To today’s 20-somethings, older colleagues’ stories of Britain’s industrial relations must sound almost like war stories.

This was the generation that lived with the constant threat of power cuts caused by miners’ strikes. They lived through the three-day week and are old enough to remember TV coverage of strike ballots which, in the seventies, largely consisted of mass meetings in factory car parks where the decision to withdraw their labour was decided on a show of hands.

These veterans can still bear witness to the mass picketing that successfully bullied workers into backing their union’s negotiating position in its disputes with their employers.

Margaret Thatcher successfully placed such disreputable practices beyond the law. Along with privatisation, trade union reform is Baroness Thatcher’s enduring economic legacy. The Blair and Brown governments never sought to overturn her reforms, recognising that to do so would only encourage the voters to recall the Winter of Discontent when over-mighty unions defined and destroyed the Callaghan government.