Winter of Discontent

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?

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.

[6] 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.

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.

[6] 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.

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.

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.

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.

The political upheavals of the late 1960s in Europe and the United States had brought participatory democracy to the fore, and workers felt they should be taking decisions, including about when and whether to strike, that had hitherto been the province of union leadership.

[22] In 1977 two of her advisors, John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss, prepared a report called "Stepping Stones" which diagrammed the vicious cycle through which they believed the unions' influence exacerbated Britain's ongoing economic difficulties, such as unemployment and inflation.

[23] By the end of the year she had formed a steering group to develop a specific policy aimed at curbing union power under a Tory government, and a media strategy that would invest the public in this.

[25] During the later phases of the Grunwick dispute, as strikers took to the streets to march and sometimes clashed violently with the police, the Tories began using the media coverage to leverage the critique of unionism contained in "Stepping Stones".

Terry Duffy, the delegate from Liverpool Wavertree Constituency Labour Party and a supporter of the Militant group, moved a motion on 2 October which demanded "that the Government immediately cease intervening in wage negotiations".

The government subsequently entered into intense negotiations with the TUC, hoping to produce an agreement on pay policy that would prevent disputes and show political unity in the run-up to the general election.

[37] Due to the disruption of fuel supplies, the Cabinet Office prepared to implement previous plans for "Operation Drumstick", by which the Army were put on standby to take over from the tanker drivers.

In Birmingham, violence erupted on 17 January when three hundred women working at the Cadbury Schweppes plant in Bournville heard that a flying picket was moving into place to attempt to block a delivery.

Party members privately expressed great disappointment with Callaghan and his Cabinet for both failing to seize a crucial opportunity to win over the public and continuing to downplay the severity of the crisis.

[47] The GMWU at the time was also known as the most conservative and least militant of the public employee unions; frequently it had used its influence within the Labour Party to frustrate left-wing challenges to the leadership, and its officials rarely faced contested elections for their positions.

The Conservative controlled Westminster City Council used Leicester Square in the heart of London's West End for piles of rubbish and, as the Evening Standard reported, this attracted rats and the available food led to an increase in their numbers.

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.

[57] 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?

[59] During 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.

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.

"[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.

[62] 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.

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 with an Abba soundtrack, a T-rex dressed in flares.

"[65] 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] 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.