David Vance SubstackRead More
I remember the 1970’s. I was there. The music was good but the economy wasn’t so great.
Labour were in power for a significant amount of time during that decades under Harold Wilson and then Sunny Jim Callaghan.
Under this Labour regime, strikes proliferated, UK productivity plummeted and the Trade Unions were ascendent.
By 1978, the UK had acquired the reputation as “the sick man” of Europe due to the waves of strikes which cumulated in the’ Winter of Discontent in late 1978–early 1979. Here gravediggers’ strikes in Liverpool and Tameside prevented burials and cremations, leading to bodies piling up and being stored in temporary facilities. Militant trade unions had wrecked Britain and the response to it came hard in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher came to a decade of power to reverse this sickness.
Fast forward to 2025 and Andre Egan is elected General Secretary of Unison, the UK’s largest union.
She has vowed to end support for any left wing politician hostile to Trade Union ambitions. Things are going to change.
