History of England 1-6

But the unions were unmoved. Indeed, with such awards dangling in front of their members, they had little choice. By the late autumn of 1978 the expression ‘Winter of Discontent’ was on everyone’s lips. People lay unburied in coffins, with the bereaved families turned away. Lorries bringing in emergency supplies were attacked, hospitals were picketed and refuse built up into stinking slag heaps in Leicester Square, while pickets proclaimed that it was not ‘a question of whether the country can afford to pay us, but of whether they can afford not to’. All of this and more contributed to a sense that the unions were fast becoming enemies of the people. It was never, of course, a general strike – most unions did not participate – but the effects hurt the public materially and emotionally, as striking became known abroad as ‘the English disease’.

Towards the end of the crisis, Callaghan agreed to an interview with the political journalist Llew Gardner. Callaghan’s voice was, as usual, reasonable and reassuring, his soft Hampshire accent enlivened by occasional flickers of hauteur. But his eyes were cold and furtive behind his spectacles, his finger jabbing at an imaginary chest. He had a message for the unions: ‘You can’t get more out of the bank than there is in it!’ Asked what happened to sour relations so terribly, he answered: ‘Too much responsibility has been devolved from the centre onto local shop stewards who do not fully comprehend the basic tenets of trade unionism.’ ‘Wasn’t 5 per cent an unrealistic figure?’ Gardner asked. ‘The realistic figure,’ barked the prime minister, ‘is the one the country can afford! Not the one people conjure out of their heads.’ Gently prodded on the question of talks with the trade unions, Callaghan remarked, ‘There is a time for reticence.’

Reticence was the keynote in other respects. The notion of a secret ballot had already been mooted by Margaret Thatcher. Surely, she maintained, union members must be allowed to vote without fear of reprisal. Callaghan expressed an openness to this thought, but not, he emphasized, if it was made a legal requirement. And there perhaps lay the crux. For Callaghan, a union man still, the law should stay away from organized labour. Besides, he hinted, the unions were above the law, and had the means to retain that position. Moss Evans, the new head of the TGWU, did as much as anyone to ensure Callaghan’s downfall, yet he understood this predicament. His message to the government was itself a melange of defiance and helplessness: ‘I won’t and I can’t restrain the stewards.’ Among the general public, meanwhile, the expression ‘Social Contract’ had become a swear word. ‘I don’t give a Social Contract about that!’ was a retort commonly heard.

That the Conservatives had a quite different policy from the unions was obvious, but even the Labour party and the unions, despite their symbiosis, had separate agendas. Though people spoke of Labour as the parliamentary wing of the trade unions, they had to govern and the trade unions had to protect their members – the two programmes were bound to conflict sooner or later. In any case, although the most contentious quarrels lay between Labour and Conservative, the most bitter rivalry lay between different unions. Britain’s unions were the oldest, and the most diverse, in Europe. By 1960, there were still 180. The English trade union tradition was local and particular, an inheritance, perhaps, from the medieval guilds and later from the friendly societies. Each trade, however small, had its union, and the difficulty lay in the fact that one union would find itself in inevitable competition with another. So it was that the conditions established under the Attlee consensus, and extended under the Wilson government, enabled the various unions to compete, with no legal checks upon them.

Douglas Hurd, who had been an adviser to Heath during the miners’ strike, summarized the question thus: ‘In a public sector dispute, the employee barely suffers. Any temporary loss of income is usually covered by the union and is in any case quickly recouped out of the eventual settlement. The employer, the actual administrator of the public concern, does not suffer at all, for his salary is secure. It is the public, and only the public, which suffers, first as consumer and later, when the bill comes in, as taxpayer. The public picks up the tab for both sides.’ Paul Johnson, the historian and journalist, put the matter more vividly yet: ‘[The unions] did not plan the victory … [and] they do not know what to do with it now that they have got it. Dazed and bewildered, they are like medieval peasants who have burnt down the lord’s manor.’