UK's winter of discontent heralds more protests

Britain has had a December to remember amid student protests, snow chaos, and disrupted travel plans. Will strikes now add to the winter of discontent?

Protestors pull barriers apart as they take part in student demonstrations in Parliament Square in London this month. Carl Court / AFP

It is a December to remember for the British people. There have been student protests against the rise in university fees, the snow chaos, and disrupted travel plans

The Boxing Day strike by London Underground drivers over pay caps heightened the misery and marked a fitting end to a difficult year. It brought much of the Tube network to a halt on the day that the crucial post-Christmas sales began in London's West End.

That was the fourth strike since September and it will not stop there, the country's trade unions warn.

There will be a wave of protests next year over government cuts, which will result in more than 300,000 public-sector job losses, a wage freeze and a higher pension contribution for those who stay.

By all accounts, a meeting that David Cameron, the prime minister, held with union leaders to try to defuse tensions ahead of the cuts had been a futile exercise. It was the first formal talks between a Conservative prime minister and a delegation of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) umbrella body since 1985 during the miners' strike, but both came out unwilling to change their stance.

The students had put the unions "on the spot", said Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite, the biggest and most militant union, rallying his 1.6 million members in an editorial for the centre-left broadsheet The Guardian. "We have to be preparing for battle." He said the "austerity frenzy" had been whipped up by the Tories in an attempt to complete "Thatcherism's unfinished business by strangling the welfare state".

"There is anger building up the likes of which we have not seen in the country since the poll tax [which brought down Margaret Thatcher's Tory leadership in 1990] … so it is the responsibility of the trades unions more than others to give guidance to that anger," he said in a follow-up interview.

Ed Miliband, the new leader of the Labour party, which is supported by the unions, has dismissed Mr McCluskey's rhetoric as wrong and unhelpful. Other leading unionists, however, are also happy to take to the streets in a big way, in strikes that will include students and the UK Uncut protest movement against alleged corporate tax evaders.

A protest demonstration in London has already been scheduled by the TUC for March 26. Other planned actions include sit-down protests on motorways and co-ordinated strikes.

The threats are alarming businesses and Conservative politicians. Businesses already face a tough time ahead on the back of disruption caused by the big freeze and student protests, and as the value added tax goes up and the public sector cuts begin to take effect.

Fearful of the return of the 1970s "British disease", the decade of strikes, power shortages and piles of rotting rubbish on the street, ministers and industry leaders are urging Mr Cameron to draw up plans to make it more difficult to legally hold a strike.

The London mayor, Boris Johnson, mindful that the strikes cost the capital about £50 million [Dh284.9m] a day, wants the threshold set at 50 per cent of eligible union members, rather than the current 50 per cent of those who actually vote.

The Confederation of British Industry, the employers' lobby, wants 40 per cent of union members balloted to be in favour of a strike. As the law stands, it can go ahead even if only 1 per cent of those polled respond - as long as there is a majority in favour.

Mr Cameron, however, has no plans for new anti-strike laws. Perhaps he does not want to worsen an already tense situation. Then again, perhaps he understands that for all their bravado, the unions have lost the clout they once had.

No doubt industrial action is on the rise. In the year to September, 563,000 working days were lost to strikes, nearly three times more than the previous year. But this is still a fraction of the 29.5 million working days lost in the 1979 winter of discontent, and the 27 million days lost in 1984 at the height of the miners' strike. Union membership, dominated by the public sector, has more than halved to just 6.2 million today from 12.5 million in 1979.

Still, alongside protests by students and the growing UK Uncut movement, the unions might just get people power to prevail.