Now we know what they mean by 'modernise'

"Modernise modernise," scream the politicians at the firefighters. Then they go back to their Gothic building, which is officially opened each year by a bloke in garters banging a rod on the door and walking backwards so they can get on with calling each other "honourable members" around a mace.

Maybe the firefighters should become as modern as the MPs. After each call, it should be solemnly announced that there's a fire, to which everyone groans "hear, hear". Then they set up a body to look into the matter but can't start until the water has been approved by a second unelected fire service that's made up of ancestors of 13th-century firemen, and Melvyn Bragg.

The MPs also yell "It's ridiculous for anyone to get a pay rise of 40 per cent" before drawing their salaries that rose this year by 40 per cent. If a schoolboy behaved like that he'd be made to stand in front of the class and be asked: "And what was your increase this year? Eh? Come on. Speak up." "Fawawawa." "How much?" "Fassypossent." "I still can't hear you." "All right – 40 per cent."

And how modern is the back-up service of the Green Goddesses? Whenever you see a convoy of them ring-a-dinging through the town, you wonder whether you've had a freak accident that's beamed you back to the 1950s. I'm sure that when they arrive at a fire, the first people to jump out are Peter Sellers and Bernard Cribbens. Then as they unravel the hose, they're nearly run over by a policeman on a bike who blows his whistle; then a criminal yells "Oy, scarper", but trips over Eric Sykes carrying a plank.

Now John Prescott has been more honest about his modernisation plans with talk of 10,000 job cuts, which suggests modern does not necessarily mean more effective. Unless the trouble with the service up to now is there are so many firemen they all bump into each other and can't fit in the engines. Or it may be that when The Sun praised Blair's stance on the strike with its headline "Blair does a Maggie", it was more accurate than it realised.

Perhaps he's jealous because Thatcher not only defeated strikes, she sacked the entire workforce. So his next move will be to publish a closure programme due to falling demand in the fire industry, adding that any firefighters we do need can be imported from Poland. Then the news will be full of angry pickets shouting "There's enough flames in them warehouses for three generations", and we'll all be wearing yellow stickers saying "Sliding down a pole, not dole".

Prescott's speech about job cuts makes marginally more sense than his interview after the failure of the peace talks, when he said something like: "I had this dumped on my lap and I'm expected to say why do you asking?" How can anyone do a deal with demands that are grammatically impossible to fulfil? If the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) accepted Prescott's terms, they'd be committed to fighting fires in three different tenses at once.

Some of the other complaints against the union make even less sense. Prescott often cites the firefighters' "generous" pension scheme, but they have to pay into it in the first place. You might as well say: "And they receive generous supermarket benefits. They have a scheme with Tesco whereby, as long as they pay money to a cashier, they are entitled to take away bags full of household items."

Or, with its usual logic, The Sun complains that "long-suffering army wives blasted striking fire-fighters and demanded 'give us back our men'". Apparently one mother said her daughter no longer recognises her dad because he's been away so long. That's six days so far. So presumably The Sun's line on war with Saddam will now change to "Bomb Iraq, but not if it's going to go on all week".

Similarly, the Government maintains that the FBU refuses to work with part-time staff. This is simply untrue. If they want to make things up, they could at least be imaginative, with stuff like: "They refuse to go anywhere if they have to tread on cracks in the paving stones."

Then there are the daily stories of where fires have taken place each day, as if no fires ever happened until the strike started. Far from being heartless, the typical attitude of strikers seems to be that of the picket who told me, as a Green Goddess trundled by: "I go cold when I see those things on their way to a call-out." Whenever they've been asked to attend a serious incident, they've rushed from the picket lines to help, not to "keep public opinion on their side", as one reporter suggested, but out of instinct.

Firefighters are immensely proud of the service they provide, and it's for that reason they've resisted such "modernisation" as job cuts and other measures whose purpose is to break the camaraderie that managers and the government find such an irritant.

Surely by now we know what New Labour means by "modern" – a fire service half the size of the current one, with top-up fees payable for anyone who needs rescuing, calculated by a taxicab meter in the front of each engine.

And every engine will be franchised out, like the foyers of hospitals, to suitable retail outlets. So, as they're hosing down your house someone will say: "While you're waiting to see whether your husband can be rescued, why not try some of our wide selection of delicious Belgian chocolates?"