Editing Winter of Discontent (section)

==End of the strikes==

By the end of January 90,000 Britons were receiving unemployment benefit. There were no more major storms, but temperatures remained bitterly cold. Many remote communities still had not quite recovered from the snowstorm at the beginning of the month.<ref name="The British and their weather" /> A {{convert|40|mi|adj=on}} section of the [[M6 motorway|M6]] north of [[Walsall]] was closed to traffic, and many other roads, even near London, had enforced temporary speed limits as low as {{convert|20|mph}}. Plans to have the Army grit the roads were abandoned when NUPE official Barry Shuttleworth threatened an expanded strike of public employees in response.<ref name="Misery Monday" />

Strikes by essential services dismayed many senior ministers in the Labour government who had been close to the trade union movement, who had thought it unlikely that trade unionists would take such action. Among these was Prime Minister [[James Callaghan]] himself, who had built his political career on his connection to the trade unions, and had practically founded one, the [[Inland Revenue Staff Federation]]. Callaghan called the actions of the strikers "free collective vandalism".<ref>{{cite web |title=Callaghan Depicts Strikers as Vandals |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/02/archives/callaghan-depicts-strikers-as-vandals-britons-woes-mount-as-workers.html |work=The New York Times|access-date=30 November 2019 |date=2 February 1979}}</ref><ref name="Davies"/>

The government was negotiating with the senior union leaders and on 11 February came to an agreement on a proposal to be put to the TUC General Council. On 14 February, as thaws in the weather began to seem possible, the General Council agreed the concordat, published under the title "The Economy, the Government, and Trade Union Responsibilities".{{efn|The significance of a comprehensive agreement on [[Valentine's Day]] was remarked upon by the press{{citation needed|date=December 2012}}}} By this stage union executives had limited control over their members and strikes did not immediately cease, although they began to wind down from this point. In total in 1979, 29,474,000 working days were lost in industrial disputes, compared with 9,306,000 in 1978.

Storms in late February prolonged the isolation of the remote communities where roads had not been cleared yet. January 1979, with an average temperature of {{convert|-1.4|C|F}}, was the seventeenth coldest January since records began to be kept in 1659; in the years since only two other winter months in Britain (February 1986 and December 2010) have had average temperatures below freezing. The {{convert|-0.1|C|F}} average for both January and February has not ever been equalled by another two-month period since. Overall, the winter of 1979 was the twenty-eighth coldest ever, but the third coldest of the 20th century.<ref name="The British and their weather" />