IF a comparison between today’s political issues and developments and those of just half a century ago seems a peculiar historical exercise, the fact remains that the early months of 1973 and those of the present year have features in common.

This year, of course, we have been witnessing rapid price inflation and much industrial action affecting the railways, health service, schools, universities, Royal Mail, civil servants and more — against a background of Conservative harsh austerity rule for the past 13 years.

As 1973 began, a Conservative government had been in place since June 1970, with dour Edward Heath at the Downing Street helm. Inflation was then rising rapidly too. On January 6 the Morning Star’s headline was “Steak for rich — scrag for pensioners.”

Without precedent, over a quarter of a million civil servants withdrew their labour on January 10. At the end of the month, gas workers rejected a rehashed pay offer, replacing unofficial with official strike action in mid-February.

At the end of February, two Ford vehicle manufacturing plants shut down, and rail workers struck, doing so again on March 8 and later. In early April the London docks came to a halt.

A national strike and protest, encouraged by trade union votes overturning a weak TUC general council recommendation at a special congress on March 5, took effect on May Day, having been backed vigorously by the Morning Star.

The turnout was substantial. On May 2 the Star reported: “Millions of workers took May Day off yesterday and tens of thousands marched through the cities and towns of England, Scotland and Wales in protest against the rich man’s government. From 20,000 to 30,000 people paraded through the West End... In Glasgow, there were 12,000 marchers.”

While this present year has witnessed prolonged refusals of constructive talks with unions by the Rishi Sunak government (and privatised Royal Mail), in mid-January 1973, Heath replaced a prices and incomes policy pay freeze for 90 days with a policy limiting pay increases to a maximum of £250 a year.

On January 24, ex-and-future Labour prime minister Harold Wilson accused Heath of “fascist” wages laws, although from 1966 Wilson’s government had itself attempted to impose its own statutory prices and incomes policy.

It can be mentioned in passing that whereas this year the terms of exit from the European Union continue to be the subject of fierce argument, the beginning of January 1973 saw Britain’s entry into the European Common Market, the EU’s predecessor, but without celebrations, and with negative comments from Harold Wilson as to the terms of entry.

Heath’s government was to pursue class war, especially against mining unions’ demands, into February 1974, when he ordered a dissolution of Parliament and a general election, wrongly anticipating a Tory victory at the polls at the end of the month.

On February 26 the Star reported: “Having produced the worst trade deficit in Britain’s history, Chancellor of the Exchequer Barber now declares that this is a good reason for voting Tory because we need a government which will ‘command international confidence.’”

The comment followed: “This is about as logical as a claim by [great train robber] Ronald Biggs that his experience entitles him to be put in charge of railway security.”

A Labour government was then to be in power, first under Wilson and later under James Callaghan, until 1979.

If today’s international situation is compared with that of 1973, it is incontestable that the determination of the US since 1945 in its own interests to control world events through war and political and economic interventions and controls continues.

While the decision of Putin to invade Ukraine and to persist with the invasion’s violence must be deplored and challenged, the backcloth has been that the US has contributed to Russia’s security concerns over the past 20 years.

Now, in tandem with European governments favouring the war’s escalation through arms supplies to the Ukrainian government instead of pressing for a negotiated ending, the behaviour of the US is entirely consistent with that in relation to Vietnam half a century ago and in relation to a succession of other countries before and since.

Gabriel Kolko’s Vietnam War history tells the story. A largely agricultural south-east Asian country, Vietnam had been a French colony before the Japanese occupation during World War II. The Vietnamese people had been through terrible times, and most were desperate for land distribution to improve their miserable situation.

Though the Communist Party led by Ho Chi Minh was small, its broad-based Viet Minh army was much larger, and a declaration of independence in August 1945 enjoyed massive popular support.

A sustained attempt by the French government to return the country to colonial status, propped up by US military aid, collapsed with defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. A settlement at Geneva confirmed the north of the country would remain under a Ho Chi Minh government.

Thereafter Washington ensured that the south of the country would have highly authoritarian, corrupt and anti-communist rulers. Consequently, Geneva-promised planned elections for 1956, given much southern popular support for the communist agenda, were denied.

In the early 1960s US military intervention against the South’s communist-led National Liberation Front (NLF) increased under the John F Kennedy administration, then ballooning under president Lyndon B Johnson from autumn 1964.

But despite the raining down of huge numbers of killer bombs and defoliants, including cancer and birth defects producing Agent Orange, and the deployment of half a million US troops, the US administration knew after the NLF’s Tet Offensive of 1968 that it could not win the war. Thereafter it relied for combat troops on the army of Nguyen Van Thieu in the south.

On January 6 1973, with talks in Paris begun, the Star reported that over 12 days the US had dropped over 100,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam, of which one witness was war critic Professor Telford Taylor, whose description of this horror was reported in the Guardian on January 10.

On January 13 president Richard Nixon’s defence secretary was quoted: “I would not eliminate the use of nuclear weapons in North Vietnam, but that is not to say I would be in favour of it either.” President Putin has seemed to imply something similar in relation to the Ukraine war.

On January 16 the press announced Nixon’s halt of the “bombing, shelling and mining” of North Vietnam. A peace demonstration in London followed on January 20.

A Guardian headline on January 24 claimed that all was over bar the signing of the peace pact negotiated in Paris, while the Star the same day noted the anticipation of “savage action” by South Vietnam’s Thieu regime “against democrats and political prisoners.” The conclusion of the Paris talks was announced on January 28, the Observer stating: “The war is over – official.”

But it wasn’t. Though most US troops had been withdrawn, the battle for the south’s future continued, with the US’s full military exit from the scene delayed until April 1975.

John Pilger wrote in his memorable 1986 book, Heroes: “During fifteen months of the ‘ceasefire’ some 70,000 soldiers and civilians were killed, and American planes dropped a greater tonnage of bombs on Indo-China than was dropped during all of the second world war.”

During six months of 1973, Pilger added, more bombs were dropped over Cambodia by US B-52 planes than on Japan during World War II, “the equivalent, in tons of bombs, of five Hiroshimas.” The Vietnam war’s human cost included over 58,000 US dead amongst a total of at least 1,300,000 people killed, with many more wounded and maimed.

If the US can demonstrate an attachment to constructive international policies rather than those murderously applied to Vietnam and in more recent times to other countries including Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the people of the world would have reason to feel safer.

Meanwhile, a large part of Britain’s population is becoming increasingly impoverished through government policies in which the case for the wealthy to become wealthier is plainly preferred.