There’s labor trouble on the rails in Great Britain. Again. And on the tube, and among British Airways cabin crew and baggage handlers at Heathrow. In December, Steve Hedley, the Assistant General Secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport Workers Union, not-so-affectionately known as rmt, told Russia Today that, “It’s very clear in our rule book. We’re in an antagonistic relationship with the managers and with the bosses. We want to overthrow capitalism and create a socialist form of society.” Mr. Hedley, also known as “Red Heds,” would have been no more than four years old and so won’t remember, as I do, the dark days and darker nights of the Three-day Week in 1974. Then, the Conservative government led by Edward Heath took on the National Union of Mineworkers and lost; Mr. Hedley obviously has something similar in mind.

Back in 1974, the central issue in the February general election campaign was said to be “Who governs Britain?”—the implied alternative answers being the elected government or the trades unions. Though Mr. Heath’s Conservative party won the popular vote (as we in America would say), it won fewer parliamentary seats than Harold Wilson’s Labour party, which then formed a new government and gave the miners all they were asking for—though, in the end, the Labour party did not give them either the overthrow of capitalism or a quite satisfyingly socialist government. A decade later, after the Conservatives had returned to power under Margaret Thatcher,