Mr Blair is standing firm to avenge the ghosts of Old Labour's past

Fear of the damage a fight with the Government could inflict is prompting some intensive activity behind the scenes

Oddly, there are some striking similarities between the two strongest women in post-war British politics. Each was the first in her family to go to university, the clever and determined products of a girls' grammar school good enough to get her into Oxford. Each took meticulous care of her personal appearance. Each even had the pleasure of employing Sir Bernard Ingham as her press secretary and enjoying his unswerving loyalty.

But because only one of them is being invoked to describe the test Tony Blair faces in his confrontation with militant trade unionism, it's easy, but unwise, to ignore the importance of the other as a role model. In public, in the Commons yesterday, Mr Blair was at once adamant in ruling out a union's implausible 40 per cent claim, and judicious in tone. In private, Tony Blair is reported to be in full Margaret Thatcher mode, consciously choosing to equate the current stance of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) leadership with the creed espoused by her vanquished enemy Arthur Scargill. But either way, the example of the late Barbara Castle, as Mr Blair will certainly know, is just as relevant.

It was, after all, Barbara Castle who most graphically demonstrated in 1968-9 what can happen to Labour governments with large majorities whose strategy is deflected by union power. OK, the circumstances were different. But if the Wilson Cabinet had shown half the steel she did as Employment Secretary in seeking to force through the proposals for regulating trade union behaviour in her White Paper In Place of Strife, the electoral history of the last 30 years might look very different. In Labour's favour.

This is worth remembering, not least by some of those left-wing MPs who have signed a critical motion broadly supporting the FBU before they promote the facile notion that the conflict with the firefighters, and with other unions at present standing behind them, is evidence for their otherwise insupportable thesis that what Mr Blair is leading is anything like a neo-Thatcherite administration. What actually makes this dispute much more interesting is its place in the long history of conflicts between unions and Labour governments from the 1940s to the notorious and much cited winter of 1978-9.

It's so much romantic nonsense, of course, to imagine that this is essentially a "New Labour" problem. So far from Mr Blair having some new brand of difficulty with the unions, it's striking how many disputes – not to mention bloodcurdling attacks by union leaders on government policy – were crammed into the relatively brief period of supposedly more union-friendly "old Labour" administrations in the last century. Indeed this was exactly what helped those periods to be relatively brief. The lesson of those years was that where unions used their power beyond reasonable limits, the lives of Labour governments were almost always shortened. And there is a rather strong tendency in the British system for Labour governments to be replaced by Tory ones, with bad results for the unions. Whatever mistakes Denis Healey may have admitted he made in the run-up to the winter of discontent, few would disagree with his succinct appraisal that "once she was Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher saw to it that the unions paid a heavy price for their irresponsibility, though it had won her the election."

Which may be one reason why the Government, in a much wider sense than 10 Downing Street, has little difficulty in using pretty robust language to denounce (rightly) the FBU's refusal to co-operate with the independent review under Sir George Bain. (Another is that you don't have to read very far into the – impeccably Labour-dominated – local authority employers' submission to Sir George to realise that, for all their members' bravery and competence, the FBU could face some serious public relations problems if the strikes go ahead.

Many of these issues have been widely aired – including the highly generous shift system. But there is also an extraordinary whiff of workers' control in the way the service is run and the failure to locate fire stations where most fires are. Why exactly, to take just one example, has the FBU been able to prevent the building of a new £1m fire station in Greater Manchester to serve Wigan and Leigh, creating five new jobs, just because one fire engine will inconveniently – for the existing firefighters – have to move from the present station?

But fear of the political – as well as other, more lethal – damage that a knock-down fight with the Government could inflict is also prompting a sensible and intensive behind-the-scenes search to prevent it by ministers and the more creative spirits of the TUC. There is a danger of misunderstanding Tuesday's TUC General Council statement. It's true that with some of the right-wing Labour ballast gone from the General Council, there has been a leftward tilt. But expectations that it would distance itself from the union were at once exaggerated and provided an incentive to use relatively strong language of support. However, there is also easily enough of a strong subtext to allow the TUC's skilful General Secretary John Monks to use his good offices to try to forestall, or at least shorten, a potentially disastrous strike. Those on the left who think he should be doing no such thing simply don't understand industrial relations or politics.

Sir George makes pretty clear, in a letter to The Independent today, his reluctance to bring his inquiry forward. Though his reasons are persuasive and honourable, I still think it would be better if he could at least produce interim findings earlier than December, partly because it could just help to trigger a further rethink among some firefighters. But he is certainly right to urge the FBU to allow its evidence to be submitted to his inquiry, just as John Prescott was right to say on Tuesday that the union's refusal to do so is indefensible.

For there is a line the Government can't – and surely won't – cross in this dispute. Mr Scargill is not the ideal comparison. For even if the FBU general secretary were to prove as uncompromising a Leninist as the miners' leader, he has at least had a ballot, even if only because he is obliged to do so by law. Nor, with the safety stakes higher even than they were in 1977, would it be sensible for the Government to adopt a "bring it on" attitude to the strike simply to display its credentials as tough on the unions. But it can't really start to settle unless the FBU is prepared to do some modest blinking first.

It's possible that this will happen in the next day or two. If it doesn't then the confrontation will be on, and that much more difficult to resolve. Either way, Mr Blair will certainly have in mind the lessons of the past when he refuses, as he surely will, to back down. It may be that he has been donning Margaret Thatcher's clothes as he has approached a showdown with the firefighters. But it's Mrs Castle, and indeed her old colleague and sometime adversary Jim Callaghan, the victim of 1979, that he will be avenging.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk