The Winter of Discontent: Myth, Memory, History by Tara Martin Lopez (review)

The Winter of Discontent, a series of major strikes in Britain in the winter of 1978–79 in which millions of workers participated, is a significant turning point in British history. Rejecting the stringent incomes policy imposed by James Callaghan’s Labour government, workers from many different sectors of the economy – autoworkers and nurses, truck drivers and school cleaners, rubbish collectors and gravediggers – went on strike. They were successful in winning immediate material gains. The Ford workers, who kicked off the wave of strikes by openly defying the five per cent limit set by Callaghan, won a seventeen per cent wage increase and effectively rendered the incomes policy ineffective; National Health Service workers and truckers also won economic gains. However, as the workers won the battles, they lost the war. As the Labour Party leadership clung to incomes policy even in the face of uprising from its own base, the strikes did not succeed in generating mass bases of support; the Winter of Discontent instead bolstered support for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives that blamed unions for the crisis, and their election in May 1979 inaugurated a long period of neoliberalism and decline in working-class power and livelihood.

In The Winter of Discontent: Myth, Memory, History, Tara Martin Lopez describes the trajectories of each strike in detail from the perspectives of participants based on in-depth interviews, offering valuable insights into the lives and experiences of those directly engaged in the strikes. She also explores the subsequent narratives of the Winter of Discontent which, as “myths” and “folk tales,” have served to discredit the labour movement and bolster Thatcherism in the popular political imagination. Indeed, considering the significance of the Winter of Discontent as a key event in contemporary British history, and the frequent negative references to the decade in which labour attained the height of its political power, Lopez makes an important contribution to our understanding of the labour history of the country that has seen the most far-reaching form of neoliberalism and undermining of workers’ power.

One of Lopez’s main aims in the book is to “deconstruct the myth that has developed around the Winter of Discontent” in order to “debunk the misunderstandings” and to “penetrate into the depth of why it still resonates deeply in popular memory.” (3) She seeks to debunk a common misunderstanding effectively promoted by the Tories that the striking workers in the Winter of Discontent were “opportunistic” and “greedy,” and willing to create chaos in people’s lives as “rubbish piled in the streets, the dead left unburied, and cancer patients turned away from hospital.” (22) Through her detailed recounting of the actual events of the strikes, she documents how the most potent imaginary of the Winter, such as food shortages, piles of rubbish on the streets, and unburied dead bodies, was exaggerated or fabricated. Furthermore, Lopez enriches historiography by emphasizing the centrality of service workers in the labour struggles of 1979, the majority of whom were women, correcting the dominant narratives that centre experiences and militancy of male industrial workers.

Lopez argues that the “myth” of the Winter of Discontent was “crucial to the ideological success of Thatcherism.” (21) As she demonstrates, the negative representation of the Winter definitely bolstered Thatcherism; however, that the Conservative Party and the right-wing press propagated the “myth” cannot on its own explain its popular resonance. Why did their narrative gain dominance, as opposed to others? The entrenchment of such a narrative is also in itself a consequence of the defeat of the working-class at the hands of Thatcherism. She herself recognizes that the popular understanding has been “profoundly shaped by the political vicissitudes of the Conservative Party, but also of New Labour.” (5) The crucial question is the decisive political loss of the working class in the Winter of Discontent itself; the loss led to the myth, rather than vice versa. After all, despite exaggerations and half-truths embedded in the dominant narrative, the disruption actually...