The Big Freeze

Now is the winter of our discontent – again! Also: some fantasy metro maps, and some notes on snow.

The Winter of Discontent, the wave of strikes that hit Britain between November 1978 and February 1979, has long played a starring role in explanations for why the Labour party found itself out of office for the next 18 years. Sure, industrial unrest was nothing new, the inflationary pressures that were its ultimate cause came from far beyond Britain’s shores, and these strikes were merely the latest in a series of ructions that dated all the way back to the oil shock of 1973. The Three Day Week, surely the single biggest crisis to hit Britain in the 1970s, had actually come about under the Tories.

But, in popular memory, none of this mattered. It was Labour who were in office for the final act of this crisis; so it is Labour that will forever be tarred with responsibility. Dennis Healey going cap in hand to the IMF; in the winter of discontent, the dead were left unburied. All were written in all caps on my late father’s list of reasons why you Can’t Trust Labour With The Economy. 

A snowman, built by some striking postmen, in the East End this week. Image: my own.

This shared mythology, I suspect, is one reason why the current Tory government seems blissfully unbothered by the new winter of discontent already shaking the nation. Again, we’ve lost six years to rolling crises and political chaos. Again, industrial unrest is soaring: October saw more days lost to strikes than any other month in a decade. On some measures things aren’t as bad now as they were then – absolute poverty, for all our problems, is lower than it once was – but on plenty of others it’s worse. Housing is more expensive. Nurses have never decided to strike on this scale before. In the ‘70s, at least partly because of that stronger more militant union movement, wages actually bothered to rise. 

The government’s gamble is clearly that the electorate, like my dad, will automatically associate strikes with the Labour party. There’s just one slight problem with that: most people quite literally don’t remember the winter of 1978-9. You’d need to be above 60 to have voted in the resulting election; perhaps 50 to remember that winter at all. Those who are younger are extremely unlikely to look at the chaos currently unfolding in the country and start swearing that Jim bloody Callaghan’s at it again. They are likely, instead, to look to the government that’s in office right now, that has presided over the last 12 years of decline, and that seems to be actively encouraging strikes, refusing to even countenance negotiations, because of their baffling belief that this will somehow rebound on Keir Starmer. 

That winter of 1978-9, after all, wasn’t the only winter of chaos to have brought down a government. That of 1973-4, which saw the Three Day Week imposed to save energy, was followed by an election in which Ted Heath asked “who governs Britain”. The resulting cry of “not bloody you, mate” was enough to finish his administration and his reputation alike. 

This winter, too, could have an impact on British political mythology that goes on to last for decades. But it won’t necessarily be the one the government thinks. 

The links bit

1. And, as if by magic, here’s a seat projection, based on the latest poll from Savanta: