‘The Winter of Discontent’ has assumed a mythic character. According to legend, this was the time when rampant greedy trade unionists held the country to ransom; when the fruits of the capitalist good life withered, to be rescued at the eleventh hour by the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister. This is the tale invoked in the media whenever trade unions show any signs of resistance.

Tara Martin López provides differing perspectives. She took the sensible course of going directly to workers, women as well as men, to trade union leaders, and to Labour politicians and asking them about their memories of the strikes. While this might appear an obvious way of researching the strikes of the late 1970s, surprisingly few journalists and academics have adopted it. The result is illuminating, poignant, and historically invaluable.

While she makes use of oral material to good effect, she complements the interviews with a large range of written material, from government papers to letters in newspapers. Consequently, this book is steeped in experiential evidence carefully contextualized within the stormy decade of the 1970s.

Both aspects allow her to make sense of the sources for conflict. Those ‘greedy’ workers were responding to inflation and wage restraint. These, in turn, had their origin in financial and economic crises over which those expected to pay the price had not presided. Their voices testify to grim conditions of work, limited options, and a sense of injustice. Their sin in the eyes of capital was simply that this post-war generation expected more. Only just a little more, it was true, but enough to trouble their employers’ profit margins and a Right wing in the Conservative Party, seeking control over unions as a means of reducing inflation. Conflict was stark and overt during the 1970s. It was evident not simply on picket lines, but at management training courses, confidentially headed ‘Revenge,’ and, as Tara Martin López reveals, in a fierce determination among sections of the Tory Party to rattle Labour's skeletons.

This book documents how an initially precarious Margaret Thatcher fostered the homily of the ‘Winter of Discontent’ to her advantage; it reminds us of the narrow margin by which the complacent and fatally insensitive James Callaghan was defeated in the Commons; and it traces the way in which the legacy of Thatcher was perpetuated through New Labour as seemingly inevitable.