LONDON — According to a wire service, a resurgent British labor-union movement, egged on by a new generation of radical leaders, is threatening a summer of strikes in what would be the biggest show of worker militancy in Britain in two decades.
Prime Minister Tony Blair lost his closest union ally on Saturday night when results of a vote for general secretary of Amicus, the nation’s second-largest and most moderate union, showed that Sir Ken Jackson had been defeated by Derek Simpson, a militant.
Mr. Simpson will be the second former Communist to take over a major British union. The other is Bob Crow of the 60,000-member Rail, Maritime and Transport Union, who led a shutdown of the London subways on Thursday and has threatened to keep disrupting transportation through the summer.
Mr. Simpson celebrated his victory by denouncing Sir Ken’s leadership as a “rubber stamp” for the Blair government and promising to be more assertive with Mr. Blair’s Labor Party, which he said had become “divorced from its roots.”
Mr. Blair’s government has produced a minimum wage and passed some labor-friendly laws, but the militant new leaders object to his emphasis on involving private enterprise in public-sector areas like health and transportation.
The private-public partnerships, as Mr. Blair calls them, are at the heart of his plans to modernize the government, stimulate the economy and meet voter demands for better services.
The union leaders are professing contempt for the Labor Party, which was organized a century ago to represent the working class but recast by Mr. Blair as “New Labor,” a more centrist political force stripped of its socialist ideology and frequent hostility to business.
“I came not to praise New Labor but to bury it,” John Edmonds, leader of the union representing public-sector workers, said Saturday at a meeting of the Trades Union Congress in London.
Delegates called for a “summer of discontent,” a reference to the so-called winter of discontent here in 1979, when union bosses and mass pickets left Britain with piles of uncollected garbage and unburied dead, and drove the Labor government of James Callaghan from power.
While the unions today lack that kind of power, they could seriously undermine Mr. Blair’s efforts to improve public services, a major demand of the public and a stated goal of Mr. Blair’s second term in office.
Less than 30 percent of the work force is unionized today, compared with more than 55 percent two decades ago, But the typical union member today is better educated than in the past and is likely to be a white-collar worker with needs and grievances that middle-class people inconvenienced by strikes can sympathize with.
A national one-day strike by local government employees last Wednesday, the first since 1979, closed schools, libraries, museums and recreation centers and left garbage uncollected. But it passed without major public complaints. In London the next day, commuters stranded by an announced shutdown of the subway left home early, thronged the pavements and parks of the city and walked purposefully to work.
Mr. Blair, through a spokesman, disdained talk of a “summer of discontent.”
“I think it’s important not to get too carried away with all this,” said the spokesman, who by tradition remains unidentified in the news media. “Yes, there was some industrial action last week, and there was a change of leadership in one union. But overall, if you look at the numbers of days lost to industrial action, they are down on pre-1979.”
Alan Johnson, the employment relations minister, called the militants’ claims “a faint echo of the kind of self-indulgence that almost destroyed the party 20 years ago.”
The leader of the Trades Union Congress, John Monks, acknowledged disagreements with the government over the private-public partnerships, wages and pensions, but he played down talk of a confrontation with the Labor Party. “I think most people recognize that we will only sort out these problems with the government and not in some way against it,” he said.