats; still they needed an agreement with the Liberal Party to have a majority on many issues. Callaghan, now Foreign Secretary, attended an informal meeting at Chequers alongside his fellow Cabinet members, where he speculated about the possibility of a "breakdown of democracy", joking with them that "[i]f I were a young man, I would emigrate."
Incomes policy
Wilson, and Callaghan, who succeeded him as prime minister after Wilson resigned for health reasons in 1976, continued to fight inflation, which peaked at 26.9 per cent in the 12 months to August 1975. While demonstrating to markets fiscal responsibility the government wished to avoid large increases in unemployment. As part of the campaign to bring down inflation, the government had agreed a "Social Contract" with the TUC which allowed for a voluntary incomes policy in which the pay rises for workers were held down to limits set by the government. Previous governments had brought in incomes policies backed by Acts of Parliament, but the Social Contract agreed that this would not happen.
Phases I and II
Phase I of the pay policy was introduced on 11 July 1975 with a white paper entitled The Attack on Inflation. This proposed a limit on wage rises of £6 per week for all earning below £8,500 annually. The TUC General Council accepted these proposals by 19 votes to 13. On 5 May 1976 the TUC accepted a new policy for 1976 increases, beginning 1 August, of between £2.50 and £4 per week with further years outlined. At the Annual Congress on 8 September 1976 the TUC rejected a motion which called for a return to free collective bargaining (which meant no incomes policy at all) once Phase I expired on 1 August 1977. This new policy was Phase II of the incomes policy.
Phase III
On 15 July 1977, the Chancellor of the ExchequerDenis Healey launched Phase III of the incomes policy in which there was to be a phased return to free collective bargaining, without "a free-for-all". After prolonged negotiations, the TUC agreed to continue with the modest increases recommended for 1977–78 under Phase II limits and not to try to reopen pay agreements made under the previous policy, while the government agreed not to intervene in pay negotiations. The Conservative Party criticised the power of the unions and lack of any stronger policy to cover the period from the summer of 1978. The inflation rate continued to fall through 1977 and by 1978 the annual rate was below 10 per cent.
At the end of the year Bernard Donoughue, Callaghan's chief policy advisor, sent him a memo analysing possible election dates. He concluded that the following October or November would be the best option, as the economy was likely to remain in good shape through then. After that, he wrote, the outlook was unclear, with pressure from the government's own incomes policy likely.
Five per cent limit
At a May 1978 Downing Street lunch with editors and reporters from the Daily Mirror, Callaghan asked if they believed it was possible that the planned Phase IV would succeed, as he believed it would if the unions and their members understood it was the best way to keep Labour in power. Most told him that it would be difficult, but not impossible. Geoffrey Goodman disagreed, saying in his view it would be impossible for the union leaders to keep their membership from demanding higher pay increases. "If that is the case, then I will go over the heads of the trade union leadership and appeal directly to their members—and the voters", the prime minister responded. "We have to hold the line on pay or else the government will fall."
On 21 July 1978 Chancellor of the ExchequerDenis Healey introduced a new white paper which set a guideline for pay rises of 5 per cent in the year from 1 August. Callaghan was determined to keep inflation down to single figures; however, trade union leaders warned the government that the 5 per cent limit was unachievable, and urged a more flexible approach with a range of settlements between 5 and 8 per cent. Terry Duffy, president of the AUEW, described the limit as 'political suicide'. Healey also privately expressed scepticism about the achievability of the limit. The TUC voted overwhelmingly on 26 July to reject the limit and insist on a return to free collective bargaining as they were promised.