I paid P&O for several channel crossing “season” tickets 10 days before they made their announcement. (DFDS had suspended their multi trip tickets). I crossed to the UK before the announcement. These undated tickets had to be amended by phone
Their website was inaccessible much of the time from that Thursday morning onwards. Their customer service line may have been working but if so I could not get through. When I emailed I got an automatic reply that I could expect a response within 28 working days.
So for my return Tuesday of last week I thought I would just get to Dover and see what I could do.
I tried their helpline one last time. Just as I approached Dover I finally got through. Since I did not have a confirmed date/time I was told that they had no current mechanism for these tickets but to go to the port and seek out the P&O staff who were liaising with DFDS. He could not tell me how or where to find or contact these people!
I went to the DFDS check in. They were easily able to find my booking ref on their fully integrated system. It took no more time than usual to be able to queue and board the DFDS ship. (I remember reading sometime ago that P&O and DFDS had integrated freight bookings so truckers could go to the port and board the first available ship).
I wonder therefore how long before DFDS knew (ie no DFDS multi-trip tickets).
I am concerned about my remaining 4 tickets but since P&O (via their agents) have fulfilled their contract to date… I feel a bit stuck. (Clearly they acted in bad faith in selling future tickets when they had no confidence they could provide a service!)
Surprise, surprise…
“P&O has gotten away with it. There’s no fine, there’s no legal action, there’s only words and hot air.”
Time for a blockade, a la Francaise? Yes I know, not good, won’t happen, but still. 
The thing is, in the longer term actions like strikes and blockades are good.
The Just Stop Oil protesters currently blockading UK oil depots may inconvenience some now - but in the long term we all benefit from such actions.
I sometimes wonder which, of all the very stupid things the Thatcher government did, has proven the most damaging. The utter mess made of the UK housing market? The deregulation that created a runaway cowboy financial sector? The tragedy of privatisation?
But probably, in fact, it was the weakening of trade unions. Any literate economist knows that trade unions drive up labour costs - thus forcing investment and increasing productivity - one of the main reasons the average French worker could now stop around Thursday lunchtime having already produced as much as a full week for a UK worker. Moreover, trade unions are particularly effective against bad businesses - helping good businesses that are responsible social actors, that pay and treat people well, to flourish. They are a much more effective instrument for economic improvement than market competition, which is generally just a race to the bottom.
So for 40 years - first under Thatcher, then by the failure of subsequent governments to fully reverse her mistakes - the UK has been effectively choosing to degrade its own economy.
I’m no fan of Thatcher but the unions became too powerful and often held the country to ransom so their powers had to be curbed, unfortunately her ideology took hold and she set out to effectively destroy them.
There are different ways to measure the strength of an economy and obviously productivity is one of them, unemployment/employment is another and it baffles me why France has one of the highest unemployment rates in the EU, conversely, the UK consistently has much lower rates.
I used to agree, and still think there is some merit in this - BUT…
The real problem with British industry was not so much the unions as the antagonism between unions and (often incompetent) management, upper class, arrogant, entitled and completely bloody useless (plus ça change…)
Had there been a more conciliatory & co-operative approach industrial relations might have been a lot better.
The union leaders became ‘celebrities’ Billy which was half the problem, Scargill was never interested in negotiation and wanted all pits to remain open even the loss making ones which lost him support from the NUM hierarchy and ultimately hastened the end of coal mining in the UK.
I’m really no expert but isn’t it because it is more expensive to employ people in France (but usually much better working conditions) and harder for start ups possibly.
" Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long-run it is almost everything," - Paul Krugman.
I would also question whether France does in fact have significantly higher unemployment than the UK. UK media reports on this often confuse the unemployment rate and the unemployment ratio.
And of course that ‘holding the country to ransom’ line is also a UK media cliché, with its usual casual relationship to the truth.
Management incompetence in the UK was, and is, grounded in the class system - it’s absolutely clear from the evidence in education that less intelligent but economically privileged kids go on to ‘better’ jobs - it’s a system that selects incompetence.
Here again France does a bit better, I think - it has a very competitive, but more meritocratic system.
Scargill was fairly unpleasant I agree - he was in it for the battle with “the right” and advocated overthrownof the Tories by violent means if necessary.
He just wasn’t that good a tactician, failed to recognise that after the strikes (and power cuts) in the 70’s the government/electricity board had built up massive coal stocks at the power stations, failed to recognise that coal was on the way out as a fuel and that the mining industry was inevitably going to be smaller and failed to recognise that he needed unity in the industry for what was going to be the long haul.
Admittedly the 2nd point would have needed foresight and wasn’t *totally* obvious in 1984 but frankly the strike hastened the move away from coal as a fuel.
I was lucky enough many years ago to spend some time with the great Tyrone O’Sullivan of the South Wales miners - including stopping him falling over outside a vodka bar in Brussels, after a great right hook from the girlfriend of another friend of mine. The late great Bob Wearn, who subsequently became the Assistant General Secretary of the Musician’s Union, was supporting Tyrone on the other side at the time. We were all working on employee-buy-outs with the European Commission - Tyrone led the buy-out of the Tower Colliery in South Wales, and Bob and I were in the middle of a national programme of music teachers’ buying out council music teaching services. The punch was for some sexist remark - I understand it was thoroughly deserved - which Tyrone later admitted (but violence is never justified kids!).
Anyway - Tyrone often talked fondly about ‘Arthur’ - but at the same time made it very clear that although their aims were the same, they had very different ideas on both tactics and strategy…
I take it the ‘winter of discontent’ didn’t actually happen and the constant strikes and massive wage demands didn’t put an end to the Callaghan government which led to Thatcher sweeping to power?
Anyone who lived through " the winter of discontent ’ Thatcher inherited in the UK would be unlikely to agree with you Geoff. Rubbish piles in the street uncollected brimming with rats and heaven knows what else, people who had died not buried for weeks on end, electricity for industry only on 3 days per week and only some hours on some days for households, other public services not running, miners who dropped stones off bridges onto the motorway that went through windscreens killing people… the unions were out of control.
I do agree with you though that union power was cut too far back in due course. I am all in favour of intelligent unions and the positive exercise of power by unions in cooperation with employers and industry as in, say, Germany and the Netherlands.
I blame the finance-ization of the real industries and public services that we need, in particular the pernicious doings of so-called "private equity’ and the lack of constraints on capitalists such as Philip Green and Dominic Chappell. So I’ll meet you half-way Geoff.
Exactly what happened often tends to be different from the tabloid headline version.
Yes I remember it well Karen - principally the said headlines. I saw the pictures of the ‘piles of rubblish’ all over the tabloids - but did I actually see any in the real world? NO!
Your own post is startlingly revelatory of how biased media coverage and constant repetition of false histories distort memories: the so-called ‘winter of discontent’ was a few weeks over the 1978-9 winter - entirely separate from the power cuts etc of the 3-day week (which were under Heath’s Tory government about 1974 from memory) - and both of these were entirely separate from the miner’s strike of 1984 - under Thatcher - during which the road-bridge-stone-dropping incident occurred.
It is of course no reflection on you that you’ve misremembered all this - it is precisely the story that the UK media has invented and managed to get millions to believe.
I’ll tell you another story. I lived in a mining village during the 1984-5 strike. Many miners were among my friends. My house was very close to the picket line at the main entrance to Silverdale pit (in Staffordshire), and I witnessed first hand police brutality - to the miners wives, who were very active in the strike, as well as the men by the way. That was expected. But my most shocking memory was of the day the miners made little nail traps to spike the tyres of the lorries going into the pit - they were, because of the protesters, always going dead slow, and there was no danger to anyone. There were no mounted police there. That evening, however, the police exhibited the nail traps on the news, saying they had been thrown under their horses’ hooves.
Next day many people expressed their shock that such cruelty had happened in my village. No doubt thousands - maybe millions - I didn’t speak to continue to believe it happened. But it didn’t. It was entirely invented. I know, because I really did ‘live through it’.
I worked in Glasgow and London at the time and the likes of the piles of rubbish were real enough, I can remember the controling of lorries into some towns and cities, the very real problems farmers had getting rid of carcasses/cattle to abattoirs and getting feed, the empty shelves, the abuse the gravediggers got for going on strike and the bodies piling up at the factory in Speke to store corpses until they could be safely buried, life wasn’t helped by the fact that winter of 1979 was also the coldest for 16 years, it wasn’t all made up and rosy.
@KarenLot , just like many people in the ‘back to the seventies’ thread recently, your conflating several different events in the 70’s and 80’s and presenting them as a whole. It’s unfortunately very common.
Edit: Just seen @Geof_Cox post. He says it much better.
Edit2: I also agree with @Griffin36 . Rubbish did pile up, but it was mostly in the cities. Where I lived, I also didn’t see this, but did see it elsewhere.
Yes - almost all the tabloid photos were actually taken in Leicester Square, part of which Westminster Council designated as a temporary storage dump (possibly in a deliberate attempt to exacerbate the situation).
Over the 70s and 80s many of the events ‘remembered’ here took place - although their scale and significance was and is wildly exaggerated. In the Liverpool suburb of Speke 56 gravediggers did strike for a few days in January 1979, for example - the first time in their history - which became in tory tabloid land a huge national scandal. What’s invented is the connecting narrative - the ‘enemy within’ trade union conspiracy theory.
The truth is far more interesting and innstructive. In response to the high levels of inflation inherited from the previous Tory government (to be fair caused mainly by international factors) the Wilson government in 1975 agreed a pay restraint policy with the TUC. It worked very well - actually an example of the approach that has always worked well in Germany and Sweden - and indeed Labour and the TUC were developing at the time the Bullock ‘co-determination’ proposals, reflecting the German Mitbestimmung ‘indistrial democracy’ management system. What might have been!
Unfortunately Wilson became seriously ill and suddenly handed over to Callaghan - who in the midst of this work that could have turned the UK into a proper, modern industrial economy - which was happening among its Continental neighbours - Callaghan panicked, and among a number of poor strategic decisions - including postponing the general election from the Autumn of 1978 - much like Brown 30 years later - he departed from the agreement with the TUC without consultation and tried to force more draconian pay restraint, even though by then inflation had been pretty much brought under control.
It was this that kicked off the industrial action, first at Ford. The public sector strikes that everybody focuses on (actually evidence that all the most important jobs are indeed in generally low-paid public services) were almost all started and finished in the last week of January and first 2 weeks of February 1979, and never involved the vast majority of workers. In this sense, there never really was a ‘winter of discontent’ - but it did give the UK media a tool to engineer the subsequent Thatcher disaster.
After ten days, the 56 workers reconvened and decided to return to work. Of all the industrial action of 1979, their strikes were said to have not so much hit the government, but affected everyday people, which was never their intent.
Many unions blamed the gravediggers action for the resulting Conservative laws that forbade their previous methods of striking, for which they may be correct. Death and treatment of the deceased will forever invoke strong views
We all, who were adult and living at the time, have our own personal view (in the physical sense of the word, not opinion) of both the ‘winter of discontent’ and the '84 strike. I also had a personal view of the earlier one which caused Edward Heath to go to the country on the question of ‘who governs, the elected government or unelected unions?’ He won the popular vote but lost the election, due to the undemocratic nature of the British electoral system.
I did not suffer in ‘the winter…’ but had an Australian friend who, with no social security to support his unemployment, worked for Manpower in clearing the streets of rubbish, and not just in Leicester square.
But I was targetted with violence in both miners’ strikes. Legally entering Nottinghamshire pits in '84 to load my lorry I was threatened and, in some circumstances forced away, by hundreds of massed thugs completely blocking approach roads. Nottinghamshire miners, and others, were horrified that a national strike could be called without a valid vote. That was all they wanted and, when denied by Scargill (for good reasons, he thought he would lose), decided to keep on working until one was called. The result was that undemocratic mobs were bussed in from elsewhere, mainly Yorkshire and the NE, to physically stop us working.
There were many occasions across the Midlands but I will bring one to your attention. The Coalite plant at Bolsover in Derbyshire was not a coalmine, it was a chemical factory producing smokeless fuel. and thus nothing to do with the strike, other than perceived to be supplying alternative fuel to the public. I drove in past a small picket one morning with no trouble, loaded and returned with my trailer to Nottingham, then again with another container for another load. The picket was a little larger, much more vocal but still kept back by the police cordon. While I was loading we could see buses arriving in the distance and when it was time to leave the police halted us in a line while they discussed things with the miners. Eventually they came to an agreement, the picket would let us through providing we stopped if asked and allowed a spokesman to try to persuade us not to return. Several drivers did so and were allowed to continue, though I had no way of knowing what had been agreed. But then when another one stopped, while the driver was listening to the picket and his attention was diverted, a miner managed to cut the fuel lines from tank to engine thus blocking, they hoped, the entrance/exit. Not realising what had happened the driver continued for a short way but then, of course, came to a stop but not blocking the road.
So things had changed, the police held us back in a long line until their own re-enforcements arrived. Then they told us that they would hold a path and we were to leave, but at speed. This we did and survived possible overturns as we swerved out of the gates and onto the road. We all got away, but not unscathed. By this time there were thousands, not hundreds, enough to line the route in depth along the road from the factory, and they had armed themselves with anything to hand, bricks and stones bounced off my cab and I was very fortunate not to be one of those showered with broken glass and injured.
Back at Nottingham the haulage firm called a halt, but I doubt any one of us would have gone back to face that. The most terrifying thing I have ever experienced in my life. Please don’t anyone tell me ‘it was only in tabloid pictures’ that I saw it. I was there, I saw it, first hand.