This firemen’s strike is a climacteric moment for Tony Blair’s government

Tony Blair has been a lucky Prime Minister. Never in his first six years in office has he had to confront the co-ordinated industrial unrest which bedevilled Harold Wilson and destroyed Jim Callaghan. When he entered No. 10 in 1997, Blair found the unions in a state of cowed irrelevance: one of the many legacies of Margaret Thatcher for which the Prime Minister has never expressed gratitude.

Since 1997 the Prime Minister has set about restoring the morale of trade unionists. Many of the Thatcherite reforms have been reversed, while union leaders are now welcome in Downing Street. For the last two years the Prime Minister has enjoyed boasting, though only while in select company, that public-sector pay is now rising faster than private wages.

The strike rate has rapidly increased. In 1997, 236,000 days were lost to industrial action. The figure for the first nine months of this year alone stands at 800,000. The generation of union leaders which Tony Blair inherited in 1997 was grateful for any sniff of power. It has been replaced. The modern school are not descendants of the hard-faced, disciplined, CPGB-influenced and Moscow-funded officials who posed a genuine threat to the stability of the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Ambitious CP men from that period have gone respectable, or at any rate New Labour. Many have ended up with the government – like Labour’s general secretary David Triesman or Peter Mandelson. Shortly after the 1997 general election I had lunch with Charlie Whelan, then special adviser to Gordon Brown, in the Savoy Grill. We had just ordered a second bottle of Chablis when John Reid, then defence minister, arrived at an adjacent booth and sat down next to a general. Reid waved cordially at Whelan. Whelan waved back. ‘We’re old mates,’ the Chancellor’s adviser explained.