The death of former Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan (RIP) means that the Winter of Discontent (WOD) is back in the news – as are the ubiquitous images of binbags in the streets, symptomatic of the bad old days of trade union profligacy. While the mainstream media replays this story, it is worth remembering that the industrial militancy of the period was relatively restrained. Fewer days were lost in strikes in the 1978/9 period than in an average year under the previous Conservative government, and the level of strike action in Britain during the WOD was on a par with instances of industrial militancy elsewhere in Western Europe. The backdrop to all of this was a period of almost unprecedented wage restraint, euphemistically packaged as a Social Contract between the government and trade unions. If anything, it is remarkable that there was not more strike action since, by the autumn of 1978, the average worker’s wage was decreasing in real terms – a situation not seen since the Depression of 1931.
This is a story that will probably not be heard in the tributes to Callaghan, however, which tells us something about the lasting effects of that period on today’s politics. The WOD worked far better as a narrative construction, signalling a ‘crisis’ of the post-war settlement, than it did as a description of industrial relations in the late 1970s. It provided a backdrop against which Thatcherism could ‘make sense’, the ideological accompaniment to an economic shift achieved with the help of Callaghan's government , which accepted an IMF loan and the accompanying condition of public expenditure cuts in 1976.
Callaghan's reaction to the WOD ('what crisis?', as he never said) is remembered as folly, whilst his response to the IMF crisis (if it is remarked upon at all) is recalled as inevitable. In these memories we can hear the echoes of an old Thatcherite story, as it works its way into the pre-election campaign rhetoric of the present. OR
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