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Strikes of the 1970's

butchersapron said:
On 43% of the vote - 37% voted labour and 5 years previously had rejected th tories when they chose to run a general election based specifically on the question 'Who Runs the Country? Us or the Unions?' with the exact same vote. There was no angry swing to Thatcher based on rejection of the unions, this is another self-serving myth.
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I'm hesitant about querying your facts but are you sure?

according to http://www.election.demon.co.uk/geresults.html the tory share of the vote went up by 8% and the Labour share down by 2.3%. In real terms the Tories added 3 million votes to their Oct 74 tally.

I remember that election as having the unions at the centre of the arguments.
 
1974 election: Wilson/Callaghan vs Heath/Thatcher
SWING
Turnout = 72.8%
Labour - 39.3% (+2.1)
Conservative - 35.7% (-2.1)

1979 Callaghan/Foot vs Thatcher
Turnout = 76%
Labour - 36.9% (-2.4)
Conservative - 43.9% (+8.2)

Sort it out, Butchersstrapon
 
Shevek said:
From what I read of Chomsky he seems to view unions as a progressive force. What I am driving at is that the union movements of the 1970's must have been progressive according to Chomsky's analysis. Why then was so much vitriol poured on them. Why is the period commonly viewed as the unions 'having too much power' surely it is better and more democratic that unions exercise power than big business.
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Unions can be a progressive force. But not if they throw their toys out of the pram every time they fail to negotiate a pay rise, as was the case under Callaghan.
 
Wolveryeti youre ignoring the fact that in nationalized industries managers are often promoted

a) because theyre shit at what they currently do - the if you want to get rid of someone promote them attitude (rife in my experience)

b) because they fit a particular perceived effective management style or they are arse licking twats

c) because they have been in the job a long time and are promoted through rank / seniority

Combine that with the macho man era of the 1970s and the inability to actually manage or negotiate effectively, people who arent selected on merit negotiating with hardmen union leaders, all playing hardball with each other and bingo you have a recipe for disaster.

The unions were under a lot of pressure from their members due to the prevailing global economic conditions affected by oil prices that went from about $3 a barrel in 1972 to $12 in 1973 to $36 in 1978. Everyone felt poorer as a consequence of this.
Both those massive price rises prompted big recessions. But of course it was "Britain" that wasnt working and all the fault of the unions. Not piss poor management practices made by piss poor managers which antagonized employees by walking roughshod over employment practices, not increasing oil prices prompting global downturns throughout the decade.
I agree unions have to understand and appreciate the prevailing conditions and accept as most do today that when orders contract so does the workforce have to. But Thatcher never really told the truth and set out to destroy all vestiges of a socialist society as it threatened her power base.
 
newbie said:
I'm hesitant about querying your facts but are you sure?

according to http://www.election.demon.co.uk/geresults.html the tory share of the vote went up by 8% and the Labour share down by 2.3%. In real terms the Tories added 3 million votes to their Oct 74 tally.

I remember that election as having the unions at the centre of the arguments.
Click to expand...

Your figures and mine are both correct, they should be given that they're exactly the same - we might have different interpretations of what they mean though.

Mine runs along the lines that though there was an undoubted swing to the tories (there had to be win a majority at that point) this just represented a return to their normal level of votes they pick up when they win elections - it was in the broad run of previous results (i.e around 13 million votes - see figures below). It didn't represent a massive unprecedented society wide rejection of unions or the social wage - despite the myth making that has grown up since - the tories still only managed to pick up 43% of the votes (magnified in terms of actual seats won due to the FPTP system), labour still picked up 37% - and these figures only cover those voting as well.

Related point but maybe OT, it's amazing how such an amazing victory can be portrayed as clear mandate for wide-ranging change when it's the right who achieves it, yet when the left does the same the lesson is that government should be based on partnership and in the interests of all. I wonder whose interests were behind that argument at the time (and subsequent myth-making)?

Those figures:

79:
Tory: 13,697,923 votes (43.9%)
Labour: 11,532,218 (36.9%)


Oct 74:
Conservative: 10,462,565 (35.8%)
Labour: Labour: 11,457,079 (39.2%)


Feb 74:
Conservative: 11,872,180 ( 37.9%)
Labour: 11,645,616 (37.2%)

70
Tory: 13,145,123, (46.4 %)
Labour: 12,208,758 (43.1%)



And in the previous elections the tories won post-war:

13,948,883 (48.8%) in 1951
13,310,891 (49.7%) in 1955
13,750,875 (49.4%) in 1959
13,145,123, (46.4 %) in 1970

Notes the 13 million figure repeating over and over.
 
Quartz said:
Hmm.. how do you square union power with anarchism? Union power is just as bad as government power.



They elected Mrs T. 'Nuff said.



Again, how do you square this with anarchism?.



There were several issues. Firstly the unions had got too powerful. They were trying to run the country. Secondly, you had to have a 'good strike' under your belt to get anywhere in the TUC, so strikes abounded; remember 'the British Disease'? Thirdly there was the incompetence of first Heath who let the unions boss him around, then Wilson, and finally Callaghan and Healey. We had to go cap in hand to the IMF. That really grated. Then there was the exposure of strike vote rigging. I remember (just) the power cuts under Heath. I remember the Winter of Discontent. But the death knell was sounded not by the election of Mrs T, but by the unions themselves: firstly Arthur Scargill who openly wanted to topple the government, then by the lady who led the print union into oblivion against Maxwell and Murdoch. If the unions had kept to their jobs - protecting and defending the rights of their members - and being reasonable about it - letting unprofitable pits close, for example - then they'd have done just fine. But they brought it all crashing down. They failed to see that Mrs T had studied the past and prepared for them: mandatory secret ballots, the end of the Closed Shop, no secondary picketing, stockpiles of coal...

Unions - and the Guilds which preceded them - are absolutely necessary to prevent workers from getting the rawest of deals. But in the 70s, they got the idea that they could rule the country and eventually paid the price for their hubris.
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utter tosh.

It was actually the abysmal record of the Callaghan govt and the deals done between the TUC and them that brought the Labour vote down. Why have a Labour Govt acting like a Tory one when you can have a real Tory one?
 
danny la rouge said:
The point I was making in my post is that this > "if you honestly believed Thatcher wasn't a reaction by the electorate to TU excess. I'd argue she was and that that point is not deniable" is the New Right version. The Thatcherite consensus won, and so it is the received wisdom.
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:hmm:

I feel like Paxo on Newsnight interviewing a Minister . . .
 
I think it's about getting the balance right. No one wants huge strikes , but at the same time, society has gone so far to the right, workers have no rights anymore, how many times will people hear "you're lucky to have a job" when they object to unpaid overtime etc?
 
butchersapron said:
Your figures and mine are both correct, they should be given that they're exactly the same - we might have different interpretations of what they mean though.

Mine runs along the lines that though there was an undoubted swing to the tories (there had to be win a majority at that point) this just represented a return to their normal level of votes they pick up when they win elections - it was in the broad run of previous results (i.e around 13 million votes - see figures below). It didn't represent a massive unprecedented society wide rejection of unions or the social wage - despite the myth making that has grown up since - the tories still only managed to pick up 43% of the votes (magnified in terms of actual seats won due to the FPTP system), labour still picked up 37% - and these figures only cover those voting as well.
Click to expand...

Well, something accounted for 3 million more people being motivated to vote for the tories: one in 4 of their voters hadn't voted for them 5 years earlier. Their votes didn't come from Labour, whose vote held up, there wasn't a Labour collapse.

Those 3 million may have previously left the tories, but they'd done so explicitly on the question of the unions. Why shouldn't their return be seen as rejection of union activity as much as any other aspect of Callaghans administration? If not, if you're saying that the net effect of robbo and winter of discontent and all that was minor, then some other explanation for those three million votes is necessary.



Related point but maybe OT, it's amazing how such an amazing victory can be portrayed as clear mandate for wide-ranging change when it's the right who achieves it, yet when the left does the same the lesson is that government should be based on partnership and in the interests of all.
Click to expand...

Isn't that a reflection of the core postwar rightwing vote being larger? In retrospect, had callaghan delivered that sort of partnership we might have been spared Thatcher. Union pressure on pay restraint, particularly in the nationalised industries, had a part to play in his inability to do so.
 
newbie said:
Well, something accounted for 3 million more people being motivated to vote for the tories: one in 4 of their voters hadn't voted for them 5 years earlier. Their votes didn't come from Labour, whose vote held up, there wasn't a Labour collapse.
Click to expand...
A significant part of that "something" could be argued to have been Edward Heath, whom many right-tories shied away from because of perceptions (based mostly on heath's pro-Europe stance) that Heath was on the tory left. Thatcher brought the abstainers of five years before back into the fold.
 
maybe, I'm a bit doubtful that 'right-tories' would have failed to support their party on the 'who rules Britain, Tories or Unions' elections of '74.

If you're right their extremism backfired anyway since Wilson won the '75 referendum
 
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