Brown faces winter of discontent amid anger

Bloomberg

refid:10938139 ilişkili resim dosyası

Spreading strikes, reduced workweeks and tens of thousands of job cuts are throwing British Prime Minister Gordon Brown back to the 1970s. With 16 months before he has to call an election, Brown is facing the toughest test of a Labour premier since James Callaghan’s so-called Winter of Discontent in 1979, after which the party was cast out of office for almost two decades.

"They’ve sold us down the river," said Charles Hilton, 61, an electrician from Hull in northern England who was out on strike with oil-refinery workers. "We’re going to see civil unrest in this country. It’s already started. It will grow unless things are sorted."

Public anger is mounting as the unemployment roll approaches 2 million for the first time since 1997 and companies reduce working hours to cut costs. Contract workers at oil refineries, power plants and a nuclear facility this week staged walkouts as Britain dug out of its worst winter storm in 18 years.

Brown’s confrontation with his party’s base comes as he commits hundreds of billions of pounds to rescue banks and fends off calls to nationalize lenders amid the global credit crunch. Support for Labour is crumbling in former industrial regions of northern England and Scotland. Hilton, who calls himself a traditional Labour voter, said he’ll back David Cameron’s opposition Conservative Party in the next election.

Losing heartland support
Brown, 57, "is in danger of losing heartland support," said Steven Fielding, director of the Centre for British Politics at Nottingham University in central England. "Without their support, he’s got no chance."

Thirty years ago, a series of strikes allowed the Conservatives to portray the country as out of control. Margaret Thatcher took over in May 1979 after lashing Labour with the slogan "Britain Isn’t Working." To be sure, Brown, who took office in 2007, faces a landscape transformed by Thatcher and a decade of growth under his Labour predecessor, Tony Blair. In the 1970s, an average 12.9 million man-days were lost to strikes each year. In 2007, it was 1 million, according to the Office for National Statistics.

In contrast to the confrontations of the 1970s, unions are now working with employers to save jobs by cutting hours. Bentley Motors, a unit of Volkswagen, has scrapped its night shift as sales declined. At JC Bamford Excavators, a closely held UK manufacturer of construction equipment that employs 4,800 people in Britain, 332 jobs were saved as it trimmed production to four days a week, company spokesman John Kavanagh said. That doesn’t make things any easier for Brown.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research said on Wednesday that gross domestic product will drop 2.7 percent in 2009.

The Conservatives have a 12 percentage-point lead, a Jan. 31 poll in the Guardian showed. The newspaper didn’t say how many people were surveyed or provide a margin of error. The gap had narrowed to 1 point in December after Brown announced his bank-rescue proposals.

His troubles mounted last week when about 600 workers at Total’s Lindsey refinery in the north walked out Jan. 28 to protest the hiring of an Italian contractor with its own staff to do construction work. Unions claimed the imported workers were undercutting their wages and the strikers only returned yesterday after promises that 102 jobs would be given to Britons. The strikes spread across the country. About 800 people at the nearby Humber refinery and the Immingham power facility owned by ConocoPhillips and 500 contractors at two Scottish Power coal-fired plants also put down their tools.

’Out of touch’
"Brown is definitely out of touch, he should be leaping to our defense," said Smith, wrapped up from the cold in the parking lot opposite the Total refinery where strikers had gathered. "I’ve been working as a welder since I was 15 years old and I have never seen this sort of solidarity." London says the protests are groundless and that the companies involved are acting legally. The strikers carried placards bearing Brown’s 2007 promise to create "British jobs for British workers." Brown says he was referring to providing training opportunities, not restrictions for foreign workers. Matthew Worley, a history lecturer at Reading University and author of a book on the Labour Party in the 1920s and 30s, sees a parallel to Depression-era politics.