CERTAIN memories seem set in stone when you look back at that turbulent year of 1979, the year in which Margaret Thatcher came to power, ending five years of Labour government, and set about changing Britain.

Many people who lived through the era recall assertive, powerful unions, numerous strikes and walkouts, and a beleaguered Labour government: the Winter of Discontent.

A glance at headlines in the Glasgow Herald from February that year gives a strong flavour of this, right on the first day: “Lorrymen go back – now the reckoning” (a crippling road-haulage strike had come to an end after a month; between 1p and 2p in the pound would now be added to groceries); and “New contract answer to pay chaos?” (the TUC and Chancellor Denis Healey moved closer to a new ‘social contract’ amid growing disruption from strikes against Jim Callaghan’s 5% pay policy).

There had been many such stories in the weeks and months beforehand; there would, of course, be many more. “The prevailing social mood”, Mrs Thatcher would write, many years later, “was one of snarling envy and motiveless hostility. To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches”.

David Owen, the Foreign Secretary at the time, was one of those who believed that Labour ought to have declared a state of emergency. By February 1, as he wrote in his memoirs, Time to Declare, the health service unions and the local authority unions were on strike, “and Jim was well aware that indiscipline and what I described as thuggery were threatening the government.

“He sadly felt unable to do what I think he knew he should, namely go on television and demonstrate that he had enough. At this stage we were not even able to bury the dead and ambulances were failing to pick up patients. If Jim had expressed his disgust on television it could have been very powerful”.

Owen said there was not a single night when Callaghan did not consider going on television: but he then asked himself if anything would really be different the next day.

Because Owen was slightly distanced from the government’s day-to-day handling of events, he writes, “I saw perhaps more clearly that we were witnessing the terminal stages of the government. In a strange way, Jim knew it too”.

The headlines continued to dominate the front pages of this and every other daily newspaper. From our edition of February 2: “Premier digs in for bitter fight over pay”; “Water alert as strikes bite”; “Miners appeal to Callaghan for more”; “Showdown near on [Civil Service] jobs switch”.

From February 3rd: “Water strike cuts off kidney patient”. The 5th: “Callaghan opens the gates on pay” (the PM had admitted that the 5% policy was now at an end). On an inside page the Herald reported that Scottish hospitals would that day be hit by selective strike action – but the union involved, NUPE, had refused to name its targets.

That evening, Sir Keith Joseph, the Tories’ hard man on union power, made a conciliatory speech in the Commons, calling for a “peace conference” between his party and the unions, and rejecting the assertion that their wage demands were a direct cause of inflation. It was seen as a watershed in the party’s preparations in the event of a spring election.

Scotland’s 17,000 miners, appalled by the NCB’s “joke wage offer” were to launch a pithead campaign to prepare them for any industrial action in furtherance of their claim.

Nicholas Fairbairn, the Tory MP, demanded a complete ban on pay-strikes – “licensed extortion” – and called for pickets to be outlawed. On February 7, Callaghan told a Sheffield audience that interruptions, go-slows and lightning strikes were death to industrial prosperity. Two nurses were ejected from the venue’s balcony after they called him a vandal. In Birmingham, 19,000 British Leyland workers staged a walkout at the Longbridge plant in the company’s row over parity payments.

Shell announced price increases of 3p per gallon, in the wake of OPEC’s increase of crude oil prices. Other oil companies were expected to follow Shell’s example. Brewers warned that beer would go up by 3p a pint. The price of cigarettes was also expected to rise.

On February 10, it was reported that every Scots hospital could be hit in a few days by an indefinite overtime ban by manual workers. You have to wonder what it was like, being a Cabinet minister and trying to cope with this endless wave of wage claims and disruption. Added to all of which was the fact that the Scottish and Welsh assembly referendums, an important part of Labour policy, were taking place on March 1.

The stories continued throughout February: Callaghan won his new pact with the TUC but only at the expense of his 5% pay limit. Mrs Thatcher, the leader of the Opposition, scorned it as a “boneless wonder”.

By then, grim news had been delivered to the 680 workers at the Goodyear Tyre Factory at Drumchapel: the owners announced that the plant, which was losing £10,000 a day, having lost £3m the previous year, was to shut down in 90 days.

Reported the Glasgow Herald: “It was the refusal of 430 manual workers to work Friday night shift once every three weeks which led to the closure – a refusal which the company’s top management described as ‘industrial suicide’.”

Westi Hansen, chairman and MD of Goodyear Great Britain, said that every concession to the workforce had resulted in people assuming that the company was bluffing. “We are not bluffing ... The plant will close”. He attacked the plant’s output and absenteeism.

As 40,000 civil servants in Scotland responded to a one-day strike call on February 23, union officials at Goodyear Tyre Factory went round the “numbed” shop floor, arguing the case for the company’s previously-announced survival plan.

On February 26, the Herald was reporting that the workers were pleading with Goodyear to “give us another chance”. However, they wanted to be allowed to work an extra night shift on a Sunday, rather than a Friday, which the men were said to prize for “social reasons”.

A company spokesman, however, confirmed that closure would go ahead in three months’ time: “We know about the men’s decision. But it is too late. We have made our decision and my information is that we are sticking to it”. (Closure was finally confirmed on March 19).

On the 21st of the month the heir to the throne, speaking in London, blamed management for many of Britain’s industrial troubles. “People”, Prince Charles said, “are not impossible to deal with. Unions are not impossible to deal with. Bloody-mindedness, if it arises, must do surely because of misunderstandings”.

Much of British management didn’t seem to understand the importance of the human factor; and it was an over-simplification to say that UK industry suffered because workers resisted change. “The evidence is that our people, like others, will tolerate change if they see its necessity and properly understand its purpose and value”.

Charles’s message evidently struck a nerve. The CBI retorted that if he were to spend a couple of years trying to cope with the problems that managers faced, “he would come to understand that solutions are not that easy to find”.

The Callaghan’s government lost a Commons vote of confidence on March 28, and an election was soon called for May 3.

Mrs Thatcher was confident that her party’s time had come. Writing in 1993 she said: “The ‘winter of discontent’, the ideological divisions in the [Labour] Government, its inability to control its allies in the trade union movement ... all these gave a fin de siecle atmosphere to the approaching election campaign”.

The lessons of 1979 died hard. But Frances O’Grady, of the TUC, writing in 2010, made an interesting point when she observed: “1979, at least as it entered popular mythology, represented a point of rupture between trade unions, particularly those in the public sector, and the wider community. Thatcherism aimed to ruthlessly exploit that sympathy gap for a generation”.