8 - Crosscurrents: Myth, Memory, and Counter-Memory

Summary

‘We should not allow ourselves to lose a vivid memory of what happened [during the Winter of Discontent], and the reversion to barbarism that took place.’ – Margaret Thatcher, July 6, 1979 speech

In 1991 Conservative author Eamonn Butler remarked that the Winter of Discontent was so traumatic for the British public that ‘the awful details […] are often blotted from people's memory.’ He spoke too soon. They would continue to be evoked. Almost 20 years after Butler declared the memory of the Winter of Discontent a disturbing event securely relegated to irrelevance, historian Niall Ferguson opened The Shock of the Global in 2010 with an introduction titled ‘Crisis, What Crisis?’ before detailing James Callaghan's media blunder upon returning from Guadeloupe in 1979. Ferguson took the headline as expressive of the apparent chaos of the decade. ‘The seventies are indeed still popularly remembered – in the English-speaking world at least – as a time of crisis.’

Outside of Conservative circles, the Winter of Discontent also continues to be resonant, in an especially personal way for some. When posed the question ‘Why was the [Liverpool gravediggers’] strike approved when it appears an obvious strike not to approve?’ Larry Whitty, who had been a GMWU researcher at the time, began to answer, but stumbled mid-sentence. He averted his gaze for the first time in the interview; his eyes misted over; and the articulate and poised flow of speech became an awkward trickle of words. My interview with Whitty in 2006 made me realize how the process of remembering the strikes was not simply a historical endeavour, but the choices individuals had made were still a source of profound emotion personally as well as politically. Not only for participants like Whitty alone, but for the British public at large, the memory of the Winter of Discontent has taken on a life of its own and continued to have a profound effect on British political culture.

As mentioned in chapter one, the emphasis sociologist Maurice Halbwachs places on the ‘framework of collective memory’ as a binding force is particularly apposite in understanding how the reiteration of the dreadful memories that enveloped the strikes of the late 1970s came to have an impact on through the 1980s and ‘90s. Not only did the memory become shared, but it assumed a mythic quality during the general election and afterwards.