Trevor Alford’s memories (Argus Letters) of the 1970s seem to be a little confused, with him claiming that everything bad that allegedly happened occurred during the “Winter of Discontent” under a Labour government.

By my recollection, the power cuts he mentioned happened under Tory PM Ted Heath in the early 70s, and the petrol queues were down to the 1973 global oil crisis, a year before Labour returned to power.

Even the events of early 1979 are hugely exaggerated. The image of the dead being unburied came from only two unofficial gravedigger strikes in Liverpool and Tameside for just two weeks.

As former Fleet Street editor Derek Jameson later recalled of press coverage of the ‘crisis’: “We pulled every dirty trick in the book.

“We made it look like it was general, universal and eternal when it was, in reality, scattered here and there and no great problem.” Happily, our national newspapers are long since past doing anything like that.

If it wasn’t for union influence, which Mr Alford calls “corrosive”, we wouldn’t have paid holidays, sick leave or many of the other things all of us take for granted at work.

Pete Gillman

Hythe Road,

Brighton