Winter of Discontent

The Sun's headline "Crisis? What crisis?"

James Callaghan, Prime Minister during the Winter of Discontent, pictured in 1978

This article is part of a series about James Callaghan
Labour Party MP for Cardiff South East Wilson's Cabinet Decimalisation Race Relations Act 1968 1975 EEC Referendum Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1976 leadership election Cabinet Lib–Lab pact Winter of Discontent 1979 Scottish devolution referendum 1979 Welsh devolution referendum Vote of no confidence 1979 budget 1979 general election
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The Winter of Discontent was the period between November 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.^[1]

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.^[2]

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.^[3]: 28 It is credited to Larry Lamb,^[4]: 254 then editor at The Sun, in an editorial on 3 May 1979.^[5]: 64