Today, it seems we are here again. Britain, we are told, is on the cusp of its Second Winter of Discontent. But if the struggle for power between government and unions 44 years ago seems eerily similar to today, look closer.

For a start, we are not used to all this — whereas in 1979, the chaos was wearily familiar. It marked a return to the years when governments of both parties had tried and failed to curb union power. A “winter of discontent” had been a long time coming: the Telegraph had warned one was imminent in 1972, as had union leader Hugh Scanlon in 1974, and the new Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher in 1975.

From the mid-Seventies, Labour seemed to have settled with the unions; but when a last-ditch deal broke down in 1978, the country was plunged back into crisis. As the post-war industrial relations consensus finally froze to death, the old images flashed before the public’s eyes one last time. Huge strikes in the car industry. Union leaders trooping into No 10. Strikes stopping trains and shutting down petrol stations and unheated schools. Jumpy talk of the government sending in the troops.

Today’s wave of strikes is a novelty precisely because of the new, less union-friendly consensus that slowly took shape in the years after 1978. The unions were then at the apex of their power, and rapidly losing public sympathy. Today, they are struggling to recover from decades of weakness, and attract much more support than at the end of the Seventies. In 1977, The Sun reported a Marplan poll which suggested 80% of the public thought “union leaders have ‘a lot’ of power and influence in governing the country”. Amid the strikes last August, a poll conducted by Ipsos found only 9% of the British public thought workers had too much power.

Since the war, governments’ main way of squashing wage inflation had been “incomes policy”, by which ministers asked, or ordered, workers to accept a limit on pay increases. The Winter of Discontent was triggered when the Prime Minister James Callaghan insisted on setting this at 5%, well below inflation. Something of this is visible in the Sunak administration’s insistence on below-inflation hikes for public sector workers. But the crucial difference is that Callaghan could reasonably expect the private sector to stick to his limit. In September 1978, the Ford car company was so keen to comply that it endured weeks of strike action before folding and coughing up 17% — even though it could have afforded that at the start. Imagine that now.

Today, most companies don’t have to worry about either powerful unions demanding pay increases or government demands for pay restraint. Only a sixth of private sector workers are in a union at all; many are on insecure contracts. Of course, there are a few exceptions: last winter, strike threats by Unite supermarket workers won pay rises that Tesco had previously said “would not be sustainable”. But 1979 was another world: that January, Mrs Thatcher claimed in the Commons that a full third of factories had suffered all-out strikes in the previous two years.

So, the shock of the Winter of Discontent wasn’t private-sector workers taking industrial action, but low-paid public sector staff, often women, in workplaces that were not obviously militant, such as care homes, and hospital laundries and kitchens. The union to which many of these workers belonged, the National Union of Public Employees, had only recently become radical. Public sector pay had been cut, in the aftermath of economic crisis and high inflation, and some NUPE members were so ill-paid they had to claim in-work state benefits.

Suggested reading

The Tories need to get over Thatcher

By Robert Saunders

Workers in hospitals, bin lorries and graveyards were pushed further towards striking by seeing private-sector workers win higher settlements. In Liverpool, this sense of unfairness was probably not made any better by some of those Ford employees who had just won a stonking raise. As the historian Tara Martin López notes, they took to hurling abuse at picketing gravediggers as they drove into work. This was because the idea of strikes among those charged with burying the dead was a shock, even to fellow trade unionists. Today, it is the other way around. Most of this winter’s strikes are in public services, and former public utilities NUPE’s successor, Unison, is Britain’s biggest union.

But the really glaring difference between then and now is that, across all sectors, the unions in the Seventies had far more leeway. Amid all the folk memories of bin-bag mountains and unburied coffins, we tend to forget the crucial middle phase of the Winter of Discontent: the strike by oil tanker drivers and road hauliers. This won rises of 15-17% — and hardened public opinion before the public sector strikes even started — because the drivers used secondary picketing so effectively. This involved deploying strikers not just at their own workplaces but wherever they would have the greatest impact. Unions set up “command centres”, intelligence systems and permit processes to keep strikes watertight. If you wanted to move goods in and out of Hull or Tilbury, you had to queue up and try to convince a dispensation committee that they were essential. They would very likely say no.

Crucially, the Labour government let this happen: a last-gasp version of the post-war consensus, in which the unions became more dominant than ever. They avoided massive confrontations with the police, but Callaghan’s policy chief Bernard Donoughue was not the only person who saw a government “surrendering to every pressure”. There is zero chance of any such thing happening today. Ever since the early Eighties, secondary picketing has been illegal.

And this is because the Winter of Discontent finally redrew the limits of what was politically possible: old taboos broke, new ones became vividly clear. Long-standing fears that restricting the trade unions would produce intolerable conflict were overridden. Prime Minister Callaghan, a long-term ally of the unions, despaired at their leaders’ inability to see what was coming their way if they refused to co-operate, the Labour government fell, and Margaret Thatcher took over. By 1979, the scope to restrict strikes was just beginning to open up. Fast forward to today, and in response to the current strike wave, Rishi Sunak has said he wants to take this process even further. A new bill, for instance, proposes to mandate minimum service levels for transport, while Downing Street has left open the possibility of outlawing strikes in the emergency services. The Trades Union Congress has objected to “restrictions that will further hinder industrial action”, such as requiring a new ballot for each continuous strike. After years of trade union legislation, critics say further tightening risks effectively making strikes illegal — which, under international law, could itself be illegal.

More from this authjor

The nightmare haunting the Tories

By Phil Tinline

At the same time, this winter’s strikes may be revealing another hard limit. Public sector pay has been under more pressure, for much longer, than it had been in 1979. Between January 2021 and September 2022, it fell by 7.7%. A quarter of hospital trusts have organised food banks for their staff. This is reflected in the difficulties in filling job vacancies in hospitals and schools, as working conditions drive existing staff to leave, and make it harder to recruit replacements. If public services get much worse, particularly the huge backlogs in the NHS, the situation may become today’s overriding political nightmare.

Meanwhile, the Times reports that the Prime Minister’s allies concede that the Government “is struggling to come up with a coherent message” to explain why it cannot afford to raise nurses’ pay to match inflation. Even the Spectator has suggested we may be at a tipping point: that for ministers, it’s the NHS strikes themselves that may be “politically unaffordable”.

In 1979, by contrast, Thatcher did manage to carve out a coherent message: that it was time to break the taboo on challenging the union’s legal position, because a weak government had allowed a minority of extremists — the “wreckers among us” — far too much power. That “us” is crucial: she sought to swing the rest of the population in behind her, including most trade unionists. In January 1979, she told an audience that “we’re all victims”. In April, campaigning in the general election, she declared:

“All of you have suffered under the rule of the pickets and the strikers this winter. We all saw at first hand that power and felt our own powerlessness. Well, you’re not powerless now. This is a time when the ordinary people of this country in their tens of millions hold the future of our country in their hands. And when you come to decide that future on May 3rd, remember last winter.”

For today’s Leader of the Opposition, such a manoeuvre may not be so easy. Keir Starmer is, to some extent, caught like Callaghan between the pickets and the rest of the public. Perhaps he can ape Thatcher by rising above the fray, casting the strikes as the final breakdown of the old order. But that would involve casting the Government, or indeed profitable companies refusing to raise pay, as the new “wreckers among us”. Thatcher could not have used such language convincingly if it had not chimed with the public mood. Will today’s voters choose to blame union leaders, cast by some as the heirs to Arthur Scargill? Or the allies of what Vince Cable once called the “pin-striped Scargills” in finance capital?

It may be that, like 1979, this winter is a breaking point that will come to haunt the next 40 years. Fairly or otherwise, the first Winter of Discontent became a warning that politicians must never allow a return to the bad old days of rule by picket and strike committee. Perhaps, as train strikes ruin Christmas and un-unionised workers miss much-needed shifts, that will happen again. But it may be that this winter comes to symbolise a different nightmare to which politicians must swear never to go back: that time when the country grew cold, and, even with the energy price guarantee, millions were barely paid enough to keep warm.

***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

Whenever there is talk of poverty and “luxury”, it’s hard not to think of that old comedy sketch, with a bunch of self-satisfied, middle-aged men in white dinner jackets, puffing cigars and bloviating about their inter-war childhoods. As the “Four Yorkshiremen” strain to trump each other’s sob stories, they become ever more ludicrous. “We lived for three months in a rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank,” insists one:

“Every morning we’d have to get up at six, clean out t’rolled-up newspaper, eat a crust of stale bread, then we’d have to work 14 hours at t’mill, day in day out, for sixpence a week. Aye, an’ then when we’d come home, Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt.”

“Luxury!”, barks his fellow plutocrat. “We used to get up at three…”

The sketch first appeared on 24 October 1967, on At Last the 1948 Show, an ITV series written and performed by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Marty Feldman. It drew not on the hackneyed old gaggery of the music halls, but the sophisticated wit of the Cambridge Footlights. The series is not much remembered, but the Four Yorkshiremen was revived by Monty Python in the Seventies. And it stuck, because it struck a chord.

Its main creator was Marty Feldman, who did not have as well-heeled an upbringing as some of his 1948 colleagues. Feldman was born in 1934, to a poor Jewish family in the East End of London. His biographer Robert Ross writes that Feldman’s father, Myer, was initially a “pushcart peddler” — but bettered himself and his family by turning round a dressmaking business, moving to North Finchley, and forking out for a Bentley.

Marty hated all this and rebelled, scarpering to Soho at 15 and sleeping in Waterloo Station. So the Four Yorkshiremen sketch seems, at least partly, to be Feldman taking the piss out of his dad. Once he became a successful comedian, there is some evidence that Marty, too, was given to exaggerate the poverty of his childhood — so perhaps he was also taking the piss out of himself. Nevertheless, the sketch is driven by a very Sixties exasperation with an older generation who just won’t stop maundering on about the hard times they once suffered, and how they had dragged themselves up by their bootstraps. Hence the punchline: “And you try and tell that to the young people of today, and will they believe you? No!”

Suggested reading

The Tories were destined for civil war

By John Oxley

All this had a much wider political resonance. Britain’s whole post-war order was built on the promise that there was to be no going back to the mass unemployment of the Thirties. In 1967, the Prime Minister was a real-life Yorkshireman, who really had grown up in the Thirties with an out-of-work father. Harold Wilson had risen via Oxford University, but at one point, money had been so tight that he was going to have to start work in his uncle’s umbrella factory instead.

Many post-war public figures had it a lot worse. Joe Gormley, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, was one of the most powerful men in Seventies Britain. In his 1982 memoir, Battered Cherub, he recounts how, growing up in dirt poverty near Wigan, “underwear was unheard of, and would have been regarded as the height of luxury”. His headmaster thought young Joe would walk the entrance exam to grammar school, but after hearing his mother panicking about the cost of the uniform, he threw his schoolbooks in a stream and took a job down the pit at 14. He saw his first fatal injury there two years later.

But there is always a risk that such tales slip into weepy, sepia sentimentality. As a callow young cabinet minister in 1948, Wilson reportedly told an audience: “The school I went to in the North was a school where more than half the children in my class never had boots and shoes on their feet.” The press didn’t buy it, and his “barefoot speech” made Wilson a laughing-stock. Even 20 years later, when the Four Yorkshiremen first aired, people were still mocking him about it. “The only reason Harold Wilson has ever been barefoot,” suggested one Conservative MP, “is because he was too big for his boots.”

By the end of the Sixties, a new generation was coming of age who harboured no such fearful memories, embellished or otherwise, and was tired of hearing them. New political nightmares were competing for attention: strikes and the cost of living. Yet still the memory of mass unemployment trumped everything. By September 1974, the Conservative frontbencher Sir Keith Joseph declared that it was time to call out the Left for incessantly “play-acting the Thirties”. The pressing nightmare now was not dole queues, but inflation. He talked about the necessity of fighting ideas with ideas, noting the way dictators always banned jokes. But now he had a joke on his side. That summer, Monty Python’s album Live at Drury Lane featured a new rendition of the Four Yorkshiremen. Marty Feldman was no monetarist, but that derisive cry of “Luxury!” was now readily to hand, sounding a sarcastic raspberry against the ghosts of the Thirties. 

By the end of the Seventies, the generational shift signalled by the Four Yorkshiremen had spread into the Labour cabinet. Roy Hattersley, born in 1932, sensed that “the fears of the Thirties had very generally passed”. Even Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, born in 1920, told the Cabinet: “I was brought up in a poor home where unemployment was bad, but it is different now.” A rise in joblessness was no longer taboo.

Suggested reading

Why the Left shouldn't be celebrating

By Thomas Fazi

In September 1980, the Pythons performed the Four Yorkshiremen to an enormous audience in Hollywood. Two weeks later, the new prime minister, Keith Joseph’s ally Margaret Thatcher, famously declared that she was “not for turning” in her battle with inflation, regardless of the cost in jobs. By the time Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl reached US cinemas in June 1982, UK unemployment had passed three million. It was the first time this had happened since the Thirties; such long-gone miseries had lost their political power.

Since then, the sketch has been revived again and again. And why not? There is still plenty of hypocrisy and performative garment-rending for it to puncture, from politicians hitching a free ride on the suffering of their grandparents to celebrities monetising their miseries. And yet. Scepticism can harden into cynicism, to the point where stories of real, unfunny poverty can be wafted away as exaggerated or exceptional, with a sarcastic cry of “Luxury!”

The Conservative MP David Davis grew up poor in Battersea and York. His grandfather, a disabled, blacklisted communist from North Shields, raised him in a single-storey prefab: a “steel, plywood and asbestos box”. As a child in the Fifties, his weekly treat was a slice of malt loaf slathered in Stork margarine. In his memoir-in-progress, he notes that it’s impossible to write about stuff like this without the Four Yorkshiremen sketch springing instantly to mind.

Nevertheless, for Davis, as for some MPs across politics, the memory of poverty has been foundational. Last September, in a debate on Universal Credit and Working Tax Credits, Labour’s Bridget Phillipson told the Commons that she knew the difference a bit of extra money can make. As a child on Tyneside in the Eighties, her single mum couldn’t afford to buy her a winter coat. “I was kept warm,” she said, “by the generosity of a neighbour, who himself did not have much, who saw me and put some money through our door in an envelope marked ‘For Bridget’s coat’.” As we head into the hardest winter many of us have ever faced, it may be useful to hear politicians talk like this now and then, without Marty Feldman’s old pop at his dad getting in the way.

Suggested reading

Kwasi Kwarteng was the wrong sort of clever

By Dominic Sandbrook

Will Sunak’s new government achieve this? The Four Yorkshiremen is a relic of a time when reminiscences about past privations had become tedious, because they had dominated politics for a generation. A resistance to over-worrying about poverty has circumscribed our politics ever since. As our new Yorkshire-based Prime Minister takes office, however, that era may be drawing to a close. Witness the collapse of Liz Truss’s political project, and the resistance of Conservative MPs, from Iain Duncan Smith to Sajid Javid, to breaking Boris Johnson’s promise to increase benefits in line with inflation.

Sunak takes office as an alumnus of Goldman Sachs, and an instinctive tax cutter. But he is also the ex-Chancellor who planned to raise National Insurance to repair the social care system, and who championed the furlough scheme. On the one hand, public services are already under terrible strain; on the other, there is intense new pressure for cuts to public spending.

If, as seems almost certain, we are headed for renewed austerity, it will be much harder for any politician to make the case for it than in 2010 — but all the more so for a man as rich as Rishi. For many of those he will need to win over, fearful of the cost of keeping warm, his lifestyle is something from another world: from the £180 temperature-controlled coffee cup to the heated swimming pool (£13,000 a year).

A politician’s economic backstory now matters far more now than it did a few years ago, when we were told politics was all about culture, and Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was the tribune of the masses. Perhaps Sunak can follow Margaret Thatcher, the wealthy barrister who reinvented herself as the grocer’s daughter. Witness those videos about his youth working in his parents’ pharmacy.

The risk is he ends up looking more like David Cameron — the stockbroker’s Etonian son, protesting that “we’re all in this together”. The Four Yorkshiremen is a warning against overplaying rather mild childhood struggles. But it is also poses another trap, and not only for the new Prime Minister: of refusing to look poverty in the face.

These episodes of our history have been evoked repeatedly in recent days — even since we heard that, come January, if a Whitehall-devised “reasonable worst case scenario” plays out, the UK will face four days of planned power cuts. If they come, the blackouts will strike industry, rail services, government buildings, even homes — just at the moment when two-thirds of UK households face being driven into fuel poverty by rocketing energy prices. This raises the grim possibility of people struggling to pay bills for a service which, for several days, they won’t even receive.

But if, as a government source insists, this is just contingency planning and is “never going to happen”, why did this story grab so much attention? Because the mere prospect of blackouts conjures images of past national crises — crises which traumatised society, but have also been romanticised.

The possibility of nationally coordinated power cuts only really began with the establishment of the National Grid in 1938, as it stitched the country together with cables and pylons. The Grid had been conceived by the Stanley Baldwin government as a state-backed coordinator of commercial firms — a typically Baldwin-esque compromise between public and private sector, symbolic of his dreams of a moderate, modernising democracy. Baldwin might well have baulked at the state-enforced blackouts of the Second World War, policed by overbearing ARP wardens. But in the face of Nazi attack, this too was a rough-and-ready form of national unity — even if that unity was mainly audible in the universal grumbling at having to put boards over the windows every evening, and then having to stay in. Sticking to and putting up with the blackout became the epitome of the much-mythologised Blitz spirit, not least for those who were never actually bombed.

So in February 1972, when blackouts became a dire necessity for a very different reason, sentimental images of wartime stoicism were readily to hand, waiting to be fired up along with the emergency oil lamps. But this time, the “war” causing the blackouts was between Edward Heath’s government and the National Union of Mineworkers. In pursuit of a pay rise, the NUM turned the electricity supply into the site of an all-out struggle for power. Ministers simply did not anticipate that the miners would mount a highly-organised, startlingly creative campaign. But they found themselves up against “flying” pickets fanning out across the country to close docks, coal depots and especially power stations — including a picket of Battersea Power Station conducted with boats on the Thames, with the aid of a loudhailer. The strike won widespread backing from railway workers and dockers. The ordinary, tedious wiring of everyday life, and the work needed to keep it running, suddenly became political.

And so, with the availability of electricity falling fast, the government was forced to declare a state of emergency, imposing power cuts to push consumption down. Medium-sized firms were shocked to find themselves on a three-day electricity week. A million people were laid off. As though to symbolise the chaos, streetlights started coming on in daylight. Why, moaned the Times, had ministers not seen all this coming? The Central Electricity Generating Board warned that if demand were not reduced, they would have to do “block” cuts, “blacking out large areas indiscriminately”. Hospitals included. Already, a doctor was telling the Mirror that two hospitals had been hit by blackouts with no warning, which could easily have killed patients. Finally, the cabinet, forced to meet by candlelight, gave in.

More from this author

The nightmare haunting the Tories

By Phil Tinline

Unlike in the Forties, this time the lights going out signified not shared national fortitude, but the overweening power of the unions, and the government’s failure to plan. Heath set up a Civil Contingencies Unit to prepare for future emergencies, and when the miners struck again two years later, he declared a three-day week pre-emptively. But after another round of blackouts, the electorate decided to try Labour instead. Margaret Thatcher vowed that, if and when she faced the miners, the lights would stay on.

The miner’s strikes may be a tale unique to this country, but it wasn’t only Britain struggling to keep the lights on. No blackout captured the political failures of the Seventies more dramatically than the one that struck a near-bankrupt New York City on the sweltering night of 13 July 1977. It’s one of those tales of the American berserk that unfolds almost as neatly as a movie. Unlike Heath’s power cuts, the proximate cause was random — a series of lightning strikes — but the blackout was soon helped along by the failings of the power company, Consolidated Edison. The “night of terror” that followed snapped Gotham’s advancing decay into sharp focus. This was the city of Taxi Driver; there was even a serial killer, “Son of Sam”, roaming the five boroughs. Not an ideal set-up for finding yourself suddenly stuck in a stalled, pitch-black subway train, let alone a lift. The city was already drowning in a crime wave; now looting raged. The main source of light in some areas was provided by the many zealous arsonists. Like its mobs, New York’s politicians were held to have completely lost control. The Mayor, Abe Beame, blamed Consolidated Edison, but, like Heath’s, his career was flickering out.

Today, the blackout remains a shorthand for political calamity, for Left and Right alike. In 2015, when a writer for the Mail on Sunday sketched out the horrors of a future Corbyn-run Britain, along with rationing and riots, the doomsday scenario duly included the lights going out. In 2019, in his BBC TV series Years and Years, Russell T. Davies imagined the authoritarian populist Britain of 2028 — complete with a power cut-inducing cyberattack. Whether the attack is internal or external, the blackout captures like nothing else the knowledge that millions of total strangers and the government are all wired up together, and that it may not end well.

Suggested reading

Europe has lost the energy war

By Thomas Fazi

But what’s really striking is that the lights going out isn’t just a harbinger of the apocalypse: the idea is creative. Once theatres could be lit electrically, it did not take all that long for writers and directors to spot the imaginative possibilities. Plunging a scene suddenly into darkness could hammer home a punchline, underline an irony, or send up characters’ helplessness. Mid-century stage thrillers loved to snap the stage to black, with gunshots and screams to follow. The playwright Peter Shaffer forged an entire comedy — called, inevitably, Black Comedy — out of the conceit of showing actors stumbling around in a blackout, but with the theatre lights on full. RF Delderfield’s play Worm’s Eye View made light of the difficulties of trying to meet wartime blackout rules by taking out a bulb. One actor who appeared in it, David Baron, turned a similar scene into something much more sinister once he started writing under his real name, Harold Pinter. In his pioneering early plays like The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, blackouts dramatise how instantly a hostile world can turn on you.

Yet equally, they open up radical possibilities. In her 2006 novel, The Night Watch, Sarah Waters re-imagines the blackouts of the Second World War not only as a frightening nuisance, but as a liberation from prying eyes. A lesbian couple can do things in a pitch-black London doorway that become impossible again in peacetime. The darkness also opened up freedoms for women who preferred male callers. Amid all the accounts of fear and trauma from the 1977 New York blackout, and the enthusiasm of the looters and arsonists, there is also the voice of a young woman rhapsodising that the experience was “far out!” For good or ill, this curious phenomenon defamiliarises the everyday, casting it in a strange new (lack of) light. Like plays, movies and fiction, blackouts signal that the hard limits framing how we live may not be quite so solid after all.

So perhaps that’s one reason why the shadow of blackouts this winter catches our imagination. As in 1972, the boring, taken-for-granted wiring of everyday life is becoming political. Our current blackout scenario centres on a new cable under the North Sea, which sends hydroelectric power to the UK from a Norwegian power station — but may send rather less if Norway’s low water levels force it to prioritise domestic energy production. This is suddenly something that might affect whether we can work or cook — like the standards of maintenance of French nuclear reactors, which may also leave the UK short of power.

Suggested reading

Civil disobedience is coming

By Thomas Fazi

For critics of current energy policy, all this draws attention to a series of long unremarked political choices, which are now registering in the unnerving mix of rocketing prices and possible blackouts. Professor Richard Jones, formerly of the Industrial Strategy Commission, points to the UK’s increased reliance on gas imports to meet our overall energy needs, as North Sea production has declined. At the same time, more countries have started competing to buy gas. Cross-continental pipelines have opened up a global gas market — to which, Professor Jones suggests, we have chosen to leave ourselves highly exposed, in the belief that the market is the best means to access cheap energy. In the Seventies, the UK was deeply dependent on domestic coal and its workforce; now we are dependent on the vagaries of foreign gas supply. So even though the UK is not supplied directly by Russia, President Putin’s withholding of gas still threatens us.

Others blame the Cameron government’s 2013 decision to roll back investment in energy efficiency and renewable domestic energy sources, or, conversely, the green levy. The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy insists that UK supplies are diverse and secure. But former Downing Street chief adviser Dominic Cummings argued recently that “Westminster’s disastrous handling of energy” goes back well beyond the current government, and that “a blackout would belatedly lay bare the consequences of our under-investing ways”.

If the worst-case scenario does happen, it may be that we choose to cast this as another Blitz, and stoically put up with it. But its impact could yet turn out to be more like what happened in the wake of the power cuts of the Seventies. For politicians, and eventually much of the public, in the years after the 1972 miners’ strike, the blackouts highlighted the folly of giving an increasingly radical union the power to shut off the country’s supplies, and the government’s failure to plan far enough ahead to avoid them. Perhaps, in time, a new series of power cuts will come to seem like a rare moment of romance in our wired-up, screen-saturated lives. But in the meantime, blackouts may once again cast a shadow over some long-accepted political choices.

***

Phil Tinline’s most recent series, Pay Freezes, is available on BBC Sounds. His book The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares has just been published by Hurst.

This week’s rail strikes have revived all this, from Monday’s Sun headline (“We regret to announce that this country is returning to the Seventies”) to the appearance of an elderly Arthur Scargill on a picket line in Sheffield. Amid a backdrop of rocketing energy prices that echo the oil shock of 1973, and a Prime Minister who has never looked so vulnerable, there is much talk of a “summer of discontent”.

But if the issues are similar, we have arrived at them from the opposite direction. History is not just a gallery of taboos, laid out in a blank space like those coffins in Utopia, ready to be raised from the dead at will. The backstory of those Seventies images was a decade-long power struggle very different to today’s.

It is hard now to appreciate just how permanently powerful the trade unions once seemed — partly because that power was founded on a shared fear that has long since faded. In the Sixties, free-market economics was a Victorian relic, unsuited to an interconnected modern economy, forever damned by the mass unemployment it had produced before the war. That memory of Thirties dole queues was the nightmare to which Britain must never return: the founding taboo of the post-war consensus, which meant governments must strive for full employment. This hugely bolstered the unions’ position. Striking is less scary if jobs are plentiful.

The long, agonising journey to the Seventies began as strikes became more frequent, and less tolerated. Labour and Conservative governments took turns to try to rein in union power — but without breaking the taboo on mass unemployment. So it was not simply the annoyance of a cancelled train or an uncollected rubbish bin that turned the imagery of the Seventies strikes into a nightmare. It was the battle for power between the unions and governments they represented, and the creeping dread that the unions were winning.

Suggested reading

The boomers destroyed the Tories

By James Sean Dickson

The single event that did most to sear this into ministers’ minds was a stand-off at a spectacularly tedious location: the gates of a coke depot in the Saltley district of Birmingham, at the height of the 1972 miners’ strike. On 10 February, thousands of pickets, marshalled by a young union official from Barnsley called Arthur Scargill, managed to compel the police to close the gates to the lorries queuing to collect coke — breaking the Chief Constable’s promise to the Home Secretary to keep them open.

When news reached Edward Heath’s cabinet meeting a few minutes later, the effect was devastating. The strike had already forced a state of emergency as power supplies dwindled. Heath later described Saltley as “the most vivid, direct and terrifying challenge to the rule of law that I could ever recall emerging within our own country”. A few days later, the miners forced him to surrender, and give them their pay rise. After a second miners’ strike in 1974, and the fall of Heath’s government, Labour gave the miners another raise — and to many, the country faced a choice of confrontation under the Conservatives, or capitulation under Labour.

Along with inflation, the prospect of civil war between the state and unions was becoming a nightmare to rival the old ghosts from the Thirties. This was held at bay for a while by the 1974 Labour government’s “social contract” with the unions — a last-ditch deal to keep wage demands down in return for government benevolence. But finally workers grew sick of prices outstripping their pay. It was this basic settlement that finally came apart in the Winter of Discontent. The sight of pickets outside hospitals and cemeteries allowed Margaret Thatcher to denounce the triumph of union power, and to win a mandate to reduce it. The spectres of the Thirties had finally lost the battle of nightmares.

The new settlement ushered in by the Thatcher government was based on constraining the unions — making what happened at Saltley illegal — and on liberating financial services. This produced a long period of prosperity. For some at least, that lasted all the way through to 2008, when those financial services nearly broke the economy, igniting the power struggle whose latest battle is being fought out this week.

The dominant power under attack was now not the unions but finance: in 2010, the Liberal Democrats’ Vince Cable pointedly branded bankers “pinstriped Scargills”. But just as the unions continued to hold sway through the Seventies, so has the City since the Crash. The impact of the Crash was absorbed by ordinary workers — not through mass unemployment, true, but through cuts to pay and hours, and the explosion of the gig economy and zero-hours contracts. Pay flat-lined for much of the decade that followed.

Suggested reading

The Tories deserve to lose Tiverton

By Tanya Gold

Now, under the stress of inflation, discontent has brought the post-1979 economic model under renewed pressure, just as globalisation has gone into reverse. Covid has broken old taboos on high government borrowing. The IMF has called for more to be done about inequality; the chief of the CBI has castigated the legacy of Thatcherism in northern England. Yet so far, despite the promises of levelling up and the talk of a post-Brexit move to a higher-wage economy, labour’s share of wealth remains lower than it was in the Seventies.

So, if the fundamentals remain so different, why has there been such insistence this week that we are “going back to the Seventies”? The Treasury and the Bank of England might be deeply concerned about the development of a wage-price spiral — a phenomenon that can be devilishly difficult to stop — but as the former Conservative minister David Willetts wrote this week: “Overall, pay is rising less than inflation. This is not some inflationary spiral.”

History suggests there may be another reason for this week’s warnings: “going back to the Seventies” is the nightmare that has underpinned the free-market consensus ever since 1979.

In the 1983 election, Thatcher frequently asked for copies of Winter of Discontent newspaper headlines to help her warn against letting Labour back in. She was far from the last leader to deploy this nightmare. In March 1997, Tony Blair promised “there will be no return to the Seventies”. In 2015, Boris Johnson warned Ed Miliband would do just that; as Prime Minister, he has complained that his Cabinet are too young to remember it. He needn’t worry, however: in 2012, four of his ministers co-wrote a book called Britannia Unchained, which begins and ends with fearful visions of Seventies collapse.

But something similar happened in the Seventies, and it only worked for so long. As the post-war consensus came apart, its tribunes redoubled their efforts to shore up the potency of the old nightmares. Labour’s Michael Foot endlessly invoked “the mass unemployment of the Thirties”; so did Conservative leaders whose politics were forged by the Depression, such as Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath.

However, a new generation of historians started to argue that, for those in work, the Thirties had really not been so bad — and all the while, the turn of the generations was eroding the folk memory of the dole queues. As we’ve seen, the Thirties eventually stopped haunting British politics. Likewise, today, to remember the Winter of Discontent, you’d have to be at least 50.

Suggested reading

Inside Wakefield's corrupt election

By Jacob Furedi

Yet for now, the Seventies nightmares remain tenacious. When Johnson won his 80-seat majority in 2019, it looked as though he might become a transformative prime minister, ushering in a permanently higher-spending state, focused on levelling up and securing its new bases in the Midlands and the north. Covid seemed to bolster that possibility.

For good or ill, the resurgence of inflation and strikes now appears to herald a return to Thatcherite orthodoxies. Yet paradoxically, this would make this government less like Thatcher — in terms of her determination to make a radical break from the past. Of course, the 12% swing to Labour in the Wakefield by-election may yet turbocharge the worries of Red Wall Conservative MPs with sufficient force to push levelling up up the government’s priority list. Even before his defeat, the Conservative candidate could be heard complaining the £25 million allocated to the constituency from the Towns Fund was not cutting through.

But all this presents Labour with a dilemma too — just witness the divisions between the Starmer leadership and those MPs who this week joined RMT picket lines. As John Curtice has pointed out, Labour’s share of the vote in Wakefield rose by only half as much as the Conservatives’ fell. Labour now has to decide how far it wants to risk a break with the post-1979 model of weak trade unions, and the job market that developed in the wake of the Crash. Unlike the Winter of Discontent, it is at least in Opposition, which worked so well for Thatcher. But Labour is always implicated by the actions of the trade union movement which played a huge part in the party’s creation.

Given the unions’ weakness compared with the Seventies, and government determination to face down the strikes, there is no obvious moment of transformation in sight. And yet it may be that the Seventies does offer a precedent here. Just as the remembered nightmare of mass unemployment was finally overridden, in part by the nightmare of mass picketing, it’s possible that very nightmare, now 40-years old, may now be overridden in its turn: by many ordinary people’s inability today to make ends meet, and their desperation for a pay rise. Unions are often dismissed as old-fashioned — but then so was the free market, and that went on to recover quite strongly. Perhaps, then, the most striking parallel between now and the late Seventies is the giddy, ominous feeling that something is coming to an end.

***

Phil Tinline’s most recent series, Pay Freezes, is available on BBC Sounds. His book The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares has just been published by Hurst.