Alan Massie: Strikes just aren’t what they used to be - gesture by masses is far cry from industrial unrest of 1970s

IT WAS billed as the biggest strike in Britain for half a lifetime or more, but it wasn’t that. Neither was it like the strikes we used to know.

Lots of people, hundreds of thousands, took a day off work, and some of them marched and others formed pickets, but their action, or rather inaction, was largely symbolic, an expression of discontent. Even the ostensible reason for the strike – objections to the government’s plan for the reform of public-sector pensions – was hardly an immediate issue. People were striking because in 20, 30, 40 years’ time their pensions will be smaller than they hoped and expected they would be.

This one-day strike was nothing like the industrial unrest with which we were familiar in the 1970s. It was the sort of gesture we used to associate with Italians. The cry of “sciopero”, down tools, out on the streets, have fun, back to work tomorrow.

In the old days, strikes used to last for weeks. In 1978-9 we had a “winter of discontent” – when, famously, dead bodies piled up in the morgues and couldn’t be buried – not just a St Andrew’s Day of discontent and inconvenience.

Some of British Leyland’s car plants were closed down by strikers more often than not. We were accustomed to finding that the trains weren’t running and the docks were standing idle. Your morning newspaper didn’t arrive because the printers had walked out, sometimes for trivial reasons such as the replacement of a light bulb by an unauthorised person. Back in the 1960s there was a long-running seamen’s strike, which prime minister Harold Wilson said was “politically motivated” by Communists. And a few years later a strike by the National Union of Mineworkers brought down the Heath government.

The UK became known as the “sick man of Europe” because of our dreadful industrial relations and the readiness with which workers responded to the cry “all out!”

It was a time when the TUC and the big unions like the TGWU, the AEU and the NUM were powers in the land. The general secretary of the TUC and union leaders such as Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon had the entrée to Downing Street and the Treasury. They were recognised as being more important than most Cabinet ministers and were better-known to the public, too.

The strange thing was that the union leaders often had more influence on the government than control of their own members. A great many strikes were “unofficial” – especially in the motor industry. That is to say, they were called by shop stewards (often described as “agitators”), such as the famous Derek “Red Robbo” Robinson, and not by the union itself. The government would then have to try to persuade the union leaders to persuade their members to go back to work.

There was another difference between then and now: all the big unions today are public sector ones. When they strike, they inconvenience the public rather than their employer, the state.

Old-style industrial disruption might damage the national economy, but often didn’t affect the general public at all.