So is this war? The noise from new trade union leaders Bob Crow (RMT), Mick Rix (Aslef) and Derek Simpson (Amicus) sent frissons of delight down the spines of the rightwing press. At last! History will repeat itself and the Tories sweep to power on the one issue that remains unassailably Mrs Thatcher's triumph. The public may blame her for 18 years of public service ruination and rusting infrastructure, but the one thing they give her in the saloon bars and the taxi cabs - she did stop the unions running the country. So is this a flicker of dawn in the long night of Tory opposition?  Almost certainly not. Tony Blair's reasonably emollient tones and his correspondingly good reception by the TUC yesterday suggest that the noisy new boys are not mainstream. Where were the wild cat calls in the Winter Gardens so eagerly predicted by the Tory press? Instead there was applause. As things stand, the unions are in a surprisingly strong position - unless they play their present hand very badly indeed. Right now, public opinion is with them. Most people think Thatcher went too far in crushing them: the snarl of Tebbit is detested more than the bellow of Crow.   The Guardian ICM poll shows 59% think strikes in the public sector by rail, tube and council workers are justified. Tony Blair's praise for unions was well in tune with his focus groups, but he rightly warned them of losing that public support. His easy confidence in facing them comes from knowing what wiser old TUC heads also know: the public is fickle and they have suffered no real inconvenience yet. A one-day strike for the dinner ladies is heart-warmingly easy to support, but the country grinding to a halt soon sets public teeth grinding. The danger is not that Labour will be brought down again by the unions, but that if the unions answer the siren calls of Bob Crow et al, they will get mashed by Blair as soundly as they were squashed by Thatcher, because the thwack of firm government is what the voters would expect again if it came to serious disruption. So, as John Monks knew, it is partnership or carry on declining.   Physically the unions are weak, membership concentrated in the old not the new service occupations - 19% membership in the private sector and even in the public sector only 65%. However desperately needed unions are among the low-paid and down-trodden, the new recognition laws have only succeeded in slowing long-term decline. (There should be compulsory ballots in every non-unionised workplace, where organising can be next to impossible for casualised shift workers unsure of their rights.) But it is not on muscle, but on public opinion that unions rely for their real power. Crow and partners need that political lesson, since public alienation seems to be almost a strategy with them.   To succeed, unions need to capitalise skilfully on the general sympathy for public service staff who have fallen far behind and deserve much better. Yet at the same time they must be wary of polls that show 78% of voters fear the extra money for public services will be "used up" in pay instead of improvements. The council workers' victory was exemplary: they won, they got a long-term pay review and they kept public affection to fight another day.   But next up, the firefighters are in danger of overreaching themselves. This may be 9/11 we-love-firefighters week, but if train drivers and tube drivers come out in support of firefighters, avoiding the secondary action laws by claiming that running trains without firefighters is a safety issue, sympathy may wane.   Andy Gilchrist, the new Fire Brigades Union leader, is making a splash with a startling 40% demand - 40%! Many other trade union leaders roll their eyes and sigh. "Hope Andy's got an exit strategy," says one, who is himself regarded as a radical - 40%! Some of the women trade unionists who helped organise the low-paid council workers strike spit with fury. "Who do these willy-wavers think they are?" said one, as her cooks, cleaners and carers settled for 5 an hour, less than half what firefighters get now, let alone another 40% on top. "What makes them think a firefighter is worth so much more than a senior care assistant, breaking her back lifting old people all day, saving lives too and, frankly, working a darned sight harder. Firefighters are asleep half the bloody time they're on duty!" On the record, the brothers' omerta means the TUC general council supported the firefighters nem con, but some shook their heads.   Well, has he got an exit strategy? There is still a long way to go before a possible strike at the end of October. There is plenty of room for compromise, so long as they don't paint themselves into a corner. Income Data Services, which monitors pay in all sectors, calculates that like all public servants, the FBU has indeed fallen far behind. To catch up with 1978, they need 21%. It is not impossible to imagine a phased deal that got them close. Both sides agree their skills have grown greatly, raising them up from manual workers to assistant professionals. Their present 21,531 is not a lot of money - though it is the median, so half the workforce earns even less. But 40%? If them, why not everyone?   The employers want a quid pro quo: a review of working practices as well as pay. But unlike the council workers, who welcomed it, the FBU refuses any review, especially not of their working practices. Emotional pleas about the danger - three die a year - may wear a bit thin among trawlermen and building trades with far higher death rates. Firefighters' jobs are sufficiently desirable so that almost alone among public workers, there is no shortage. Once the public focuses on all this, the firefighters may look a bit less loveable than they do this week. Blair's political education dates from 1979, hearing those famously disastrous words of the leader of the London ambulancemen: "If it means lives must be lost, that is how it must be." If the Fire Brigades Union or anyone else threatened anything like it now, they'd be seen off. Times have changed.   But both these strikes bring home the great public pay dilemma the government will have to face. The review of council workers' pay will stub its toe at once on "comparability". What is any worker worth? How do you value them? Easy to give points for training, for exams, for responsibility but allowing for these, they are all indispensable and it gets difficult.   Until now women's work has been downgraded simply because women do it with no rhyme or reason, only tradition - from teaching, social work and nursing to caring, cleaning and catering. Women's jobs will have to be revalued upwards. Then where do firefighters, who are compared now to the upper quartile of male manual pay, fit? (An FBU leader reputedly had a racehorse called Upper Quartile.) All need more, but women's pay cannot rise relatively unless some men's pay falls back, relatively. Awkward truth.