IS NOW THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT?

A debate between the Right Honourable Tony Benn and Sir Richard Lambert, Chancellor of the University of Warwick, Chaired by Rodney Bickerstaffe

Rubbish piled up in the streets. Bodies left unburied. Such was the 1978/9 Winter of Discontent when workers’ anger over pay settlements led to industrial disputes across the country. In an event to celebrate the re-opening of the University of Warwick’s Modern Records Centre, home to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) archives, Tony Benn and Sir Richard Lambert discussed the possibility that we may return to the season of strikes.

There were many issues surrounding the Winter of Discontent, chair of the debate, Rodney Bickerstaffe - himself a former leader of the trade union UNISON - pointed out. These included the morality of strikes, the role of women, the structure of trade unions, low pay and the role of the state in industrial disputes.

The new modern alternative, he said, to the old British adage “Do you think it’s going to rain today?’ is "Do you think there will be a Spring/Autumn/Summer/Winter of discontent?" Within the Modern Records Centre there is 14 km of shelving housing a rich collection on industrial relations and politics, labour history and protest. Former Labour cabinet minister and current President of the Stop the War Coalition, Tony Benn, and Sir Richard Lambert, former Director-General of the CBI and the present Chancellor of the University of Warwick, tackled the question. Each brought their own political, social and economic experience to the debate.

“I think overall when people look back on that Winter it will be seen as the moment when Mrs Thatcher built the support she needed for a huge majority based on the fact that she argued the trade unions ran Britain,” opened Tony Benn. He was Energy Secretary in the cabinet at the time and huge arguments went on amongst ministers about what needed to be done and why. The political and economical repercussions of the Thatcher period “makes you ask yourself whether that’s the only way for the future or whether there are better ways of handling things”.

At the time of the Winter of Discontent Sir Richard Lambert was Unit Trust Correspondent at the Financial Times newspaper. He described the two very different kinds of capitalism he’s lived through during his long working life - both of which collapsed. He asked what will come out of the current financial crisis: will it be insider capitalism, where a very small group of people pay themselves huge amounts of money, or a new, populist capitalism?

“For the first third of my working life we took it for granted that the government commanded the heights of the economy. They owned the utilities, steel, aerospace, shipbuilding... and business bosses succeeded by cosying up to the government.” It was a very different world. “Then came the Winter of Discontent; as Mr Benn said, in came the Reagan/Thatcher years and I had my second completely different kind of capitalism in my working life. Everything was privatised, pretty much, and there was massive deregulation in the financial world. By the turn of the century it seemed to be the accepted wisdom that anything that government did, interfering in the market, was likely to be damaging.”

Sir Lambert thinks that the 2007 financial crisis was a bigger catastrophe than the Winter of Discontent. “We’ve learned that markets fail and a market economy can only work properly when it is aligned with a competent and active government.” For him the big question is what the role of the state will be in the new kind of capitalism that we’re moving to. What will the proper role of the state be and how will it set a regulatory structure that leads to a sustainable economy, sustainable employment and a fair system that citizens are prepared to accept?

What of the question of whether there will be another Winter of Discontent in 2011? At the time of the discussion, on November 1st 2011, over a million public sector workers had announced that they would strike on November 30th.

“The one area where democracy hasn’t even begun to enter into the discussion is the accountability of management to labour.” According to Tony Benn, his job as a minster was to protect and defend the manufacturing industry. The treasury would say that if a business failed it should just be allowed to go, whereas they are vigilant about any threat to the financial sector. “I think we have lost a lot over the years in neglecting our manufacturing industry. Still there are broader questions about the different interests between management and labour which come out in what’s called discontent.”

There are very large numbers of young people who are not in work, who are having a difficult time and have a right to be angry.

There won’t be a Winter of Discontent in the 1979 terms, according to Sir Richard Lambert, partly because trade union power is much less strong that it was. Fifteen per cent of the private sector is unionised and just over half in the public sector. “But where I do think that we can expect to see unhappiness expressed publicly is in occupying the streets. There are very large numbers of young people who are not in work, who are having a difficult time and have a right to be angry. They see in the newspapers every day headlines about the bonuses being paid in the city and executive pay more generally. They feel that parliament and the trade unions don’t have much to offer them and I’m not surprised they’re angry."

What about low/high pay asked Rodney Bickerstaffe? The Winter of Discontent wasn’t just about public services, it was about pay too. For Richard Lambert the introduction of the minimum wage in 1997 was another way in which the world has changed for good. “I’m not saying there’s not still great depravation in the land,” he adds, “but there’s not the extremes of low pay that there were in those days.”

Tony Benn took a different view. “There are very substantial differences between incomes and I think that the discontent that there is quite deep and strong. Whether, like 1979, it will produce another right-wing government I don’t know. It might be the other way around, producing a demand for a political alternative.”

The speakers agreed that there is a national mood for change on pay. Rodney Bickerstaffe summed up feelings of discontent by saying that the public is fed up with pensions, inflation, the fact that half of young school and college leavers are unemployed, and the fact that one per cent of the working population gets a far greater proportion of the national income than the rest. The debate was then opened up to the floor.

Do you remember the Winter of Discontent? How does then differ from now? What’s the way forward for our political and economic system? Leave your comments below.

Participants were the Right Honourable Tony Benn, former Cabinet Minister and Labour Party MP, and Sir Richard Lambert, Chancellor of the University of Warwick and former Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). The chairman was Rodney Bickerstaffe, former General Secretary of UNISON and a long-standing supporter of the Centre.

By Penelope Jenkins