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 refuse collectors, 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.
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.
After the Conservatives won the following year's election, they implemented their own legislation to address the issue. The Industrial Relations Act 1971, modeled in part on the U.S. Taft-Hartley Act, passed over determined union opposition, included many of the same provisions as In Place of Strife, and explicitly stated that formal collective bargaining agreements would have the force of law unless they had disclaimers to the contrary. It also created a National Industrial Relations Court to handle disputes and put unions under a central registry to enforce their rules.
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.
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.
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 Exchequer Denis 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.
Unexpectedly, however, on 7 September, Callaghan announced that he would not be calling a general election that autumn but seeking to go through the winter with continued pay restraint so that the economy would be in a better state in preparation for a spring election, therefore the 5 per cent limit stood. The pay limit was officially termed "Phase IV" but most referred to it as "the 5 per cent limit". Although the government did not make the 5 per cent limit a legal requirement, it decided to impose penalties on private and public government contractors who broke the limit.
Changes in labour movement
Between 1966 and 1979, Britain's unions were changing and becoming more diverse. Most of the increase in union membership was driven by women returning to or entering the workforce—73 per cent of them joined a union during that period against 19.3 per cent of men newly in work, as manufacturing jobs, traditionally heavily male, disappeared. Black and Asian workers also filled union ranks; in 1977, 61 per cent of black men in work belonged to a union as opposed to 47 per cent of white men. Asian women became the face of the labour movement during the 1976–1978 Grunwick dispute over pay and conditions at a film processing plant in suburban London.
Within unions, power was also devolving to the rank and file. 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. Hugh Scanlon, who took over as head of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) in 1967, and Jack Jones, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU) from shortly afterwards, were known among union leaders as "the dubious duo" for their advocacy for devolution.
These matters came to a head with the 1977 fire brigade strike, a strike that many firemen were conflicted about since they knew they would be abandoning their own profession's duty to protect life, but felt that they could no longer make ends meet with their pay packets. They asked for a 30 per cent increase, 20 per cent over the government's limit at the time, and a limit to 42 hours of work each week. The government responded by declaring a state of emergency and bringing in Army troops as replacements. The TUC voted late in the strike to not campaign in support of the firemen, in order to maintain its relationship with the government.
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. Thatcher made it available to her shadow cabinet with the authors' recommendation that they all read it. 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. In 1978 Britain's largest tabloid, The Sun, dropped its longtime support for Labour to instead embrace the Tories. Editor Larry Lamb met frequently with Thatcher's media advisor Gordon Reece to plan and refine strategy. 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".
Ford negotiations
Although not an official guideline, the pay rise set by Ford of Britain was accepted throughout private industry as a benchmark for negotiations. Ford had enjoyed a good year, and could afford to offer a large pay rise to its workers. The company was, however, also a major government contractor. Ford's management therefore made a pay offer within the 5 per cent guidelines. In response, 15,000 Ford workers, mostly from the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), began an unofficial strike on 22 September 1978, which subsequently became an official TGWU action on 5 October. The number of participants grew to 57,000. The strike prevented the production of 115,000 vehicles which cost Ford around $885 million.
During the strike, Vauxhall Motors employees accepted an 8.5 per cent rise. After long negotiation in which they weighed the chances of suffering from government sanctions against the continued damage of the strike, Ford eventually revised their offer to 17 per cent and decided to accept the sanctions; Ford workers accepted the rise on 22 November.
Political difficulties
thumb|300px|right|UK inflation history <br> [[1976 sterling crisis]]
As the Ford strike was starting, the Labour Party conference began at Blackpool. 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". Despite a plea from Michael Foot not to put the motion to the vote, the resolution was carried by 4,017,000 to 1,924,000. The next day, the Prime Minister accepted the fact of defeat by saying "I think it was a lesson in democracy yesterday", but insisted that he would not let up on the fight against inflation.
Meanwhile, the government's situation in the House of Commons was increasingly difficult; through by-elections it had lost its majority of three seats in 1976 and had been forced to put together a pact with the Liberal Party in 1977 in order to keep winning votes on legislation; the pact lapsed in July 1978. A decision to grant extra parliamentary seats to Northern Ireland afforded temporary support from the Ulster Unionist Party, but the Unionists were clear that this support would be withdrawn immediately after the bill to grant extra seats had been passed – it was through the Ulster Unionists agreeing to abstain that the government defeated a motion of no confidence by 312 to 300 on 9 November. with the formula being rejected on the chair's casting vote. One important personality on the TUC General Council had changed earlier in 1978 with Moss Evans replacing Jack Jones at the TGWU. Evans proved a weak leader of his union, although it is doubtful whether Jones could have restrained the actions of some of the TGWU shop stewards.
After Ford settled, the government announced on 28 November that sanctions would be imposed on Ford, along with 220 other companies, for breach of the pay policy. The announcement of actual sanctions produced an immediate protest from the Confederation of British Industry which announced that it would challenge their legality. The Conservatives put down a motion in the House of Commons to revoke the sanctions. A co-ordinated protest by left-wing Labour MPs over spending on defence forced the debate set for 7 December to be postponed; however, on 13 December an anti-sanctions amendment was passed by 285 to 279. The substantive motion as amended was then passed by 285 to 283. James Callaghan put down a further motion of confidence for the next day, which the government won by ten votes (300 to 290), but accepted that his government could not use sanctions. In effect this deprived the government of any means of enforcing the 5 per cent limit on private industry.
Onset of severe winter weather
A mild autumn turned cold on the morning of 25 November when temperatures recorded at Heathrow Airport dropped from to overnight, with some snowflakes. Throughout most of the following month, the cold lingered, only for temperatures to rise well above around Christmas. On 30 December, the temperature dropped again, along with rain that soon turned to snow; the next day 1978 ended with Heathrow recording a high of only amid steady snowfall.
The effects were more severe outside of London. Ilfracombe and other towns in North Devon could only be reached by helicopter as many roads could not be adequately cleared. The Royal Automobile Club blamed local councils, who in turn pointed to unresolved issues with their unions and staff shortages; even around London local authorities were only able to clear main roads. Two Scottish trains near Stirling were stuck in the snow, leaving 300 passengers stranded; rail transport difficulties were exacerbated elsewhere in the country by a strike. Tanker drivers had also gone on strike in some areas from 18 December, causing some homeowners to have difficulties keeping their homes heated and limiting petrol supplies. Only three League football matches could take place over the New Year's holiday, and all rugby contests were cancelled. Three men drowned after falling through the ice on the Hampstead Heath pond in London. The Road Haulage Association (RHA), the industry trade group, had initially told Secretary of State for Transport William Rodgers, a member of the Labour Party's right wing who had become sceptical of the public's appetite for the completion of the party's socialist programme, that it would stay within the 5 per cent ceiling but as 1979 began, the RHA, whom Rodgers saw as disorganised and easily intimidated by the TGWU, suddenly increased its offer to 13 per cent, in hopes of settling before strikes became widespread.
The offer had the opposite effect. Drivers, emboldened by memories of a strike the previous winter by South Wales hauliers that won participants a 20 per cent rise, decided they could do better by walking out. The union's national leadership was, as they had anticipated in their September dinner with Callaghan, doubtful they could restrain the local leaders. On 2 January Rodgers warned the Cabinet that a national road-haulage strike was about to happen, but cautioned against pressuring the RHA to improve their offer even more.
The next day an unofficial strike of all TGWU lorry drivers began. With petrol distribution held up, petrol stations closed across the country. The strikers also picketed the main ports. The strikes were made official on 11 January by the TGWU and 12 January by the United Road Transport Union. With 80 per cent of the nation's goods transported by road, and roads still not completely cleared from the earlier storm, essential supplies were put in danger as striking drivers picketed those firms that continued to work. While the oil tanker drivers were working, the main refineries were also targeted and the tanker drivers let the strikers know where they were going, allowing for flying pickets to turn them back at their destination. More than a million UK workers were laid off temporarily during the disputes.
In Kingston upon Hull, striking hauliers were able to blockade the city's two main roads effectively enough to control what goods were allowed into and out of the city, and companies made their case to their own nominal employees to get past the barricades. Newspaper headlines likened the situation to a siege, and the Battle of Stalingrad; fears that food supplies would also be impacted fuelled panic buying. Such coverage often exaggerated the reach of the strikers, which served both their interest and their employers'. It also helped the Conservatives disseminate the arguments of "Stepping Stones" about unionism out of control to the public; letters to the editor across the country reflected a growing public anger with the unions.
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. However, the operation would need the declaration of a state of emergency in order to allow conscription of the assets of the oil companies, and the government drew back from such a step on 18 January. Rodgers in particular was opposed to it, since the available troops could at best only make up for a very small portion of the striking drivers, and it might be possible to use them more effectively without declaring an emergency. Before the situation developed into a crisis the oil companies settled on wage rises of around 15 per cent.
The Cabinet also decided that same day that it would not take action to limit any hauling company's profits, thereby allowing them to increase their offer to the strikers. Rodgers was so disheartened by this that he wrote a resignation letter to Callaghan, saying "the Government is not even in the front line" and accusing it of "defeatism of a most reprehensible kind". He ultimately decided to remain in the Cabinet.
A further plan was drawn up to call a state of emergency and safeguard essential supplies through the Army, regarding which the government warned the TGWU leadership, which resulted in the union accepting on 12 January 1979 a list of emergency supplies which were officially exempt from action. In practice, what counted as an emergency was left up to local officials of the TGWU to determine, and practice across the country varied according to the views of the local shop stewards who established "dispensation committees" to decide. When strikers in Hull did not allow the correct mix of animal feed through to local farms, the farmers dropped the bodies of dead piglets and chickens outside the union offices; the union contended that the farmers had actually wrung the chicken's necks to kill them, and the piglets had been killed when the sow rolled over and crushed them.
Demonstrations against the strike took place in Liverpool and Manchester, met by counterdemonstrations in support. 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. Swinging their handbags and umbrellas, they quickly drove away the striking lorry drivers, whom they outnumbered by twenty to one. The incident made national news.
On 29 January, lorry drivers in the South West accepted a deal awarded by an arbitration panel of a rise of up to 20 per cent, just £1 per week less than the union had been striking for; this settlement proved a model which was accepted throughout the country.
After the drivers returned to work, some media outlets took a second look at the shortages and found that they had been more a matter of fear than reality. The Economist reported that many predicted shortages of foods had not actually taken place. Douglas Smith of the Employment Department recalled years later that he only recalled certain breakfast cereals being out of stock, and Rodgers, too, agreed that the job losses had not been as severe as they seemed they would be but the fears of disruption had had an impact on the national mood even if little of what was feared had actually come to pass.
On 10 January, as the temperature climbed above freezing in southern and low-lying areas of Britain for the first time since the storm, and perhaps did not truly love their country. McNally was chagrined; this was not how he had expected things to go. The phrase "Crisis? What crisis?" had entered public consciousness in the 1973 film The Day of the Jackal and had been further popularized by Supertramp's 1975 album of the same name.
While he had never used those exact words, Callaghan's speechwriter Roger Carroll agreed they were an effective paraphrase. "He asked for it, I'm afraid, and he got it."
A week later, as the cold returned and Britons had begun filing claims for unemployment benefit by the thousands, Thatcher addressed the situation in a party political broadcast. From a small sitting room she spoke, she said, not as a politician but as a Briton. "Tonight I don't propose to use the time to make party political points", she told viewers. "I do not think you would want me to do so. The crisis that our country faces is too serious for that."
The disruptions caused by the strikes had led Thatcher to "wonder what has happened to our sense of common nationhood and even of common humanity". She traced those to the unions' broad abilities to picket and strike, allowing almost any of them to "strangle the country". Most unionists, she allowed, did not support such extreme tactics.
Public sector employees
Bitter winter weather returned after a week of milder temperatures on 22 January. Freezing rain began falling across England at noon; by midnight temperatures dropped further and it turned to snow, which continued falling into the next day. Once again roads were impassable in the south; in the north and at higher elevations areas that had not yet recovered from the storm three weeks prior were newly afflicted. and many workers stayed out indefinitely afterwards. With many in the private sector having achieved substantial rises, the public sector unions became increasingly concerned to keep pace in terms of pay. The government had already announced a slight weakening of the policy on 16 January, which gave the unions cause for hope that they might win and use free collective bargaining. Train drivers belonging to ASLEF and the National Union of Railwaymen had already begun a series of 24-hour strikes, and the Royal College of Nursing conference on 18 January decided to ask that the pay of nurses be increased to the same level in real terms as 1974, which would mean a 25 per cent average rise. The public sector unions labelled the date the "Day of Action", in which they held a 24-hour strike and marched to demand a £60 per week minimum wage. It would later be recalled as "Misery Monday" by the media.
The ensuing strike, in Liverpool and in Tameside near Manchester, was later frequently referred to by Conservative politicians. With 80 gravediggers being on strike, Liverpool City Council hired a factory in Speke to store the corpses until they could be buried. The Department of Environment noted that there were 150 bodies stored at the factory at one point, with 25 more added every day. The reports of unburied bodies caused concern with the public. On 1 February a persistent journalist asked the Medical Officer of Health for Liverpool, Dr Duncan Bolton, what would be done if the strike continued for months, Bolton speculated that burial at sea would be considered. Although his response was hypothetical, in the circumstances it caused great alarm. Other alternatives were considered, including allowing the bereaved to dig their own funeral's graves, deploying troops, and engaging private contractors to inter the bodies. The main concerns were said to be aesthetic because bodies could be safely stored in heat-sealed bags for up to six weeks. The gravediggers eventually settled for a 14 per cent rise after a fortnight off the job.
In their later memoirs, Callaghan and Healey both blamed NUPE for letting the strike go on as long as it did, as would Conservatives. While the Tameside gravediggers had been members of that union, those in the Liverpool area were GMWU.
Waste collectors
With many collectors having been on strike since 22 January, local authorities began to run out of space for storing waste and used local parks under their control. 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. The media nicknamed the area Fester Square. One broadcast on 23 April began with the Sun's headline "Crisis? What Crisis?" being shown and read out by an increasingly desperate voiceover interspersed with film footage of piles of rubbish, closed factories, picketed hospitals and locked graveyards. The scale of the Conservatives' victory in the general election has often been ascribed to the effect of the strikes, as well as their "Labour Isn't Working" campaign, and the party used film of the events of the winter in election campaigns for years to come.
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 general election, which the Conservatives won by a landslide.
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 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."
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, left with three dozen other disaffected Labourites to form the more centrist Social Democratic Party (SDP), a decision he recalls reaching with some difficulty. 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 Suns "Crisis? What Crisis?" headline, left Labour for the SDP.
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.
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. 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."
Response by the British left
After Labour's steep losses, including many seats the party had held for decades, in the 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 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.
Some leftists have joined the criticism of labour actions during the Winter of Discontent. 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 economistic and defensive militancy".
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.
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 and the austerity measures introduced by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who had succeeded Brown at the 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."
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 with an Abba soundtrack, a T-rex dressed in flares." 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." Two years later, with 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.
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 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."
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."