Winter of Discontent - Political Impact

Political Impact

In the summer before the Winter of Discontent, the minority Labour government's fortunes in the opinion polls had been improving and suggested that they could gain an overall majority in the event of a general election being held. However, on 7 September 1978, Callaghan announced that no general election would be held that year. Callaghan's failure to call an election would ultimately prove to be a costly mistake for his government.

The strikes appeared to have a profound effect on voting intention. According to Gallup, Labour had a lead of 5% over the Conservatives in November 1978, which turned to a Conservative lead of 7.5% in January 1979, and of 20% in February. On 1 March, referendums on devolution to Scotland and Wales were held. That in Wales went strongly against devolution; that in Scotland produced a small majority in favour which did not reach the threshold set by Parliament of 40% of the electorate. The government's decision not to press ahead with devolution immediately led the Scottish National Party to withdraw support from the government and on 28 March in a motion of no confidence the government lost by one vote, precipitating a general election.

Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher had already outlined her proposals for restricting trade union power in a party political broadcast on 17 January in the middle of the lorry drivers' strike. During the election campaign the Conservative Party made extensive use of the disruption caused during the strike. One broadcast on 23 April began with the Sun's headline "Crisis? What Crisis?" being shown and read out by an increasingly desperate voiceover interspersed with film footage of piles of rubbish, closed factories, picketed hospitals and locked graveyards. The scale of the Conservatives' victory in the general election has often been ascribed to the effect of the strikes, and the party used film of the events of the winter in election campaigns for years to come.

Following Mrs Thatcher's election win, she brought the post-war consensus to an end and made drastic changes to trade union laws (most notably the regulation that unions had to hold a ballot among members before calling strikes) and as a result strikes were at their lowest level for 30 years by the time of the 1983 general election, which the Tories won by a landslide. Indeed, this shift to the right in British politics led to the formation of a new consensus, which dominated politics until the 2010s; both the Conservative and Labour Parties favoured lowering government spending, lowering taxation, and privatising industries and services that had hitherto been publicly owned. This shift was cemented in place by New Labour, which won the 1997 General Election. See New Right.