Dave Lyddon

The changing pattern of UK strikes, 1964-2014

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the changing strike activity in the UK over the last 50 years. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on a wide literature on UK strikes and an extensive trawl of newspaper sources. It is divided into four main sections. The first two summarise, in turn, the changing amount and locus of strike activity between 1964 and 2014. The third discusses the changing relationship and balance between official and unofficial strikes. The last covers the role of the courts and legislation on strikes, highlighting some key moments in this turbulent history. Findings – The period 1964-2014 can be divided into three sub-periods: high-strike activity until 1979; a transition period of “coercive pacification” in the 1980s; and unprecedentedly low-strike activity since the early 1990s. Unions were more combative against the legislative changes of the 1980s than they are normally given credit for. Research limitations/implications – Given its broad scope...

Ethical Socialism and the Trade Unions: Allan Flanders and British Industrial Relations Reform

the USA. Such a distinction of the use of force by the state matters when the object of the exercise is to determine whether public debate was useful or required or not. States can use military force in limited ways without such debates. Indeed, in most of those cases, public debate is not effective in any case, nor is it interested. That lack of public interest, says Towle, is something that the UK must be wary of when the next situation arises that requires a decision to use military force in pursuit of state interests. Still, for anyone familiar with the last three general elections in the UK, and the lack of any substantive debates on foreign or defence policies in any of them, one has to ask whether it is only the fiscal collapse of the nation that has finally forced any sort of debate at all about such issues. Ultimately, the book is worth reading for the questions it poses and not the answers it provides, which is a most useful service in itself.