Editing Winter of Discontent (section)

===As 21st-century Conservative talking point===

In 2008, another ''Times'' piece raised the spectre of the Winter of Discontent in warning Labour, then in government with [[Gordon Brown]] as prime minister, not to allow the TUC to set the party's agenda again. Militant union rhetoric at the party's 2008 conference, [[Rachel Sylvester]] wrote, made it "a quaint but rather pointless vision of the past: [[Jurassic Park (film)|Jurassic Park]] with an [[ABBA|Abba]] soundtrack, a T-rex dressed in flares."<ref>{{cite news |last=Sylvester |first=Rachel |title=Labour beware, the dinosaurs are not extinct |url=https://www.thetimes.com/article/labour-beware-the-dinosaurs-are-not-extinct-kmptqxp0txc |newspaper=[[The Times]] |date=9 September 2008 |access-date=7 July 2020}}</ref> Five years later, at the first Margaret Thatcher Annual Lecture given after her death, [[Boris Johnson]] lamented that British youth were getting an overwhelmingly negative impression of the late prime minister from "[[Russell Brand]] and the BBC" that those old enough to remember what came before her election did not. "[In 1979] Red Robbo [i.e. [[Derek Robinson (trade unionist)|Derek Robinson]]] paralyzed what was left of our car industry and the country went into an ecstasy of uselessness called the winter of discontent: women were forced to give birth by candle-light, Prime Minister's Questions was lit by paraffin lamp and [[Blue Peter]] was all about how to put newspaper in blankets for extra insulation."<ref>{{cite web |last=Johnson |first=Boris |author-link=Boris Johnson |title=The Third Margaret Thatcher Annual Lecture |url=https://www.cps.org.uk/files/factsheets/original/131128144200-Thatcherlecturev2.pdf |page=3 |date=2013 |access-date=12 July 2020 |archive-date=30 October 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201030051409/https://www.cps.org.uk/files/factsheets/original/131128144200-Thatcherlecturev2.pdf |url-status=dead }}</ref> Two years later, with [[2015 United Kingdom general election|another election]] looming, Johnson again claimed that [[Ed Miliband]], Labour's then-leader, would take Britain back to the 1970s if he became prime minister.<ref>{{cite news |last=Mason |first=Rowena |title=Labour will take Britain back to 'nasty 1970s', says Boris Johnson |url=https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/31/boris-johnson-labour-britain-nasty-1970s |newspaper=[[The Guardian]] |date=31 March 2015 |access-date=13 July 2020}}</ref>

After losing that election, Miliband was succeeded as Labour leader by [[Jeremy Corbyn]], a surprise winner of the leadership election identified with the left wing of the party, who had been a NUPE activist before his election to Parliament in 1983; he was popular among younger voters. In the [[2017 United Kingdom general election|2017 general election]], the first contested with him as leader, the party did better than expected, gaining 30 seats, its first seat gains in 20 years. ''[[Daily Telegraph]]'' columnist Philip Johnston attributed this to Conservatives' failure to use the Winter of Discontent against Corbyn as an example for his youthful base of what his policies would likely lead to a repeat of. "It appears that the economic arguments we had as a nation in the Eighties will have to be joined all over again."<ref>{{cite news |last=Johnston |first=Philip |title=The Tories' biggest problem? No one remembers the winter of discontent anymore |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/05/tories-biggest-problem-no-one-remembers-winter-discontent-anymore/ |newspaper=[[The Daily Telegraph]] |date=5 July 2017 |access-date=13 July 2020}}</ref>

Two years later, in ''[[The Independent]]'', Sean O'Grady recalled his experience of that winter, as a child. While conceding that some memories of it exaggerated its severity, "[t]here was a mood in the country that we couldn't carry on like this" and thus Thatcher was elected. O'Grady warned readers that if reforms to labour laws that her government had enacted in the wake of the Winter of Discontent were repealed, in addition with the enactment of legislation desired by unions to make it easier to organize, Britain could see a repeat of 1979. "We learned hard lessons about this sort of thing in that exceptionally cold and harsh winter of 1978–79", he wrote. "Don't let Britain have to learn those painful lessons again, the hard way."<ref>{{cite news |last=O'Grady |first=Sean |title=Opinion: Corbyn aims to put unions back on top again. Have we learned nothing from the Winter of Discontent? |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/winter-of-discontent-jeremy-corbyn-trade-unions-margaret-thatcher-a8741256.html |newspaper=[[The Independent]] |date=22 January 2019 |access-date=13 July 2020}}</ref>

{{blockquote|"When deployed by the Right against the Left 'the 1970s' is a malleable field to which all the worst elements of the nation's past are consigned", Myers observed in ''Jacobin''. Yet, "the more the specter of 'the 1970s' is raised in British political discourse, the less the reality of the past is actually discussed ...  For modern British Conservatism, the 1970s can thus serve as an empty signifier, its power dependent on eternal repetition of a memory from which even those who lived it are excluded."<ref name="Jacobin piece" />}}