In June 2013, Education Secretary Michael Gove criticized striking teachers. ‘There are far better ways to secure enhanced working environments for teachers than 70s-style trade union tactics.’ Gove's allusion sought to strike a chord with the British public and press. The Daily Mail explains, ‘Referencing the 1970s will trigger uncomfortable memories of the strikes that shook the country that decade, culminating in the winter of discontent when rubbish was left on streets and bodies went unburied.’ The evocation of the Winter of Discontent, a series of strikes over 34 years ago, is still common in British political culture. In 1978–79 workers engaged in a series of strikes in protest against the then Labour government's wage limits. These controls, or incomes policies, were not uncommon in post-war Britain, but for British trade unions, three years of wage restraint, coupled with inflation depressing workers’ wages, made the rank-and-file membership increasingly less likely to abide yet another year of such a policy. Towards the end of 1978, Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan's imposition of a 5 per cent wage limit proved particularly galling, and trade unions were in a position to effectively resist the government's efforts. The first rupture came in September 1978, when Ford workers went on strike for an increase of 17 per cent, effectively breaking the income policy. Overtime bans among oil tanker drivers and strikes in road haulage soon ensued. When public sector workers followed with nationally co-ordinated action in January of 1979, some of the most iconic images of these strikes exploded across British newspapers and television with piles of rubbish on the streets because of striking dustmen, services limited at hospitals by striking domestic cleaners, and, most notoriously, mourners turned away by picketing gravediggers. Such drama prompted the Sun editor Larry Lamb to coin this dramatic series of events ‘The Winter of Discontent.’

The Conservative Party, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, capitalized on these strikes as shining examples of Labour's inability to control its own supporters in the trade union movement. This strategy proved effective, and Thatcher was elected to office on May 3, 1979 with a supposed ‘mandate’ to ‘clip the wings’ of trade unions.