Dan Snow's History Hit - The Winter of Discontent

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

In the bitter winter of 1978-1979 petrol ran short, panic buying was rife, rubbish piled up in the streets and bodies went unburied as a wave of industrial action swept the UK; but what lessons might be learned as we face our own shortages of food and fuel? The disruption was in fact relatively short-lived but the Winter of Discontent has left a deep imprint on British social and political culture which we can still feel today. Historian Alwyn Turner joins the podcast to explain what caused this state of emergency, what lessons it could teach us now, its impact on the political landscape and why the 1970's weren't quite as grim as many remember.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. Britain is in the grip of a panic. People are queuing up in petrol station, gas station, forecourts, filling up their cars. The government is saying there is no fuel shortage, but some petrol stations are running dry. And whenever there's a shortage or a strike or a power cut, people think of the 1970s. They don't think about the lean years following the Battle of Waterloo, old 1815 to 20-odd, you know, those lean years of Lord Liverpool's administration.

No, they don't, although maybe they should. They think about the 1970s, a time when there were shortages. On this podcast, I'm going to talk about the 70s and their shortages and see if there's any lessons for today. My favorite shortage in the 1970s was in late 1984 when there was the so-called housewives panic. There was a shortage of sugar because a rumor went around that they were running out of sugar and tens of thousands of tons of sugar disappeared from supermarket and shop shelves. Supermarkets limited sugar to two pounds per person until they got that back under control.

And there's a very similar shortage of salt. A joke was written in a newspaper in Slough. Just perfect. A journalist heard some ladies having tea. They were discussing salt. And one of them said she heard salt was running out because miners in Siberia are going on strike. The journalist put this in the article as a joke.

And there was a rush on salt. You almost couldn't make it up, except they did. Anyway, so what's going on? We're going to talk to Alwyn Turner. He's a senior lecturer in history at the University of Chichester. He's an absolute legend. He's written about the 70s what does the 70s mean what they mean at the time what they mean to us now he's got a wonderful new book out called All In It Together looking at more contemporary more recent history if you want to watch documentaries as well as

listen to excellent podcasts right here on the History Hit Network. You can go to History Hit TV. We have had our biggest ever week of acquisition into History Hit TV. So thank you very much, all of those new subscribers. I hope they've come from the loyal podcast listeners and not just people floating about on the internet who've heard about it. Although nothing wrong with those people on the internet. All subscribers are equal. Love them all. Goodness me. Anyway, if you want to go to historyhit.tv listen to all these back episodes of podcasts out the ads and if you want to watch hundreds of hours of history documentaries you can do so at historyhit.tv go and check it out in the meantime we're talking about shortages fuel shortages sugar shortages we're talking to Alwyn Turner. Enjoy.

Alwyn, thank you very much for coming on the pod. Thank you. It's good to be here. History never a piece. History sometimes, you know, rhymes and it echoes. Let's talk a little bit about the echoes. We are in a period of panic buying here in the UK. We've got supermarket shelves, got food and beverage issues, but let's start with fuel. And we did see fuel anxiety in the 70s as well, didn't we? We did. And on several occasions, most famously was over the winter of 73, 74, when the OPEC crisis,

because of the situation in the Middle East, oil prices rose dramatically, threefold in the space of a couple of months. And there was talk of reintroducing rationing in Britain. Petrol coupons were printed up ready to go to the system of rationing. We never quite got to that stage, but there was undoubtedly a sense of siege, really, that led into the problems of the three-day week and all of that. And the critical difference, I suppose, that was a supply problem, is that the Saudis and others used oil as a weapon in what we call the Yom Kippur War,

the autumn of 1903 battle between Israel and Syria in particular. That is different today where it's an internal British, well, it's a delivery issue, I guess. Indeed. And there were countries that were worse affected than us in 73, 74. The Netherlands were very hard hit because they were seen as being pro-Israel. And Britain was not targeted particularly by the OPEC oil producing countries because they thought that Britain was to some extent an honest broker and it was even handed in its treatment of the two sides. So it wasn't that we were particularly picked upon. It's just it also

in Britain coincided with an overtime ban by the miners, which then led to a full-on strike in January 1974. And that exacerbated the problem because suddenly there's fuel on both sides. There's the oil price rise, plus there's a shortage of coal. Everything comes together. We live on an island made predominantly of coal i mean i'm joking geologists do not at me as david george said in the first of all we're surrounded on an island sea full of fish on an island made of coal we should have shortage of neither like so what was causing the problems with the coal that was part of the long running problem that britain had with strikes in the 1970s and there have been kind of revisionist

accounts to play this down a bit, but I don't think it can be really. If you look at the figures, the number of days lost to strike action in the 1950s and 1960s, we were averaging around three, three and a half million days a year lost to industrial action. In the 1970s, that goes up to nearly 13 million. There is a huge problem here. And it's much worse in our competitor countries. We lose more days of strike action in the 70s, two and a half times as many days as the French lose, 11, 12 times as many as West Germany loses. So there is a problem with industrial relations in Britain. And that was most obviously manifest when it was the miners, because power stations were mostly coal run at that stage.

And so an interruption to that supply was inevitably going to start affecting the electricity supply. And the problems just kind of mounted up in a way that I'm not sure is quite the same now. But as you say, history doesn't ever repeat repeat itself but there were a series of factors playing in so by 1974 you've got a petrol shortage as it were as a foreign import of energy shortage and you've got domestic supply problems and you get the legendary three-day week you know i hear people talk about three-day week you know clever people and write columns and go on three days i actually don't know anything about three-day week, Alwyn. Help me. What is it? What happened? The point of the three-day week was that people were told,

companies were told that they were only allowed to operate for three rather than five days in a working week because it was a way of saving fuel. And it doesn't last for very long. It's only a few weeks at the beginning of 1974. But it is such an extraordinary thing to do. Combined with a whole load of other emergency measures, the television was closing down at 10.30 in the evening so that we didn't use too much electricity. There were rolling scheduled power cuts across the

country. The speed limit on motorways was reduced to 50 miles an hour. There was a whole range of emergency measures. And it was a declared state of emergency. And the fifth state of emergency that had been declared under the government of Edward Heath, which had only been in power for less than four years, they were averaging more than one state of emergency a year. And I think the legacy of it was culturally very, very powerful and politically. The country gets back to normal fairly rapidly. We have the election of February 1974, a new Labour government, a minority government, exceeds to all the demands of the miners and the strike ends and things kind of return to normal.

But that memory does last. It's shaped a bit by how old you were. I was at school at the time and it was terribly exciting. Breakfast by candlelight and all that was wonderful, fun stuff. Not necessarily for our parents, I hope. Not good news for people around the clock broadcasting podcasts. What would we do? Imagine if the social media, the history hit TV turned off at 10, we'd be in big trouble. Alwyn, big question here, and we've seen interesting response to the current situation here. Who did people blame? The blame largely fell on the unions, whose popularity decreased over the course of the 1970s, even as the numbers within the trade unions grew. By the end of 1979, this is the peak period of union membership in the country. Nearly 50% of the workforce,

just under 50%, were in unions. So the numbers involved were growing, but the general perception was that they were the ones who were causing the trouble. And then politically, on the right of the Conservative Party with Keith Joseph and his protégé Margaret Thatcher, and on the left of the Labour party with Tony Benn, they blamed the moderates in both parties and considered them to be a single block. And I think that's important because it's part of how people's memories have been shifted, because there is a lot of talk about the winter of discontent in early 1979 at the moment. And people are talking about it as the time when the lights went out and it was the three-day week. Well, the lights didn't go out in the winter of discontent. That was an earlier period. The three-day week was under a Conservative government. The winter of discontent was under a

Labour government. But they all get conflated together. And it was in the interest of, let's say, the right wing of the Tories and the left wing of the Labour Party to make that case, because then there was a need for a radical break. But all of these things kind of keep up and they get confused and turned into a single period of absolute disruption. So let's quickly touch on the winter discontent. I was born, so there's no discontent in Team Snow House, I'll tell you that much. But in January 79, there was a Road Pauliers strike, which led to shortages. Is that one of the reasons people might have conflated the two? Indeed, it starts with, there was a strike by

fuel drivers, drivers of petrol tankers, which led to petrol shortages, which is obviously one of the things that's echoing around now. And prices of petrol went up by factors of three or four times in the space of a couple of days at petrol pumps. And then there was the oil strike, which led to food shortages around the country. The other thing that's worth bearing in mind, though, about the winter of discontent of 1978-79, it was incredibly cold. That January was the coldest since the big freeze of 1963. That was not unique to Britain. There were extraordinary weather conditions at the time. And it was just at the point when scientists were starting to look at the idea of man-made global warming. And it seemed to be

relevant to that. There was unreasonably cold in Saudi Arabia, very warm conditions in the Antarctic. There was a sense that things were going a bit odd. But in Britain, it fed into, as I say, this absolutely freezing cold winter. And already, there were shortages of food because farmland was covered in snow, crops were being affected. There was a great headline in The Guardian very early on in this, not because of the strikes, but a headline, the day that Brussels sprouts became a luxury. There was already a problem because of the weather. And then into that came this series of strikes. And that was okay to some extent. I mean, I was at school at the time and return to

school was delayed by a week at the beginning of January 1979, because they couldn't guarantee they could get food in. There was a genuine problem. But then it turns very bad indeed when that mood of striking spreads across to the public sector, which isn't something that we'd encountered on a national level before. And you started getting hospital quarters closing down hospitals and school caretakers closing down schools and rubbish piling in the streets. And the famous Daily Mail headline, now they won't even let us bury our dead because mortuary workers were on strike in Liverpool and also in Sedgefield. And it was those strikes, I think, that really hit home with the winter of discontent because these were public services. And so the people who were most affected were those who rely on public services.

So it's the poor and the working class who are most hard hit by the winter of discontent. And that seemed to take it to another level somehow. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about shortages from the 1970s, and today maybe, more after this. What caused the anarchy? How did medieval migrants shape the language I'm speaking right now? Who won the Hundred Years' War? Could England's lost patron saint be buried under a tennis court in Suffolk? How did England's last medieval king end up under a car park?

And were the Dark Ages really all that dark? I'm Dr Kat Jarman. And I'm Matt Lewis. On Gone Medieval, we'll uncover the most exciting and unexpected stories about the Middle Ages, hearing from the best and brightest minds. We will disentangle fact from fiction, bring you the latest discoveries, and reveal how the so-called Dark Ages laid the foundations for much of the world we're living in today. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

Land a Viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. What is the government's response?

I mean, again, it's call the army, get the army to do something. Did the army do things during the winter discontent? Were they used by politicians? And what other levers do politicians have to pull here in the UK? The difference, I guess, between then and now is that the trigger for the winter of discontent was entirely in the government's hands to start with. It was because James Callaghan as prime minister announced that there would be a pay policy

and he hadn't negotiated what that policy should be. And the concept of the pay policy is now so remote and so old that it maybe needs explaining. This was the idea that the government, together with the trade union movement, would decide what the maximum pay award should be for a particular year. And it had been running for several years by this stage. It started off, it had a maximum of £6 per week increase, and then it went on to percentages, 6%, 10%. And it had worked. Inflation had been this massive problem, and they were gradually bringing it down. 1975, we were averaging 24% inflation. By 1978, we were down to 8%. So this pay policy had worked. And then in the autumn of 1978, James Callaghan announces that there will be a new pay policy, and it will be 5%.

And he hasn't consulted and negotiated this with the trade union movement, and therefore, they don't feel bound by it. And they start taking strike action. And I think to some extent, it's reasonable. That 5% was a very tough target. Prices had been outstripping wages for some years by this stage. People's take-home pay was reducing in real terms. And then even though you've got inflation down to 8%, you're then saying maximum wage rise should be 5%. You're asking for another year of cuts in living standards without having agreed it with anybody. People reasonably say, well, we will look after our interests and devil take the hindmost. Okay, so there's wage negotiations. What about things like army? Are governments really able

to do anything in these situations? Is deploying the army today or back in the 1970s, does that move the dial? The army is called upon regularly right through the 1970s to deal with problems because then as now it is one of the few areas of the public sector that is guaranteed to deliver. The British army does tend to be quite efficient. And so there'd been the firefighters strike in 1977, when the army had been called in for the first time to operate as a fire crews. There'd been a big refuse workers strike in Glasgow, where the army had to come in and clear the rubbish off the streets. And the army, not quite as much as now, but the army was always seen as being the last resort. When everything else in civil society seems to have broken down,

you can rely on the professionalism of the British Army somehow. And we should just complete the 70s. The mythology is that Margaret Thatcher said no, and she broke the power of the unions, and everyone went back to work. But in brief, how did Britain extricate itself from so-called winter of discontent? The various disputes, and they were all separate ones, it's just they all coincided. None of them lasted for a very long time. They were all quite brief. And by mid-February 1979, people were pretty much back at work. So it was only for a period of maybe six weeks at the beginning of that year that there was massive disruption, but it was massive.

The number of days lost in strike action in 79 was the highest since the year of the general strike in 1926. I mean, this was an extraordinary wave of strikes, and it was all concentrated in that period. And that's why it lingers, is because although it was a short period of disruption, it was a very intense period. And things went back to normal, to some extent. But Margaret Thatcher did have a very good winter of discontent where she explained that this was what she'd always been campaigning against. She was against the concept of a pay policy at all. She thought the unions had got too powerful, and she played very well the kind of statesman role of rising above the fray and saying,

this is not about party politics, this is about the future of the country, and I'm not here to score political points. And all of that did work very effectively. She had a very successful winter of discontent. James Callaghan, as prime minister, had a disastrous winter of discontent, partly because he was away just when everything got really bad. He was at an international summit. And to add insult to injury, the summit was in Guadeloupe, which was agreeably warm at the time when the rest of Britain was freezing.

And so when he comes back and gives a press conference at the airport and the Sun reported under the headline, crisis, what crisis? That kind of fed into how people saw Callaghan. And he had a catastrophic winter of discontent. And it was one that he had largely caused himself, oddly, because it was a failure to communicate with the trade unions, which was the whole point of Callaghan, was that he was the union man. He was the one who did work with the unions. And then he forgot it at the critical moment. And I think it changes the course of British politics, not simply because it creates the conditions where the Conservatives can win the 1979 election

and bring Margaret Thatcher to Downing Street, but also because it splinters the Labour movement. But also because it splinters the Labour movement. The trade unions decided against pay policies as well as Margaret Thatcher. Their interests now coincided. like Callaghan, now lost faith with them and were more inclined to support the left. And Tony Benn, at a critical moment when the Labour Party, in defeat after the 79 election, was trying to find some way forward and trying to work out what it was going to do with itself, the trade union leaders were now more inclined to cast their votes in support of the left. And so the whole Labour movement starts to fragment. And it's not quite clear from there onwards what the Labour Party and the union's relationship should be. So I think it has a very profound long-term impact.

And of course, the memory of it is something that the Conservatives rested on for decades. Okay, let's just come out now because you've written so beautifully in the past and spoken about the 1970s, what they came to represent. As you say, that Conservative spin on the 70s, take on the 70s, which is it was a kind of nadir of Britain, sort of was shorn of its foreign empire, Suez happened. Then at the very lowest point, we had electoral instability. We had two elections in one year. It started to look like Italy. There was also this series of industrial dispute, happened. Then at the very lowest point, we had electoral instability. We had two elections in one year. It looked like Italy. There was also this series of industrial dispute, discontent. This is kind of British history and it's Nadir. It's a big question.

How should we think about the 1970s today? In political terms, it is clearly where one option for what the country should be kind of ran out of ground. It seems clear by the end of the 1970s that we were going to take a turn to the right or to the left. For most of the 1970s, it was assumed that that would be to the left, that Tony Benn would inherit the nation at some point. The power of the trade union movement would continue to grow and grow. And there was nothing that would be able to stop it. In fact, obviously, we took the other turn. But I think in political terms, clearly, it's the end of one road and the search to find another direction.

But there are other sides to the 1970s. Culturally, it was a wonderful time. It tends to get overshadowed because the 1960s were so noisy and self-advertising in cultural terms. But the 1970s were great. And I think socially, despite all the problems that existed, there was a sense of unity and community and of shared experience that I think we have lost since, and that we lost probably in the winter of discontent. Because prior to that, if you have power cuts, this affects everybody, Duke and Dustman alike. And it's not good, but you do get that sense of a shared experience. And there was much talk of the blitz spirit and people coming together. And I think there is a genuine truth in that.

By the time of the winter of discontent, because those public sector strikes are disproportionately hitting the poor and the marginalized, that starts to splinter. The direction the Labour Party then takes, in both cases, there is a move away from the idea of community. And the Labour Party talks about communities, but that's a very different thing. And diversity becomes more important than unity. So I think it is possible to look back at the 70s as quite a positive time. The wealth gap between richest and poorest was at its narrowest in British history at that point. There was a sense that although the take-home pay was not comparable to where we are now, there was so little to spend it on that actually people had probably a higher disposable income. There was not a great deal of choice anywhere. And that brings people together. The fact that there are, for example, only three television channels means that everybody is watching the same programs and they get these vast figures

and there is a shared culture. And I think there's a positive side to the 1970s that can get overlooked in the talk of the gloom and the misery, which undoubtedly did exist, but at least it was shared gloom and misery. Last question. Are there any useful lessons, hints, thoughts for today? I guess in political terms, don't go to Guadalupe whilst everybody else is suffering. But that's not a lesson that politicians seem to have learned. They still seem to be absent on foreign holidays when things go wrong. But that would be an indication. At least stay in the place and seem as if you care about it. I don't know. It's very difficult to see where this is going because the current issue

that's dominating petrol shortages, that will pass, obviously. A solution will be found and within a couple of weeks, it will be largely forgotten. In the same way that the great fuel crisis of 2000 doesn't have the same resonance as the winter of discontent or the three-day week. That fuel crisis in Tony Blair's first term in office, it's remembered, but it's not remembered as a great indictment of the Blair government. So these things can pass. It just feels at the moment as if there are so many other problems waiting to manifest themselves. And I guess to some extent is a question of how concentrated they are.

Because if it's over a long period of time, then we get used to things, we get accustomed to it, and there's one crisis followed by another by another, but it doesn't build into a single moment. And that seems to be what's distinctive about the 1970s. There are these key moments where everything seems to happen at once. The three-day week at the beginning of 1974, the winter of discontent at the beginning of 1979. These are moments where the crisis just seems to take over every single aspect of life. And I don't think we're there yet. Well, Alwyn, I guess that is good news, I suppose. Thank you very much for coming. Now, the new book is you've moved on from the 70s, haven't you?

My latest book is Scarcely History Anymore. It's now all in it together, the story of England in the early 21st century. So it goes up to 2015, which is only yesterday, but it still seems a very long time ago somehow. Yes. Yes, Alwyn, it does. Thank you. And just tell everyone what that book's called. All in it together. All together. There you go. Go and get that, everyone. Alwyn, thank you very much for coming on and talking about it. Thanks very folks.

We've reached the end of another episode. Hope you're still awake. Appreciate your loyalty. Sticking through to the end. If you fancied doing us a favour here at History Hit, I would be incredibly grateful if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give it a rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great please head over there and do that it really does make a huge

difference it's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account so please head over there do that really really appreciate it you