Mr Gilchrist has one last chance to save his union from destruction

It's becoming clearer by the day that if anyone is going to be defeated in this strike, it isn't going to be New Labour

Maybe it was just a Freudian slip. But it was a copybook error for the leader of a union on a national strike even to hint that he wanted to change the character, let alone the leader, of the government of the day – as his subsequent protestations that he was taken out of context appear to show.

It's worth spelling out why. Two years ago, when direct action was launched by fuel protesters in an attempt to change the government's fiscal policy, I argued that this was not qualitatively different from the attempts by business interests – including, as it happened, road hauliers – to undermine the democratically elected Allende government in Chile in the 1970s. As with the right, so with the left.

The much-cited Arthur Scargill in 1984-5 was, of course, in a class of his own. Scargill was a Leninist in that he took the vanguardist view that if the workers aren't ready for revolutionary struggle, don't consult them before you embark on it; an absolutist in that he rejected every attempt to make peace; and a syndicalist in that he sought to change the economic policy of a government through industrial action.

I doubt that Mr Gilchrist, although of the left, is any of these things, and not just because he had a large ballot majority for strike action of the sort Mr Scargill might well not have done had he called a ballot, which famously he didn't. By his decision last night to go to Acas, Mr Gilchrist also looks like a man conscious of the need for an exit strategy, which isn't something you could ever accuse the miners' leader of.

But the fact remains that either you believe unequivocally in parliamentary democracy or you don't. It was special pleading for Nigel de Gruchy, this year's TUC president, to claim that the FBU's political aspirations, whatever they are, were simply a matter between it and the Labour Party, to which it is affiliated. It wouldn't have hurt for Mr de Gruchy to make the point that the TUC as an organisation, which has rejected syndicalism since it worked for a settlement to the 1926 general strike, knows better than most that industrial action can't, in a mature democracy, be used to subvert the government of the day.

For "can't" – as well as "shouldn't" – is the operative word, especially in this case. What's becoming clearer by the day is that if anyone is going to be defeated in this strike, it isn't going to be New Labour. Even allowing for a government in – at times excessive and unnecessary – propaganda overdrive, it's pretty clear that yesterday's Cobra report has something real to say about the working practices – from joint control rooms to smaller shifts after midnight –that would work well in a civilian fire service. And that in turn strengthens the Government's arguments for reform.

Secondly, the FBU's resort to the national strike weapon looks a little less frightening than it did all those times in the last 25 years when it was threatened but never used. True, it's been a quietish time of the year. True too, the strikers have helped by leaving picket lines to fight fires. But so far it looks as if the military – and the public – have been coping pretty well.

There are conclusions from this for both sides. Given that the dispute is demonstrably going the Government's way, the need to be even more draconian at this stage is doubtful. Those urging Mr Blair to be even more Thatcherite should consider a little history. It's worth remembering, amid all the talk about banning strikes in essential services, that Norman Tebbit, when he was Margaret Thatcher's Employment Secretary in 1982-4, looked seriously at the idea before pronouncing it too much of a "legal thicket" to be worth trying. As for the – to some – seductive idea of sacking all the firefighters and hiring some more à la Ronald Reagan, Ian McGregor, the then Coal Board chairman, contemplated doing just that to the pit deputies who walked out during the miners' strike, only to have the political establishment, from Mrs Thatcher down, throttle the idea at birth.

Which brings us to the language ministers use. Two phrases ring out from the 1984-5 miners' strike, both, oddly, originating with the First World War. One was the electricians' leader Eric Hammond's description of the miners as "lions led by donkeys". And the other was the ageing Harold Macmillan's reminder that these were the "men who beat the Kaiser". You don't have to think either appropriate in the present case to infer that a little care should be taken. Demonise the cause, if you will. Demonise the second jobs if you have to. Demonise the union leadership. But don't demonise the men – and a few women – who will still be brave public servants when the dispute is over.

A cod recruitment leaflet circulating in the Army says: "We're looking for blokes who fancy spending around nine months a year away from home on crap pay then provide strike cover for tossers who only work six months a year for better money." Among soldiers that is wholly understandable – and also illustrates that they won't be thrilled to do this for many more weeks. From the rest of us, it is rather less helpful. Within the limits it has set out, it is in the Government's interest to settle. And here the astute minister Ian McCartney's more-in-sorrow-than-anger-as-a-friend-of-the-FBU is a big step forward.

But the sharpest lessons are, of course, for the union. Actually, for all Mr Gilchrist's faux pas at the weekend, the better parallel than with Mr Scargill threatens to be with the leaders of the print unions in the mid-1980s who, convinced by their own invincibility, just didn't get what was coming at Wapping. They led their members badly because, instead of negotiating sensible agreements in new times, they thought they could stop social and technological change happening. As a result they were comprehensively defeated.

In an important sense, and contaminated as it was by working practices verging on the fraudulent, Wapping was the last of the real class struggles. For the demographics have changed decisively since the last fire strike. It's poignant that the firemen's pay formula no longer works for them because it was linked to skilled male manual workers' earnings, and that very group simply doesn't exist as it once did. For you can talk about New Labour betraying the organised "working class" ; but even "Real Labour" would have to ask whether a working class – in that sense – still exists.

Mr Gilchrist need not suffer the fate of the print union leaders. If he can start showing at Acas that he is ready to take seriously the review by Sir George Bain, start accepting that a better paid, higher qualified, multi-skilled and, yes, leaner fire service can help the large majority of his members who will still be working in two or three years' time, he will be showing precisely the statesmanship that eluded those who led the print unions in the 1980s. If he doesn't, he won't just be failing to supplant New Labour. His union could end up – sadly – suffering just the kind of defeat suffered in national newspapers.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk