We appear to be in for a repeat of the Winter of Discontent, the mass public service strikes which brought down Jim Callaghan’s government in 1979. But this time there isn’t an immediate general election in the offing, so the endgame is more protracted and unpredictable.
In the winter of 1978-79, Callaghan lost control of attempts to cap pay rises at well below the rate of inflation as public service strikes paralysed the country. Rubbish wasn’t collected, the dead went unburied, hospitals were picketed and chaos reigned.
Callaghan’s minority Labour government was in the fifth year of the parliament elected in October 1974, dependent on Liberal votes. But, by the mid-1978, the Liberals had withdrawn formal cooperation. As industrial strife moved from bad to worse, and the government effectively lost a referendum on Scottish devolution, the Liberals sided with the Tories in parliament and forced an election. Thatcher was elected in May 1979 and the rest is history.
This time, however, there are probably another 18 months to go before an election. So it doesn’t look as if RMT general secretary Mick Lynch is going to bring the government down, even as ambulance workers and nurses join the fray. At least, not in the next few months.
More relevant may be the way that the strikes themselves ended in 1979. It wasn’t the election of Thatcher which brought this about, but rather Callaghan’s decision to set up a “pay comparability commission” in early March 1979—the so-called Clegg commission, after its chairman, professor Hugh Clegg. The Clegg commission went on to award a series of inflation-busting pay awards—exactly what Callaghan had been seeking to avoid—until it was wound up by Thatcher shortly after the election.
It was a classic case of a government losing control slowly and then rapidly. The price of industrial peace, once the government’s will and authority had been vitiated, was essentially to give the unions what they had been demanding. Could something similar happen this time?
Potential strikes by ambulance workers, nurses and teachers are by far the most threatening to the government. This isn’t only because of their strategic threat to bring large parts of the NHS and the school system to a virtual halt, worse than anything Lynch can do with the national train set. It is also because they may overwhelm the entire pay review body, which has governed pay and conditions in most public services in England—including all the NHS and state schools—for more than 30 years. (They don’t operate in the privatised rail industry, however notional privatisation now seems.)
The pay review machinery, independent of government but working within a broad Treasury “affordability” remit, was itself a reaction to precisely the pay strife which had prevailed in the previous era of “collective bargaining”. The implicit deal was that pay increases would not fall behind inflation, and private sector comparability, in return for the unions giving up their ability to confront employers directly around the negotiating table. The setting up of the teachers’ pay review body for England by John Major’s government in the early 1990s was seen as a victory for the teacher unions, after years of industrial conflict in the 1980s, when the Treasury had opposed such a move precisely because it feared that teachers’ pay would be driven upwards.
This is the first time the pay review bodies themselves have been the focus of sustained assault and strike action. But then it is also the first time that inflation has taken off in recent decades and the review bodies have not recommended that pay keep pace.
So a big question—if the government is forced into concessions—is who will review the review bodies? And where does this leave the credibility of the review bodies hereafter? If another “Clegg commission” appears on the scene, for Sunak read Callaghan, in slower motion.
