As the dispute prolongs and attitudes harden, that is bound to come on to the agenda, perhaps by the early New Year.If so, the firemen would probably be able to rely on support from other left-controlled unions Much good it would do them. Such action would merely give Mr Blair another opportunity to sound tough, and to win.To paraphrase Karl Marx, history repeats itself: the first time as threat, the second time as farce Until the mid-Eighties, the strike weapon was potent. Left-wing public-sector unions could paralyse essential services and halt the country. With the defeat of Arthur Scargill’s miners, however, those days were over. Since then, there has been even more embourgeoisement, still more fragmentation of trade-union solidarity, and a steadily increasing amount of privatisation.Today’s trade-union extremists could still cause disruption and damage.

But if they did so, they would merely provoke the Blair Government into imposing further legal restraints while accelerating the pace of privatisation Some union leaders may be nourishing Scargillite fantasies They should remember Mr Scargill’s fate. In much more propitious circumstances for union militancy, he went down to total defeat, thus exposing his members to the rigours of privatisation and redundancy. The same would happen to any union that was to launch a fundamental political challenge to the Blair Government.This would, of course, cause upset consciences in many sectors of the Labour Party. The average Labour MP did not go into politics to cheer on a strikebreaking Labour Government, which itself was cheering on a belligerent Republican President. There would be anguish in the tea-rooms and bars; mini-revolts in the division lobbies.None of this would worry Tony Blair. He has no doubts as to his ability to control his own party, including the beaten-dog tendency, as the former Labour left is now known. Nor has he any sentimental attachment whatsoever to the trade union movement (with the possible exception of the Bar Council).If the Prime Minister were offered a choice between a dinner with three trade union general secretaries or a dinner with President Bush, Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch, he would not even regard it as a choice.

He has far more social empathy with the average global billionaire than he does with the average trade unionist.In preparing himself for the subsequent stages of this strike, the PM has only one problem. His spin-doctors will be hard at work to conceal a vital piece of information from the British public: that if the Government had taken proper preparations, it could have broken the strike earlier, with less destruction of property and less loss of life
More from Bruce Anderson. It has been a time for counting, for edgy emotional assessments. The Government’s annual British Social Attitudes survey has been published and it has some alarming news on the subject of friendship. Eighty per cent of those interviewed were able to name, without any difficulty, their best friend and most of them claimed to meet up with this special pal at least once a week.

More than ever before, we are likely to invite friends around for dinner or go out with them to a pub or club. Money helps on the mateship front, apparently – if you earn more than £35,000 a year, you are 25 per cent more likely to have at least 10 close friends than someone earning less than £12,000.All this suggests that the British reputation for emotional reserve is entirely unjustified, according to Alison Park of the National Centre for Social Research, who co-ordinated the project. “One of the traditional stereotypes has been that we are rather inward-looking and that we are not as sociable as other people,” she says. “This work suggests that, in Britain, friends play a very important role in people’s lives.”Feeling inadequate? I am.