Even at this late hour, the Government can avoid this damaging strike

In its confrontation with the firefighters, the Government is heading for a car crash, the worst it has experienced in industrial relations since arriving in office more than five years ago, and one of the worst in the public sector any government and union have faced since the 1984-85 miners' strike. Understandably determined though the Government is to withstand the industrial muscle at the command of an undoubtedly left-wing union leadership, the dispute's complexities are ill served by macho headlines about ministers being ready to "crush" the Fire Brigades Union. There may possibly be an honourable way out of it, which we'll come to in a moment. But with the strikes due to begin next week, time is fast running out.

On one level, the Government looks to be on strong ground to procure an exemplary defeat of a public service union. At a time when inflation is at a record low, a 40 per cent pay claim – arguably the FBU's one real public relations own goal – looks truly out of line. True, it ill behoves national newspaper columnists and MPs, let alone Prime Ministers, to start pontificating about how men – and hitherto a too tiny handful of women – shouldn't be paid £30,000 a year to risk their lives by going into burning buildings when everybody else is leaving them. But on the other hand, such an increase is going to be well nigh impossible to justify in other public services when the council workers – cooks, carers, dinner ladies, people at the front line of education and social service care – have just settled for an inflation-beating 7.8 per cent increase over two years which brings them to around half the hourly rate already enjoyed by the firefighters.

Especially when the Government almost certainly has considerable public support for its proposition that the large spending increases for public sector workers shouldn't all be soaked up in higher wages at the expense of front-line services. And when the fire service – at a time when unemployment is also at a record low – has no trouble in recruiting or retaining personnel for jobs, each of which attract more than 40 applicants every time they become vacant. And when the unusual two days/two nights shift system currently allows firefighters to take additional jobs if they wish to do so. And when the FBU general secretary Andy Gilchrist's alliance with other left-leaning union leaderships – less active, incidentally, with the RMT's militant demon figure Bob Crow than with Aslef's more astute Mick Rix – could lead to train and Tube stoppages which may well provoke a public backlash that fire strikes on their own might not do. And when, finally, the FBU has so far refused to co-operate with a pay and productivity review which promises to deliver them a new and significantly more generous formula than the one that stood them in good stead for nearly a quarter of a century.

But on another level, it isn't quite as plain sailing for the Government as it looks on paper. True, the famously high level of public support for striking fire crews started to tail off after the nine-week 1977-78 strike passed its halfway mark. While ministers should guard more vigilantly against mistaking near-unanimity of support for the Government among leader writers as a surrogate for public opinion, that could happen again.

The problem is that by then attitudes among the firefighters – exceptionally comradely, tightly knit and in their own way insular, by the nature of their life-and-death interdependence on the job – could be even more entrenched than they are already.

Secondly, everybody agrees the firemen's own formula is obsolete and needs to be replaced by another which will avert strikes for another generation. The fact is that no government wishing to show its mettle in the face of public sector pay demands would choose the fire service as the prime battle ground.

Which brings us back to the review currently being carried out by Professor George Bain – the great potential virtue of which is that it could provide the means of giving the firemen a big ring-fenced increase which doesn't have a knock-on effect on other public service groups. The Government is hardly blameless for the stately pace at which this got off the ground. The local authority employers originally floated the idea of a review past Whitehall back in May but there was little – too little – alarm in Government at the prospect of a strike at that stage. It wasn't until July, when the local authorities realised that Mr Prescott and the Treasury were not prepared to fund the substantial pay and productivity offer – some say around 15 per cent – they had in mind, but might well fund the outcome of an independent review, that the proposal was formally tabled to the FBU. At that point, by some accounts, Mr Gilchrist wasn't as unremittingly hostile to it as he has subsequently become. Even so, it wasn't until September that the review team started its work in earnest.

Which is one reason why it now looks as if the Bain review won't report until December, after the strikes have already started, and when attitudes will be more entrenched. This is crazy. You can see that Professor Bain, having started late through no fault of his own, wants to do a proper job, especially when he has to consider much wider issues about the way the fire service is run. And certainly one problem is that if he reports too soon Mr Gilchrist and his colleagues will no doubt charge that he has skimped on his research.

But the fact is that the territory has already been sketched out in a series of reports including the Audit Commission's 1995 study of efficiency – and inefficiency – in the fire service. Consider the Wilberforce inquiry into miners' pay during the government of Edward Heath in 1972. This had to deal with all sorts of coal industry arcana, waiting, washing and winding time and so on – and reported on 18 February – just a week after it was set up. It's hard to see why the Bain review couldn't do something similar.

There's another point. At the end of last week, the local authority employers pointed out that if at their request the FBU held off their strikes until Professor Bain had reported they need not, because of a clause in the relevant employment legislation, forfeit their right to strike after he had done so, in accordance with the overwhelming ballot majority of its members. It's no doubt too late for Mr Gilchrist to accede to that; but it makes it more difficult for him to complain if the Bain review is now accelerated.

As it should be. By allowing the minister Nick Raynsford to meet Mr Gilchrist yesterday, the Government showed that it accepts its public safety responsibility. It now needs to show the same responsibility in at least trying to avoid a strike. It should make clear, as it has not yet done, that it will fund the outcome of the review from central taxation to stop cuts in – say – hard-pressed council social services. And Professor Bain should be urged to burn the midnight oil and bring out his report before the strikes start to threaten lives.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk