Blair says pay claim would lead to economic disaster

Tony Blair raised the stakes in the Government's battle with the firefighters yesterday by declaring that the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) had embarked on a fight it could not win.

At a Downing Street press conference, the Prime Minister warned that the FBU's "unreasonable" pay claim would have "dire consequences" for the economy and, if replicated across the public sector, would lead to "an economic disaster".

In his first comments since the union began its eight-day strike, Mr Blair adopted an uncompromising stance, saying that any pay rise on top of the original 4 per cent offer would have to be financed through the modernisation of working practices. He said the £500 million cost of the 16 per cent offer blocked by the Government last week would have raised the income tax bill for a basic rate taxpayer by 30 per cent.

He warned: "This is a strike they can't win. It would not be a defeat for the Government, it would be a defeat for the country."

Mr Blair – who is reported to have likened the fire strikes to the tactics of the miners' leader Arthur Scargill during the 1984-85 strikes – said he would not bow to "Scargillism", and that the days of pursuing "political ends by industrial means" were over.

"They have got realise the year 2002 is not 1978 or 1979, it's not 1984. It's different. Life has changed. This is not the way to resolve these things nowadays," he said. "We are never going back to those days and I simply will not tolerate a return to them."

But Mr Blair denied claims that the Government had deliberately "engineered" the fire strikes so that he could prove his Thatcherite credentials.

"This idea, particularly at a time of heightened security and terrorist concerns is palpably absurd," he said. "There is nothing macho about this."

The Prime Minister said the Army, which was providing a covering fire service constituting about a third of regular manpower, had shown it was possible to introduce changes to working practices, such as joint control rooms and fewer personnel on duty at night because most call-outs happened during the day.

He said the military had not asked for more red fire engines to be released from fire stations, but that they would be provided if such a request were made.

Appealing to FBU members over the heads of the union's leaders, Mr Blair told them: "We do not want confrontation with you. Rightly you are valued members of your communities. We do not wish you to go without pay from firefighting any longer than you have to."

He said the 16 per cent rise proposed last week would "simply become their rising mortgage bills, become rising prices and the country's unemployment tomorrow."

He added: "We made it clear as we have throughout that we could not sign such a cheque, especially a blank one with no costings."

Later Mr Blair was summoned to the House of Commons to make an emergency statement on the dispute, the first a Prime Minister has been forced to make since 1987. The ruling by the Speaker, Michael Martin, was seen as an implied rebuke for Mr Blair's decision to spell out his position at a press conference rather than in Parliament.

Iain Duncan Smith, whose pressure led to the statement, told MPs: "Instead of speaking with consistency and clarity, the half dozen Cabinet ministers who have been speaking for the Government on this issue over the weekend have said different things each time they opened their mouths."

Mr Blair retorted by accusing the Tories of seeking to exploit the dispute by inflaming it. But he also came under pressure from Labour MPs sympathetic to the firefighters. Llew Smith, MP for Blaenau Gwent, asked why the Government could find the money for a war in Iraq when it could not fund the "justified demands" of the firefighters.

Mr Blair said it was an "odd situation" that saw the firefighters continuing to use fire stations to put across their case. "That is, I think one of the issues ... in terms of the way that fire services are managed, that has to be looked at in the course of this dispute," he said.

He added: "Whatever the costs of fighting the dispute, they are less in our judgement than the costs of yielding to a claim that would trigger other claims right across the public sector, which there is no way the Government could afford."

He added: "It's all a question of realising that in the end there is a reasonable way to approach this, we are trying to be reasonable, and if people don't want the reasonable way we have to, I'm afraid, stand firm and say the interests of the country come first."