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Continue reading Tagged Conservative party, Labour Party, Left, Media, Seventies, Strikes, Unions 31 Comments The myth of American conservatism
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Union membership and labour militancy remain at historic lows across the Western world, including in Britain. But just as one swallow does not make a summer, so three days of national strikes by a single union does not signal a return to 1979, let alone a future blighted by class war. Certainly, by paralysing Britain’s rail transportation network through the withdrawal of their members’ labour, the RMT has demonstrated the latent industrial power of Britain’s workers. Yet on almost every level, the notion that we’re seeing a return to the Seventies is fantasy politics. As with all fairy-tales, it also had a happy ending, in this case with Britain’s exhausted voters ejecting James Callaghan’s Labour government and sweeping Mrs Thatcher into office to save the country from intransigent union barons and far-Left militancy. Britain’s newspapers are trying their hardest to evoke the chaos of the winter of 1978-79, which, in the neoliberal fairy-tale version of history, marked the grim nadir of union power and social collapse in the UK. Headlines scream about a looming “ class war“ reports warn of an inevitable “summer of discontent”.