Labour MPs recognized this when they voted him as successor to Harold Wilson in 1976, topping the best slate of leadership candidates ever offered to a British party, seeing off Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins. He’s still the only person to have held all four of the great offices of state: PM, chancellor, foreign secretary and home secretary. And if that’s all a bit lofty, as transport minister in Clement Attlee’s government, he gave us zebra crossings and cat’s eyes, literally changing the look of the country.

But what he’s chiefly remembered for is the wave of public-sector strikes that paralyzed the country in the early weeks of 1979. There were more days lost to industrial action that year than any since 1926 and the General Strike, and for the next two decades, the Winter of Discontent — as it became known — was the go-to line of attack for Labour’s opponents. It was the “I’m afraid there is no money” of its day. Indeed, it’s not dead yet. In January this year, Richard Littlejohn warned Daily Mail readers that the current government “would take us back to the Seventies” and the accompanying photo was captioned: “Rubbish piles up on the streets of London during the Winter of Discontent.”

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This is a bit unfair as well. Callaghan’s stewardship of the economy had thus far been successful by most measures. Labour came to power in 1974 in the midst of a recession and with massive inflationary pressures left over from Conservative Chancellor Anthony Barber, who had done economic damage far beyond that attributed to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. Under Wilson and then Callaghan — with Healey as Chancellor throughout — Labour steadied the ship. In 1976-78, GDP grew by an annual average of 3.2% while inflation was brought down from 24.2% to 8.3%. There was even, relatively speaking, industrial peace; more days were lost to strikes in 1972 under Edward Heath than in the first three years of Callaghan.

The key factor in all this was the partnership between government and trade unions. From 1975, a national pay policy was agreed, fixing the maximum wage increase that would be permitted, and for the most part the line was held. A decline in the standard of living was accepted, with some reluctance, by the unions as the price of restoring economic stability.

But by late 1978, the reluctance proved too great. Callaghan failed to secure an agreement with the unions, and instead the government unilaterally announced a pay policy of 5%. The Winter of Discontent ensued, Labour was driven out of office, and 18 years of opposition followed.

In his last days as PM, Callaghan predicted the dawning of a new era. “There are times, perhaps every 30 years, when there is a sea change in politics,” he told adviser Bernard Donoughue. “It then does not matter what you say or what you do.” Though he was right that this was a critical moment, there’s an unmistakable note of self-justification, because there was nothing inevitable about the country taking the direction that it did. Had he not launched that doomed pay policy, and done what everyone expected by calling a general election in the autumn of 1978, when the economic conditions were favorable, he would almost certainly have won.

But maybe the sea change had already come, back at the 1976 Labour conference, when Callaghan himself announced the death of Keynesianism. “We used to think that you could spend your way out of recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending,” he declared. “I tell you in all candor that that option no longer exists.” For 30 years, governments of both parties had pursued the target of full employment, but now the emphasis was to be on conquering inflation. We’d been living in a cozy world, avoiding “fundamental choices and fundamental changes” for too long. “That cozy world is gone.” As Margaret Thatcher, his successor in Downing Street, was later to say, “There is no alternative.”

And there was the problem for Labour. Callaghan’s move away from Keynes took him into Tory territory. The Thatcherite wing of the Conservatives had already concluded that inflation was the real enemy, and that state spending needed to be cut. Following her election victory in 1979, Thatcher pursued Callaghan’s argument to its logical extremes. He complained that his speech to conference had been taken out of context — “misused by Conservative spokesmen to justify their malefactions in refusing to increase public expenditure at a time of recession” — but the truth was that he had prepared the way for Thatcherism and was then horrified by what transpired.

He was the last prime minister of the old cross-party consensus, a time when — in the language of the day — union leaders had “beer and sandwiches” at No. 10, and deals were done in “smoke-filled rooms”. Displaying the conventional complacency of an ancien régime, he underestimated his rival, failing to take seriously her talk of being an outsider, “a plain straightforward provincial”, her rejection of “metropolitan liberal views”, her call for “a return to common sense”. In retrospect, Thatcher looks more and more like the harbinger of the era of populism, and Callaghan her facilitator. That 1976 speech is what he should be remembered for, the start of the sea change that he spoke about.

All of which seems increasingly relevant at a time when we are in the early stages of an even bigger sea change, with a Labour prime minister again trying to navigate the death of a cross-party consensus.

The features are very different, of course. And so are the two men. Keir Starmer didn’t exactly beat the cream of the crop when he defeated Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy to become leader. He had no experience of political office at all — let alone the great offices of state — before the general election last year. On the other hand, he has a massive parliamentary majority to fall back on — the 1974-79 government started with a majority of three and rapidly declined into a minority.

Despite the differences, there is the same sense of a new political mood and, as in the late Seventies, the ideological fervor is with a populist Right. Recently this has been with the rise in the polls of Reform, but a reinvented Conservative Party that can harness public discontent remains the real threat.

That looks a distant possibility right now, but the return of Donald Trump has accelerated the pace of events. Starmer’s premiership has certainly changed in response to Trump. The biggest challenge is clearly the development of a new version of NATO, but there are domestic implications as well. The noisiness of Trump and his outriders is changing the political agenda here. In particular, immigration — the key dividing line between mainstream parties and populists — looms larger.

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Earlier this month, Health Secretary Wes Streeting had some fun at the expense of the Tories. “It must be so painful for them to watch a Labour government doing the things that they only ever talked about,” he teased: “reducing bloated state bureaucracy; investing in defense; reforming our public services; bringing down the welfare bill.” He was exaggerating for the sake of comedy, but there was an underlying truth to his boast. With that comes the danger that, as Callaghan found, the attempt to try to occupy the opponents’ ground can end up merely by legitimizing the Right’s arguments. There’s been nothing in the advance briefing about Rachel Reeves’s spring statement today that looks particularly Labour.

Callaghan tried to hold the incoming tide halfway, offering a compromise that accepted spending cuts and a (hopefully short-term) rise in unemployment while retaining the structure of the old system, most notably cooperation with unions. That proved economically effective in the short term but it wasn’t enough to save Labour. By the time the party returned to power in 1997, it had accepted Thatcherism in full. As Callaghan said: “The cozy world is gone.”

At last, Nixon said, the war was over. At a cost of 58,000 American lives and some $140 billion, not to mention more than two million Vietnamese lives, the curtain was falling. The last US troops would be brought home. South Vietnam had won the right to determine its own future, while the Communist North had pledged to “build a peace of reconciliation”. Despite the high price, Nixon insisted Americans could be proud of “one of the most selfless enterprises in the history of nations”. He had not started the war, but it had dominated his presidency, earning him the undying enmity of those who thought the United States should just get out. But the struggle had been worth it to secure “the right kind of peace, so that those who died and those who suffered would not have died and suffered in vain”. He called it “peace with honour”.

Fifty years on, Nixon’s proclamation of peace with honour has a bitterly ironic ring. As we now know, much of what he said that night was misleading, disingenuous or simply untrue. South Vietnam was in no state to defend itself, and collapsed just two years later. The North Vietnamese had no intention of laying down their weapons, and resumed the offensive within weeks. And Nixon and Kissinger never seriously thought they had secured a lasting peace. They knew the Communists would carry on fighting, and fully intended to intervene with massive aerial power when they did. But then came Watergate. With Nixon crippled, Congress forbade further intervention and slashed funding to the government in Saigon. On 30 April 1975, North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace, and it really was all over.

Half a century later, have the scars of Vietnam really healed? It remains not only America’s longest war but one of its most divisive, comparable only with the Civil War in its incendiary cultural and political impact. The fundamental narrative trajectory of the late Sixties — the turn from shiny space-age Technicolor optimism to strident, embittered, anti-technological gloom — would have been incomprehensible without the daily images of suffering and slaughter on the early evening news. It was Vietnam that destroyed trust in government, in institutions, in order and authority. In 1964, before Lyndon Johnson sent in combat troops after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, fully three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government. By 1976, a year after the fall of Saigon, not even one in four did so.

It was in the crucible of Vietnam, too, that you can spot many of the tensions that now define American politics. Perhaps the most potent example came in May 1970, after Nixon invaded nominally neutral Cambodia to eliminate the North Vietnamese Army’s jungle sanctuaries. First, on 4 May, four students were shot and killed by the National Guard during a demonstration at Kent State University, Ohio. Then, on 8 May, hundreds more students picketed outside the New York Stock Exchange, only to be attacked by several hundred building workers waving American flags.

The “hard hat riot”, as it became known, was the perfect embodiment of patriotic populist outrage at what Nixon’s vice president, leading bribery enthusiast Spiro Agnew, called “the nattering nabobs of negativism…an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterise themselves as intellectuals”. Today it seems almost predictable, just another episode in the long-running culture wars. But at the time it seemed genuinely shocking. And with his brilliantly ruthless eye for a tactical advantage, Nixon saw its potential. When he invited the construction workers’ leaders to the White House two weeks later, he knew exactly what was doing. “The hard hat will stand as a symbol, along with our great flag,” he said, “for freedom and patriotism and our beloved country”.

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Even now, many Americans prefer to forget how the war ended. Yet even in that story, there are any number of hints of what was to come. Take what happened to the South Vietnamese — more than a million in total — who fled to the United States in the aftermath of defeat. At first, many were housed in air bases and army barracks. But polls showed that most of their new neighbours resented them and wanted them gone. In the inaptly named town of Niceville, Florida, where more than a thousand Vietnamese refugees were quarantined at Eglin Air Force Base, eight out of ten people said they wanted them out. “Gooks Go Home” read placards in Arkansas. “They can’t speak English,” said one Los Angeles carpenter, “and they will be on welfare before they get off the airplane. And who pays for that? We do.”

Perhaps it’s easy to understand why so many people resented the new arrivals. Times were hard, the American economy was in recession, and unlike previous waves of refugees, the South Vietnamese were symbols of defeat, reminders of a uniquely humiliating, agonising chapter in the nation’s recent history. Even on the Left, there was remarkably little sympathy for them.

Unbelievable as it may seem today, the bloody collapse of South Vietnam — which saw thousands of former American allies executed or imprisoned for years in Communist concentration camps — provoked an outpouring of joy among elements of the old peace movement. On 11 May 1975, not two weeks after Saigon’s fall, some 50,000 people gathered to celebrate in Central Park, for what one reporter called “a joyous all-day carnival of songs and speeches in the perfect sunshine”. Two Democratic congresswomen, Elizabeth Holtzman of Brooklyn and Bella Abzug of Manhattan, delivered rousing speeches, and there were songs from Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Paul Simon and other veterans of the good old days. “There’s a lot of lumps in a lot of throats,” one onlooker told reporters. “It’s unbelievable. Today is the first day I really realise the war is over.” You would scarcely have believed that the Americans had lost. Or perhaps you would.

For most Americans, however, the overwhelming emotions were humiliation, sadness, and guilt. “I thought that we did a really miserable job for those people,” said Thomas Polgar, the CIA chief in Saigon, “and they would have been much better off if we had never gone there in the first place.” Indeed, some decided not only that American intervention in Vietnam had been a mistake, but that all interventions abroad must be illegitimate or misguided. American isolationism has a long history, but never has it enjoyed a bigger boost than it did in the early Seventies.

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Around the world, too, America’s image had taken a horrendous battering. Asked for their reactions to the defeat in Vietnam, the British historian Jack Plumb mourned “the diminution of America to human size”, the Dutch critic Rob Kroes thought the United States was “losing its magnetism”, and the French sociologist Michel Crozier declared that America was no longer “a touchstone for other societies”. And for perhaps the first time, even instinctively pro-American commentators began to wonder — as they still do today — whether the nations of Europe should prepare for life without the shield of their most powerful ally. “For 20 years we have enjoyed a golden age of security under the American umbrella,” said the Daily Mail. “Now we must start learning to take care of ourselves.” That was almost half a century ago. What’s changed?

The irony, of course, is that the war really had been all for nothing. Henry Kissinger always insisted that the struggle had been essential to stop the advance of Communism in south-east Asia. But the domino theory turned out to be nonsense. Vietnam and Cambodia both fell to Communism, but instead of the dominoes tumbling in rapid sequence, they promptly started fighting one another. Then the Chinese got stuck in, too. Today Vietnam is still ruled by the autocratic Communist Party; yet it’s also a rapidly growing globalised economy with high inequality, high corruption and an unhealthy dependence on Western tourism.

As for the United States, it takes more than 50 years for such a traumatic defeat to fade. The deepest scars, naturally, belong to those who suffered most. “I came home from the war with the curious feeling that I had grown older than my father, who was then 51,” writes Philip Caputo in the preface to his memoir A Rumor of War. “A man saw the heights and depths of human behaviour in Vietnam, all manner of violence and horrors so grotesque that they evoked more fascination than disgust. Once I had seen pigs eating napalm-charred corpses — a memorable sight, pigs eating roast people.”

But there’s a case, too, that the shock of defeat fundamentally distorted American politics. It’s a misconception that the “Vietnam syndrome” made the United States less likely to embark on foreign crusades. The truth is surely quite the reverse: successive presidents were desperate to wipe away the stain. Would Ronald Reagan have sent US troops into the sideshow of Grenada in 1983, had it not been for his eagerness to show that he could succeed where John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon had failed? Would George Bush senior have gone into Panama? Would the younger Bush have been quite so quick to assert his nation’s virility in Afghanistan and Iraq, had he not spent his college years during the height of the Vietnam War, when every night brought new footage of America’s travails in the jungle? Perhaps the answer in each case is still yes, because intervention is an inevitable consequence of wealth and power. But it’s surely worth asking the questions.

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Even the most recent presidents have been haunted by Vietnam. Barack Obama once called the treatment of Vietnam veterans “a mistake that must never be repeated”, and it’s pretty obvious that he was talking about the wider war, too. Indeed, his foreign policy mantra — “Don’t do stupid shit” — could hardly be a better encapsulation of the post-Vietnam mindset, which explains his reluctance to get involved in Syria. Joe Biden, too, is a post-Vietnam politician: one of his first major votes as a young senator in 1975, for example was to cut off funding to South Vietnam just days before the fall of Saigon.

But there is, of course, an exception — a recent American president who didn’t serve in Vietnam because he avoided the draft five times, and never really wrestled with its moral and strategic dilemmas because he always knew it was a terrible idea. He never really understood why other young men bothered going, he once said. “What did they get out of it?” And perhaps Donald Trump can be forgiven for not taking Vietnam seriously, because he had bigger things to worry about. He never felt guilty about ducking the war, he told Howard Stern, because “we have our own Vietnam — it’s called the dating game”. Dating was genuinely perilous, he explained, because of the risk of sexually transmitted diseases. Indeed, women’s vaginas were “potential landmines…there’s some real danger there”.

Some people might consider this a remarkable analogy. But the 45th President felt blessed to have come through unscathed. “It’s amazing, I can’t even believe it,” he mused. “I’ve been so lucky… It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

You’ll never think of Apocalypse Now in the same way again.

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.

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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.

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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.

***

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

The year was 1976. The factory was the Grunwick film processing plant, and strike became a cause célèbre of the British trade union movement. Dozens of Labour MPs visited the picket line. One MP, Audrey Wise, was left “black and blue” after she spotted a young woman on the picket line being dragged away by police. Wise intervened to prevent her arrest; the police dropped the woman, turned on Wise, and said: “You’ll do.” The next day photographs of the Labour MP behind bars flashed across the national papers.

A month earlier, ministers in the Labour government visited the same picket line. “We came down to show our solidarity,” Education Secretary Shirley Williams explained. One of the picketers, Mahmood Ahmad, thanked the Cabinet ministers for their “great morale boost”.

It was inevitable that the then prime minister, Jim Callaghan, would face scrutiny over his Cabinet ministers’ appearance. During Prime Minister’s Questions, John Stokes, a Conservative MP and member of the Right-wing Monday Club, rose to level the charge. He asked if Callaghan would “rebuke” his ministers for the “most unfitting action” of joining a picket line. “No, Sir,” came the prime Minister’s defiant reply. “I should have thought that the honourable gentleman would go and do the same thing.”

Almost half a century later, it is difficult to imagine Keir Starmer uttering the same words. In the current standoff over railway workers’ pay and job security, he has declared that he is “against the strikes”, going so far as to sack Shadow Transport Minister Sam Tarry after appearing on an RMT picket line. Echoing his boss, Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy said: “a serious party of government does not join picket lines.”

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It was a remarkable display of historical illiteracy. Even the so-called Labour “modernisers” of the Eighties and Nineties did not punish their MPs for standing on the picket line. In 1988, Shadow Health Minister Harriet Harman joined nurses on a Unison picket line outside Maudsley Hospital in her constituency, and faced no rebuke from leader Neil Kinnock. A decade later, Gordon Brown’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, Don Touhig, visited a CWU picket line outside a factory in his constituency; no fuss was made. In 2006, a member of Tony Blair’s Cabinet, Hazel Blears, appeared on a Unison picket line outside a local hospital. She was criticised in the press for protesting the consequences of her own government’s health reforms, but there was no suggestion she should be sacked.

Lammy’s comment was indicative of a mindset common among Labour strategists today: that the party will lose elections if it is seen as too close to unions. Often they point to the Callaghan government’s fall in 1979, which they blame on the breakdown of industrial relations during the previous “Winter of Discontent”. Callaghan’s defence of his ministers on the Grunwick picket line is now regarded as an act of tremendous naivety.

In the following decades, modernising leaders Neil Kinnock and John Smith attempted to make some reforms to trade union power within the Labour Party, notably by reducing the unions’ voting strength in party conferences and in the selection process of parliamentary candidates and leader. Yet neither wished to challenge outright the Labour Party’s connections with the unions — they had, after all, founded the Labour Party. In his final party conference speech before his death, John Smith argued that British democracy itself “springs from…the trade union campaigns for the rights of people at work”.

When Tony Blair became leader the following year, this rhetoric quickly evaporated. Stan Greenberg, an American political consultant, told Blair that his “willingness to take on and master the unions” would be the defining feature of his leadership. Greenberg’s research found that although Labour was leading in the polls, “a third of Conservative defectors to Labour worry about excessive union influence”. What was needed was “relentless reassurance” that “the unions no longer seemed to control Labour”.

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Mindful of this, Blair went to great lengths to reassure the public that the unions had little sway over the New Labour project. As one union official memorably put it, under New Labour “unions were seen as a virility test; bashing the unions was seen as macho and a way of distancing yourself from the mad auntie in the attic”. And so in the 1997 election, Blair promised that “we will not be held to ransom by the unions”, rejecting the longstanding view that the Labour Party was the “political arm of the trade union movement”. Instead, he declared, Labour was the political arm of the “British people”. Tony Benn, still a Labour MP at the time, bitterly remarked that Tony Blair was the political arm of the Daily Mail.

In government, Blair was broadly able to resist trade union influence because he found alternative means of funding the party, relying on the wealthy. During the Kinnock leadership, there would have been none of the slick Walworth Road research and PR operation without trade union money. In the early Nineties, well over three-fifths of Labour’s funding came from the trade unions. But by 1998, Blair had shrunk union revenue to just 30%, with 20% of party funds coming from the newly created “High Value Donors Unit”.

Yet Labour’s divorce from the union movement was far from finalised. As recently as 2019, Starmer himself joined a BFAWU picket line of McDonald’s workers who were on strike over low pay. It’s only in the years since that, in spite of standing on a radical manifesto when he sought to replace Jeremy Corbyn in 2020, Keir Starmer has spent his leadership renouncing Labour’s once unashamedly supportive relationship with the unions.

This is a mistake. In a YouGov poll last month, just 31% of the public said they believe Labour should distance itself from the unions in part (18%) or completely (13%). While over 80% of the public in the Callaghan years thought the unions were too powerful, just 36% did during the Corbyn years. Today, 58% of the public say the rail strikes are justified, and 66% of the public blame the Government for them.

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None of which should come as a surprise. Britain, after all, is no longer living in the shadow of the Winter of Discontent and untrammelled trade-union power. Years of Thatcherite assault and New Labour neglect have seen to that. Today’s concerns are of a different order: Britain is now living in the shadow of the financial crisis and austerity; the public realm has been hollowed out; public services are not working; living standards are still below pre-financial crisis levels; the ongoing energy crisis could see households paying as much as £500 a month on their bills next winter.

There is, to put it simply, nothing like the relative prosperity and confidence of the Nineties. A failed economic model is not a bad memory; it is a living reality. Except, this time, the British public recognise that the culprit is not the power of working people but a vulture capitalism that has picked off the dying carcass of the British state. The Conservative leadership contest has descended into a Margaret Thatcher tribute act. Labour’s response to this crisis cannot be a Tony Blair tribute act. If New Labour was about meeting the politics of the moment, Starmer’s muffled response to the crisis of low pay is anything but.

On the morning of my 63rd birthday this month, I posted a quote by Kingsley Amis: “No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare.” Looking back at my long, louche life, it’s a philosophy I thoroughly concur with. But for me Weston-super-Mare is not a graveyard, but rather the crucible of my ambition.

You couldn’t blame them; going on the game made more sense than a pretty teenage girl from a blue-collar book-free home announcing that she was planning to be A Writer. But that, aged 12, is what I knew I wanted to do. No one summed up my interesting situation better than Kate Bush: “I found it very frustrating being treated like a child when I wasn’t thinking like a child… I felt I was being patronised, right through until I was 18 or 19. From the age of ten I felt old.”

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At the age of 17, I escaped, winning my first job as a writer at a music paper, taking to a life of — literally — sex, drugs and rock’n’roll every bit as easily as I’d imagined I would since I was 12. My life certainly turned out not ordinary, to say the least. By the age of 35 I had been divorced twice, losing custody of my beloved son Jack the second time; at weekends we would hop on the train to my parents’ home in Bristol, and then set out next morning to Weston. But the lido was no more; they’d concreted most of it over so it was a quarter of the size, demolished the majestic diving board edifice, installed a wave machine and called the whole hot mess The Tropicana — “It’s fun and fruity, wet and wild!” It would have been easier to get a decent swim in a spittoon — but so long as Jack was happy, I was too.

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And then something I had been saving up to say: “Let’s break the silly rules!”

The rules, until that day, had been strict. All manner of behaviour, from the growing of Begonias in front gardens to the stressing of the second syllable in the word controversy, were unacceptable in our little, class-obsessed lives. But very close to the top of the list — second only perhaps to the use of the word toilet — was eating in public. On building sites, one could make an exception, or in the trenches in wars — but not in normal life, not even on holiday.

But Mum was on a journey of her own. A child to look after, a new world of social disruption to cope with, a husband who had gone mad. And in Teignmouth that afternoon she cracked, and the happiest day of my young life was complete. We bought the Mars Bar and divided it and ate it — not entirely in the open air (we used a bus shelter to protect our dignity) — but defying the Gods who policed the division between upper- and lower-middle class, we scoffed the lot.

It was only a day trip. But it was the greatest holiday of my life. It was a harbinger of happier times ahead, of freedom from self-imposed distress. We could look across the flat grey sea and imagine blue skies, sunny days, the sound of laughter. We were laughing ourselves as we got back on the coach.

A few years ago, while driving one of my daughters home from school, I was making what I thought were some trenchant observations about the joys of their modern childhoods and the depredations of my youth.

“When daddy was young,” I said as we wove our way through traffic, “we didn’t even have a car!”

“Oh, when were they invented?”

The Seventies is ancient history. Black-and-white times, as my kids still call it. Phones with dials in draughty halls. Coal smoke, cigarette smoke, everyone coughing, expiring.  Heart attacks taking men who unwisely ran for a bus. Whispers about “the big C”. IRA bombs. Our little house: my step-father suicidal, Mum taking tablets called Quiet Life. But the quiet, when it came, not making anything better.

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One thing, though, made everything better. I was in love with coaches. The company was called Roman City and the day their summer brochure was published we would queue outside the shop and ask solemnly for two, please: they were free and Mum and I enjoyed the reckless abandon of possessing our own separate copies.

There was not much else of the devil-may-care or even the vaguely hedonistic in our small world. But on four or five summer Saturdays, courtesy of Roman City coaches, we would escape it — Mum and me — and head for Plymouth via Dartmoor, or Brighton and Hove, or Swansea and the Mumbles, or London for the Ideal Home Exhibition. A drive from our little box in an unfashionable outer suburb of Bath to a better world. In which I would feast not on the destination but on the journey. My memories are not of buckets and spades or the smell of the sea or the sound of the gulls. They are of the open road, where the diesel could spew into fields as we dipped down into villages or pulled into pub carparks.

Coach trips in the Seventies were exercises in grounding. Connection to the person you were with, devoid of any distractions. Too noisy to read and too uncomfortable to snooze. No phones, of course. Connection as well to the land, to place and to places. The vehicles themselves were heaving wrecks, stifling in summer heat. They often broke down but never in the modern way, with software issues that can only be solved in a lab. It was all hardware: a spanner could resolve matters. The drivers sometimes returned to base with smears of grease on their faces.

And when the beasts were coaxed up some country lane in Devon or Somerset or Warwickshire or Wye Valley, you were close to the hedges. You moved slowly and noisily and stared out — and people in these places stared back. I can still picture the aftermath of an accident somewhere near Ilminster in deepest Somerset: squeezing our vehicle past a small group of people in tears, luggage strewn by the side of a road. Grittier than any train view.  Uncomfortably close to the action.

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For those of us in the downwardly mobile, upper-middle class, the coach trip also provided a community mixing that modern travel, modern holidays, would never match. I am not pretending this was necessarily to my mother’s liking. If you abhor those you regard as lower-middle class, a day trip to Minehead is an unwise holiday choice. But she did it for me and the result was a bonding between us that grew ever stronger as we giggled and raised our eyes at our fellow passengers in their crimplene suits, with their concern about “toilet breaks” and willingness to eat sandwiches in full view of each other as if they were farm animals or scaffolders.

Nobody on the coach — least of all the two of us, social snobs but educational illiterates — would have been familiar with arguments about rationalism and its sometimes baleful discontent-inducing influence on human existence. But years later, at the LSE, I would spend many hours in the company of disciples of the recently retired philosopher Michael Oakeshott, and I remember thinking then how my life, and the lives of many others in the Seventies, matched his intellectual preference — conservative with a small c — for what works over what might be.

True: nothing much did work back then. But the absence of grand intellectual plans in the pre-Thatcher age gave our lives a kind of messy satisfaction we miss today — and opportunities, in the grimmest of seaside towns, for small moments of real joy.  As Oakeshott put it, we preferred “present laughter to Utopian bliss”. Never mind dreams of frolicking in the sun if you can have a Mars Bar in Teignmouth and enjoy it.

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Don’t overthink life: that for me was the lesson of those holiday trips. You can dream of course of better times, sunnier holidays, changes in circumstance.   But live in the moment, savour the fumes, the small intense pleasures that can make life meaningful.

My kids have swanky holidays. We go abroad. They know (too much) about room service. During one American trip, I asked one of them what she wanted to be when she grew up; she thought for a few moments before answering, “a guest!” They take photos of sunsets, of meals, of themselves.

And, frankly, I am glad. I would not visit my early life on anyone, and certainly not my own children. But still, they miss out — we all miss out in the modern holiday world — on the small pleasures we enjoyed in the days before Instagram, before colour, before choice. If you have been on a British Seventies coach holiday, you have learned how to cope, how to make do, how to stay cheerful. You have no need of the sun. You carry it in you.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Yet on almost every level, the notion that we’re seeing a return to the Seventies is fantasy politics. Certainly, by paralysing Britain’s rail transportation network through the withdrawal of their members’ labour, the RMT has demonstrated the latent industrial power of Britain’s workers. But just as one swallow does not make a summer, so three days of national strikes by a single union does not signal a return to 1979, let alone a future blighted by class war. Union membership and labour militancy remain at historic lows across the Western world, including in Britain.

Yes, Britain’s summer of chaos is real enough: energy prices, NHS waiting lists, flight cancellations, and inflation are all spiralling. But none of these ills can be attributed to union power or working-class tumult.

It is not uppity labourers but supply chain shocks stemming from the pandemic and lockdown, as well as the Ukraine war, that are driving inflation, smoothed along by pre-emptive corporate price hikes. It is not union barons but airline companies, which slashed so many jobs during the lockdown, that have shredded Britons’ summer plans. And unlike in the Seventies, today’s economic sclerosis can hardly be blamed on creaking nationalised behemoths, given the fact that the Tories have sold off most of them over the last 40 years.

Under an exhausted Tory government, corporate profits are booming while wages are being eaten up by inflation. We are at the end of the process that began with Thatcher’s election in 1979. In short, however this tale unfolds, it will necessarily have a different ending; a neoliberal fairy godmother isn’t going to come to the rescue.

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Back in Seventies, governments had no choice but to negotiate with pervasive and powerful unions. Then Thatcher came along and pursued a different tack of open confrontation in her bid to break up the power of the organised working class. Today, the Conservative government’s refusal to negotiate with the RMT is no flash of Thatcherite steel, but a sign that they are unwilling to take political responsibility for Britain’s railway grid, which they have already been nationalising through a haphazard, piecemeal process driven by necessity over the last few years. The Tories’ unwillingness to fully reverse the failed disaster of rail privatisation betokens no commitment to free market nostrums, but a simple inability to see anything through at all.

This is not just a process of elite decay but also a direct result of neoliberal government inaugurated by Thatcher: the regulatory state that replaced the command-and-control state had less direct power. And with less direct power at stake in party-political competition, politics itself became less meaningful, with the banks and corporations sucking up the best and brightest that would have once formed the cadre of government and party-political elite. Neoliberalism locked in a vicious cycle in which a diminished public life drew in increasingly mediocre professional politicians, culminating in our hapless parliamentary class of today. Taking back control of Britain’s railways would require a political vision, and that is something our politicians are unable to supply.

All of this indicates that we are not returning to the Seventies, and we are far away from class war. The fact that sub-editors and journalists have no way to frame the railway dispute except by plucking out shibboleths about seasons of discontents only shows that the Right and the Tory middle classes need socialism and class war just as much as the Left needs fascism — which is to say they have no vision to offer. It is ultimately unsurprising that a generation of journalists, editors and pundits whose careers were made in the era of neoliberalism are struggling to adapt; after all, what we are going through is the end of an exhausted neoliberalism.

The exception to this fantasy politics is the RMT itself, which is seeking to defend its members’ wages and jobs. How far this will inaugurate a new confidence in labour organisation and trade unionism remains to be seen. It certainly seems that, with attempts to re-shore various industries and supply chains, and with tightening labour markets, the conditions exist for some form of organised labour to re-emerge from the abyss. Add to that the way Covid lockdowns exposed our collective dependence on a swathe of often poorly paid and menial working-class jobs, and it is hardly surprising that in the aftermath, “key workers” are now claiming more than merely symbolic tokens of our affirmation.

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In defence of class

By Justin Webb

But who will support them? The fact the broad swathes of the middle-class Left has thus far shown sympathy for a working-class strike is probably more reflective of the Left’s penchant for working from home in the wake of the pandemic than any substantive political solidarity. Were the RMT threatening the middle classes’ capacity for telecommuting, we can be certain we would already have been subjected to a torrent of op-eds and tweets about the “privileges”, racial exclusivity and backwards sexual mores of RMT members. Intersectionalism is designed to disable the formation of collective interests, majoritarian decision-making and solidarity. As long as the Left remains committed to intersectionalism, it will have nothing to offer the reformation of independent working-class politics in Britain. This is plain in Labour leader Keir Starmer’s efforts to distance himself from the industrial action — an attempt to maintain the strategy of triangulation and middle-class support.

Throughout the neoliberal era, it is the unions that were cast in the role of conservative goliaths, standing in the way of the forces of technology, modernisation and globalisation. If it were ever true, that narrative certainly no longer holds: from its insurgent beginnings in the Seventies, British neoliberalism has collapsed into widening inequalities, technocracy, lockdown, indebtedness, stagnant wages and wilting productivity. Can a new working-class politics reverse these trends? For all the media histrionics provoked by the RMT strike, one thing it has exposed is that our entire social and political order rests on labour passivity and working-class quiescence. What happens when this ends?

Think back to the early Eighties. We face many of the same pains, again under a Conservative-majority government: Moscow is in the news for all the wrong reasons; high inflation; low growth; widespread industrial action. Britain is a country ill-at-ease, uncertain of its next destination.

The surgeon back then had no uncertainty over what medicine needed to be administered, what operation was required. The 1979 election was a referendum over the direction of the country: more of the same pain, or an operation that, despite its risks, might just jolt the country back to life?

And while you could describe both Conservative prime ministers by their characterful hair alone — Margaret Thatcher: powerful, unyielding, strong; Boris Johnson: chaotic, untidy, silly — there the similarities quickly come to an end. This hasn’t stopped the Johnson cabinet claiming the Thatcher legacy as its own. Hear Rishi Sunak’s speeches and you would assume the Government was on a Lawsonian crusade against high taxes.

The reality is precisely the opposite: taxes are about to reach their highest level since the Second World War, 12 years after the tax-cutting Tories re-entered Number 10. In 1979, the party swept into government with a clear diagnosis and a comprehensive treatment plan, defined by its ambition to bring down inflation, get Britain back on track, and consign the “sick man of Europe” label to the dustbin.

Today, however, after three consecutive Tory prime ministers, the party seems tired and unsure of what the whole point of being in government is, beyond holding power for its own sake. The by-election results from Wakefield and Tiverton will all but confirm this, covering two completely different demographics and geographies. The likely defeats will be a symptom of the lack of a narrative that holds the Government together — unlike Thatcher’s crusade against inflation, excessive union power, and unfree markets delivering poor outcomes to consumers.

Ostensibly, Levelling Up is the Government’s mission. But with limited cash or ideological rigour underpinning the policy, claims of ambition, drive and determination ring hollow. It didn’t seem this way two-and-a-half years ago, when the party jettisoned austerity and set sail for new ideological waters. What was remarkable, and remarked upon heavily after the 2019 landslide win, was how far the Tories had reached into former Labour heartlands. Wakefield itself is a prime example of one of these “Red Wall” constituencies. For the first time in generations, it bought into a Tory aspirational narrative. These areas were going to get better, and the Conservatives were going to be the party to make that happen.

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The Tories deserve to lose Tiverton

By Tanya Gold

But what wasn’t sufficiently remarked upon at the time was the extent to which this victory was achieved without the youth of Britain’s cities. Instead, it was achieved with a deep dependence on older voters, with over two-thirds of people in their seventies and over voting Tory.

It is easy to imagine that the cities, London in particular, have always been bastions of falafel-eating, Birkenstock-wearing liberals — impregnable Red fortresses owned by the Labour Party since time immemorial. Yet that is to forget that Thatcher’s majorities were achieved with the enthusiastic support of the cities. In London, a full two-thirds of the seats were won by the Conservative party in 1983, compared with only 29% in 2019. By contrast, the 2019 victory was underpinned not by a vision of growth and ambition, but by home-owning pensioners in ex-industrial and ex-mining regions who didn’t usually vote Conservative for cultural reasons, but finally snapped and voted for their own interests.

The traditional diagnosis for the cities turning against the Conservatives is that this split has happened over social and cultural values. Cities are predominantly young, and the young reject the current social and cultural values of the Conservative Party: values typified by the placement of Nadine Dorries as culture secretary, initiatives such as the Rwanda refugee resettlement policy led by home secretary, Priti Patel, and, of course, Brexit.

While this is certainly a significant part of the picture, what is rarely accounted for is the wholesale fiscal and monetary contempt the modern Tory Party has for anyone who isn’t a home-owning pensioner. Faced with the highest tax burden since the war, the highest inflation in decades, and ever-shifting student loan repayment terms — faced with plummeting rates of homeownership and sky-high house prices that have more than sextupled the time it takes for someone in their late-twenties to save a deposit — why should anyone under-40 vote for the Conservative Party?

And for retirees? As much jam as they want. Pensioner incomes now even exceed working incomes, after tax and housing costs, for the first time in history. The United Kingdom is choosing not to reward those who are building for the future. Instead, the spoils of the Treasury are being diverted to the mediocrity of the already satisfied, whose biggest ambition is driving their Honda Jazz to the local garden centre to buy a plastic lawn they won’t have to bother mowing.

This wasn’t always the case. Once upon a time, at an archetypal and electoral level, the urban yuppie seemed the core demographic of the Conservative Party: young chaps with floppy hair in pinstripe suits striding confidently through the City with ears glued to a mobile telephone the size of a small dog, shouting “Buy buy buy!” These aspirational workers could not have been more enthusiastic for the Thatcherite deregulation of the financial markets and the Lawson tax-cutting budgets.

What changed? Simply put, the core value of the Conservative Party is not deregulation, low taxation or free markets. The core value is power.

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By Jacob Furedi

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Being in government means weilding the ability to shape the country in your image and, just as important, prevent the opposition from shaping it in theirs. But what happens if access to power is shaped not by the distribution of “winners and losers” in society, where pressure builds up over time in living conditions to shift voting behaviour, but by the sheer size of a demographic cohort?

The clue is in the name — baby boomers. The huge increase in post-war births resulted in a great demographic bulge. There are millions more baby boomers than in the following and preceding population cohorts. This has granted baby boomers the advantage of a vast, unified voting bloc. This bloc of voters, owing to their similar age, wealth and health needs, are all likely to have comparable public spending and policy priorities.

With this voting power comes responsibility. But like a Labrador with access to an unlimited supply of sausages, the boomer cohort has not been able to help itself — and has gorged itself until it can barely walk. The triple lock on pensions; ring-fenced NHS and social care spending; low taxation on asset wealth owned by the old, combined with high taxation on income, predominantly earned by the young; avoidance of housing reform. And austerity? That was for the young only.

“The facts of life are Conservative,” said Thatcher. And broadly, it holds true. People like to limit the rate of change in their communities. And once people have built assets, they want to see them protected, and taxed lightly, if at all. But what if people can’t even build an asset base in the first place, because of a combination of planning gridlock and loose monetary policy shooting house prices into the stratosphere? What if they remain vagabonds, moving from rental flat to rental flat, not gaining a sense of community to care about, enrich and protect?

Think back to the ambition of the Right to Buy policy. The politics of enabling homeownership to a generation of striving workers wasn’t lost on the party then. It was a central policy of the government: an opportunity for the aspirant individual to buy into the national project. The party has since betrayed its own orthodoxies for political convenience and power. But through this it has set a potentially terminal trap for itself. If the facts of life are no longer conservative, how can the party build a winning coalition? As the boomer demographic declines, all the party will be left with is a generation of resentful, asset-poor millennials who haven’t seen income growth in decades.

The next election is already looming over this parliament, and the need for a radical policy agenda to challenge this inequality is glaring. Young people already overwhelmingly vote against the Conservative Party, which barely mustered a fifth of the 18-29 vote share in 2019, a year in which it won a landslide victory. Labour already can already rely on this demographic. All that’s left for Labour to go after — which means favourable policies, subsidy and controversy avoidance — is the predominantly Conservative boomer vote. Politics by traffic jam. Pork barrel politics divided by age, not by constituency.

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Despite this grim outlook, green shoots of ideological rebellion are emerging within Conservative circles. Innovative policy solutions such as Policy Exchange’s Street Votes proposal are being laid down. The party may also seek to focus on building in the cities over the more politically controversial areas with housing shortages in more rural areas. The political risk here is much diminished. What will the heavily Labour city constituencies do if they hate development — vote more heavily against the party that doesn’t hold their seat?

Others in the party are also questioning treasury orthodoxy on investment spending. Abandoned to the Brownites in the 2010s, a perfectly reasonable conservative case can be made for state-spending on infrastructure to lower taxes in the long run because of higher economic growth. The party of business cannot be blind to the fact that businesses require investment to grow and become profitable. If this idea was good enough for Ronald Reagan’s Right-leaning government, it can be good enough for the Tories today.

For now, however, these remain fringe ideas within the party. The discontent is there, and it’s growing, driven by high prices, a decade of stagnant growth and limited policy innovation. If it’s to move forward, the party needs to admit to itself the scale of the ideological tangle it’s got itself into. The national pallor of the late Seventies forced a brave, ideological character to emerge in the form of Thatcher.

Today, after 12 long, tiring years in power, no such figure has emerged. And that doesn’t look like changing. Whether the Wakefield and Tiverton by-elections will serve as a second trigger for leadership challenges is unclear, even with the year-long immunity from a confidence vote that is assured by the 1922 Committee rules. It would only take a rule change from the committee to see Johnson fall. Either way, today’s polls surely mark the beginning of the end of the Johnson era.

Who will follow is anyone’s guess, though it seems likely they will disappoint. After all, which Tory will be brave enough to challenge, let alone destroy, the boomer-led satisfaction with national mediocrity?

Nearly 50 years ago, the oil crisis of 1973 sent inflation skyrocketing across Western countries. It was a textbook case of imported inflation, which in a context of close-to-full employment and strong union bargaining power triggered self-reinforcing inflationary pressures, as companies raised prices to defend profit margins while workers in turn demanded wage increases. This price-wage (or wage-price) spiral was a response to the inflationary pressures coming from abroad — not their cause.

However, the Seventies crisis came at a time when the “compromise” between labour and capital that had provided the bedrock for the post-war economic-political settlement was already heavily strained, as each side attempted to claim a greater share of a shrinking cake. Economic and political elites realised that the inflationary crisis provided them with the perfect opportunity to deal a deadly blow to the post-war full employment regime, which in their view had led to the working masses becoming too powerful. They concluded that it was time to strike back — to break the back of organised labour and reassert the unfettered power of capital over society.

Inflation represented the perfect casus belli. With the theoretical backing of monetarist economists such as Milton Friedman, they crafted a narrative that blamed all economic problems — beginning with inflation — on excessive union power, unreasonable wage demands by workers and bloated welfare systems. The neoliberal counter-revolution had begun, a crucial aspect of which was the deliberate engineering of unemployment through a radical tightening of monetary and fiscal policies, in order to crush the bargaining power of unions. Combating inflation was not the end — it was the means.

As Alan Budd, economic advisor to the Thatcher government, would later admit: “There may have been people making the actual policy decisions… who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation. They did, however, see that [monetarism] would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes.”

In many ways, the same thing is happening today. As in the Seventies, inflation is surging, threatening the post-pandemic recovery and raising once again the prospect of stagflation — the simultaneous incidence of stagnant or negative growth and accelerating inflation. And as in the Seventies, establishment economists and commentators have been quick to blame the surging prices on excess demand (people having too much money to spend), fuelled by excessive wage increases and over-expansionary fiscal and monetary policies during the Covid crisis.

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Sanctioning Russia could topple the West

By Thomas Fazi

Their proposed solution is the same as that adopted in the Seventies: central banks must hike up interest rates and cut back on fiscal spending. In one word: austerity. And that’s what they’re doing. Not only the US Federal Reserve, but central banks all over the globe — including, most recently, the ECB — are raising rates rapidly in the most widespread tightening of monetary policy for more than two decades.

The problem with all this is that — again, just like in the Seventies — the recent inflation has relatively little to do with excess demand and excessive wage growth. In fact, it has mostly supply-side origins, triggered by the Covid crisis and now the Ukraine war, and rooted in the systemic deficiencies of neoliberal globalisation. From a Western perspective, the global lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 caused a collapse of global supply chains in durable goods and industrial components, as well as of cheap, flexible and abundant labour in low and middle-income countries. These foreign supply-side bottlenecks, which in turn were exacerbated in several countries by domestic supply-side bottlenecks — such as a shortage of long-haul truck drivers and dock workers in the US and UK — are the reason prices were on the rise well before the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine.

In other words, lockdowns are to blame — not the fiscal measures adopted to dampen their effects. This is what we might call lockdown inflation, which is now flaring up once again due to the recent Chinese lockdowns.

In recent months, the Ukraine war and the sanctions on Russia have caused inflation, especially energy and food prices, to grow at an even faster pace. These price rises have several self-reinforcing causes. On the one hand, the conflict has directly disrupted exports of crude oil, natural gas, grains, fertiliser and metals, pushing up energy, food and commodity prices. These supply-side problems have been further exacerbated by the West’s utterly self-defeating sanctions against Russia, which have left European countries scrambling for more expensive alternatives to Russian oil from America and Africa — as well as by speculation in commodity (futures) markets.

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America has won Europe's war

By Thomas Fazi

Indeed, notwithstanding the conflict in Ukraine, changes in supply and demand in themselves can’t justify the energy price increases. Global oil production, including from Russia, has actually increased compared to the same time last year (indeed, some Western countries, such as Italy, are importing more crude oil from Russia today than they have in past ten years, even though Russia’s recent decision to slash its gas supply to Europe suggests this is about to change). But energy traders, most of whom work for the world’s largest oil companies, saw the conflict in Ukraine as a perfect opportunity to hike up prices, knowing that most people would simply blame the rising prices on “the war” or even see it as “the price to pay to defeat Russia”.

This is why, as more and more people struggle to make ends meet, global energy giants such as Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and Chevron have raked in record profits in the first quarter of 2022, far exceeding their revenue during the same quarter in 2021 — all because they are passing on ridiculous mark-up prices to consumers. As President Joe Biden recently put it, oil companies have “made more money than God this year”. Likewise, speculative activity by hedge funds, investment banks and pensions funds, fuelled by QE-induced cheap credit, rather than “supply and demand”, is also helping to drive up wheat prices, despite comfortably high global wheat stocks, raising the prospect of an unprecedented global wave of hunger. This is what we might call speculative inflation.

To make matters worse, certain mega-corporations that dominate entire sectors are able to use the (temporary) shortages, production cost increases and market chaos to raise their own profit mark-ups without losing customers — which is why corporate profit rates in the US and elsewhere have soared to their highest level since the Second World War. As even the Chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, has said, large corporations with near-monopolistic market power are “raising prices because they can”. This is what we might call profit or market power inflation — or what some have termed “greedflation”.

Indeed, despite all the talk of the need to rein in wages to avoid wage-price spirals, the reality is exactly the opposite. As a result of the structural loss of workers’ bargaining power during the neoliberal era, workers in this new inflationary era are unable to protect their real wages, which are falling off a cliff in many countries as nominal wages grow much less than the general price level. Blaming workers for the current situation is a textbook example of victim blaming.

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By Jacob Furedi

In this context, raising interest rates and pursuing fiscal austerity will not only achieve little or nothing in terms of lowering price rises that are driven by primarily supply-side factors — but by depressing aggregate demand and economic activity and driving up unemployment, it will hurt wage-earners even more. Furthermore, it will “discourage investments that could ease some of the logistical bottlenecks that emerged during the pandemic crisis”, as a UN report reads — that is, long-term investments needed to increase domestic production (supply) and wean countries off their dependence on foreign imports, especially in the field of energy.

It would be naïve to assume that policymakers aren’t aware of this. So why are they pushing for such a solution? I would posit that once again, as in the Seventies, they are intent on exploiting the current inflation to engineer a recession and drive up unemployment in order to pre-empt a potential rise in labour bargaining power. After all, even if organised labour is still very weak, it is also true that labour markets — particularly in countries such as the US and UK — have been growing increasingly tight as a result of the post-lockdown surge in labour demand and Brexit in the UK. They are bound to remain relatively tight even in the future as the global economy undergoes a structural process of de-globalisation and reshoring.

In this context, recreating a reserve army of labour through austerity and engineered unemployment might be seen by capitalists as a way to ensure the balance of power between labour and capital doesn’t tilt too much towards the former, even at the cost of causing some creative destruction on stock markets — and of sabotaging the long-term shift towards a more environmentally and geopolitically sustainable model of greater economic self-sufficiency. Indeed, the Fed now predicts that unemployment will rise for the next three years as a result of its decision to hike interest rates.

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Moreover, in the EU, monetary tightening is seen by European techno-elites as a way to get countries back on the path of neoliberal “structural reforms” after the pandemic put these on the backburner. As Robin Brooks, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance (IIF), recently said: “Behind closed doors, there is a feeling that Italy’s spread has been too low for too long. That stymied needed reforms and drove away private investors who want a higher yield. So spread widening after [the recent] ECB meeting is partly by design. Back to more market discipline…” So much for the chattering classes’ talk about the EU’s post-pandemic “progressive turn” and abandoning of its neocolonial approach to economic policy.

So what might an alternative labour-driven rather than capital-driven response to the current inflationary crisis look like? There’s no shortage of tools that would shift the burden of the adjustment on the strong — the corporate pandemic and war profiteers — rather rather than on the weak: workers and low-income families. In the short term, as the Dutch economist Servaas Storm writes, “temporary strategic price controls, accompanied by supply-enhancing policy measures, can be used to eliminate corporate profiteering and prevent key prices (of energy and food) from shooting up”. These include price caps on fuel, energy and basic food items. This would force corporations to accept a reduction in their profit share, while allowing the labour share of income to rise.

Meanwhile, financial regulation cracking down on excessive speculation in energy and commodity markets would help lower inflationary pressures coming from financial markets. Redistributive fiscal policies, the opposite of austerity, are also needed to shield vulnerable groups from the higher costs of energy, fuel and other basic goods. And in the longer term, inflation control must be unconditionally subordinated to broader societal aims, such as boosting domestic supply and making economies more self-sufficient and less dependent on foreign imports. Ultimately, the debate about inflation is not really about inflation — it’s about the future of capitalism. And perhaps of the planet itself.