When the prime minister raises the terror threat level to critical, as Theresa May did for 48 hours after Friday’s London tube bombing, you think you know what that means. And in some ways, you do. It means another attack is considered “imminent”; it means that, when an attack comes, police response times are futuristically fast – it was eight minutes from the first call to the emergency services during the London Bridge attack to all three terrorists having been fatally shot by police. Yet the inner workings of the critical threat level are less obvious, because one assumes it means extra police officers. In fact, it means existing police officers working longer hours and having their days off cancelled. This is a hot-button issue on Twitter, as the Metropolitan police federation points this out, and people with Twitter handles such as Gooner123 tell them to count themselves lucky they never served a tour in Afghanistan. Yet the public services can no longer be pitted against each other, as a way to neutralise or suffocate their complaints against the government.

May urged to guarantee prison and police staff numbers after pay rise Read more

The police were traditionally the last port in a funding storm for a government that had fallen out with every other sector. Or one of the last – the army, likewise, rarely made a squeak, except in private, on the understanding that beacons of the state’s authority, whatever their differences, ought to stick together.

The caring sectors – nursing, midwifery – might have grumbled but would never talk tough. Doctors and civil servants tended in the past to recoil from any activity to which words such as “firebrand” and “radical” could be applied. A constellation of duty, respectability, small-c conservatism and reserve, applied in different amounts to different fields, made collective strike action across the entire public sector more or less unthinkable. Disputes happened one at a time – between the government and teachers, the government and prison officers – and it was in those silos that they played out.

The public sector pay freeze, conceived in the fog of Cameroonian austerity, prolonged by parsimony and the government’s shocking failure to register what the lived experience of it was, has changed all that. The fact of a nurse having to use a food bank, and Theresa May’s gurning dismissal of the problem just before her disastrous election (surely these two events were related), has been only the most vivid example of a dramatic cut in living standards. Teachers, astonishingly, have seen their average pay fall by £3 an hour; police officers by £2 an hour; doctors by £8 an hour. When you consider the absolute song and dance that successive chancellors make when they raise the minimum hourly wage by 30p, to allow public servants’ wages to slide like this without so much as an acknowledgement is myopic and negligent.

And yet public servants are a peculiar breed, with a far greater sense of civic duty than most, which we know empirically from all the junk they put up with.

If you transposed the workload, hyper-surveillance culture and ceaseless measurements of the teaching profession to the private sector, turnover would be astronomical. If austerity extended only to their pay packets, it is an even bet that public sector workers would continue to swallow it. However, wage cuts and stagnation have been combined, of course, with the reduction of services – in the NHS, policing, the prison service, the civil service and education, with more damaging cuts in the last sector yet to come. Self-interest and the common interest are aligned: everyone fighting for their own wages is also fighting for the service society needs.

Police and prison officers will get a pay rise at the expense of the quality of the service they put their lives into

A suggested pay increase for the police and prison officers – 2% and 1.7% respectively, still woefully short of what it would take to boost spending power – is slated to come from those departments’ own existing budgets. They will get their pay rise at the expense of the quality of the service they put their lives into. Theresa May, watching the growing unity of the public sector, tried to peel off the peelers; she is unlikely to succeed.

Len McCluskey, summoning the spirits of Mandela and Gandhi, vowed a general public sector strike, even if it meant breaking the law. The questions should have been, who is part of this alliance? What would action look like, how could it have most impact while causing least damage to people, what could precede it, what constructive campaigns could be created alongside it?

Instead, the questions became: is it OK to break the law? Did he really mean it? Is this just sabre-rattling? This is a classic process: a strike threatened; a strike averted; noisy standoffs and invisible climbdowns. Attention turned to the Labour party. John Humphrys, in an exchange so sour and unpleasant it was like waking up to your neighbours having a domestic inside your bedroom, asked the shadow lord chancellor, Richard Burgon, whether he was in favour of breaking the law. Burgon came back with a politicians’ drone, a really unlovable modern manoeuvre where you say a tangential thing at tedious enough length that the crowd wanders off. The Conservatives, whose policies have caused this crisis, had nothing to do but get in popcorn and watch, as Labour was asked to defend a hypothetical illegal act that nobody really knows if the unions mean anyway. Practically speaking, there is a problem with the law: the litmus test of a strike’s legality is a minimum 50% turnout, then – for essential services – a minimum 40% of eligible voters in favour, which on a 50% turnout would, of course, mean 80% approval. Legislation made in good faith would alter the voting process to reflect the world; postal ballots are aggressively inconvenient; votes should be cast online. It is both weak and weak-minded to hobble your opponents with technicalities and faff.

The old-school actors – McCluskey, May, Humphrys, Paul Dacre, Jeremy Corbyn – are falling into last century’s roles: the union grandstander; the high-handed, silent prime minister. Commentators see nothing here but a bear trap for the opposition; the Labour party dances around it.

None of this reflects the new territory we’re in for the relationship between the government and the public sector, and, rippling out from that, new territory for the opposition, unions and media. It is unarguable: we have never before had the nurse who can’t reliably afford to feed his family on the same side as the police officer who hasn’t seen hers in a week. The centralised debate, unfolding predictably, irrelevantly, disconnectedly, is heading for a Brexit-scale shock once the balloting starts.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist