Anyone who lived through the 1970s and 1980s, to look no further, knows what wrecking meant. Those were decades of constant politico-industrial wreckage. The political culture was one of conflict, in which most people knew which side they were on. There was a government and an opposition, and there were forces outside them that challenged both of them. This was a country in dire economic trouble, the basket case of Europe, a nation at war with itself.  The two decades were not identical. The Callaghan years were marked by savage disputes between public sector workers and industries the public owned, without the faintest regard for the national interest. Wreckage spread through the private sector, culminating in 1978-9 with a winter for which the voters did not forgive Mr Callaghan. The Thatcher years saw similar upheaval, though in a different context. Here was a government taking on the public sector, bashing trade unions, privatising sacred cows, under a leader who did not disguise her mission to wreck much of the economic and political power structure that had been in place since the war.   These were decades of turmoil. The forces of order struggled constantly to maintain it. You could say the political culture was unstable, but not that it was moribund. There were real contests for political life and death. Thus were fought out the last years of the left-right ideological struggle, before the collapse of socialism.    What's startling about the present deployment of the word "wreckers" is that it comes out of a quite different sky. The weather is grey, not thunderous. The word most commonly applied to the culture is not conflict but apathy. Apathy, verging on universal scepticism, pervades the body politic. The government may scan the far horizon with the most powerful telescope but cannot see itself in peril. Successive elections yield evidence that the formal opposition party may be dying. This is no longer a nation in the middle of a war between definable enemies. Its political culture is comatose, if not dead.   But the prime minister seems to have a strategy for reviving it, which is by getting his retaliation in first. It is he rather than his critics who wants to create a climate of conflict. Could he be further from James Callaghan? There being no serious challengers, he needs to invent them. There is no meaningful threat from the right, beyond a half-baked nihilistic confusion which, as a leader committed to making public services better, he can easily swat aside. So he discovers threats on the left, likening them to a militant tendency that belonged in the decades long gone.   To any detached observer, this is at odds with observable facts. Reform has been Labour's project since 1997. What's interesting is not how much wrecking Labour's reforms have induced but how little. Take education, the prime interest of the first term. Primary school reform was slow, difficult, contested. It forced a lot of new work on teachers. Curricula, standards, league tables, endlessly shifting demands, all were meat to the enemies of reform. But in the end the work was done. It continues. There was a lot of abrasion, but the output of schools measurably improved. There was no wrecking.   The term may be more applicable to old-fashioned disputes about pay and conditions, which still go on as well. But these are hardly systemic. The RMT union's battle with Arriva is a consequence of the worst of all the privatising "reforms" of the Conservative government, which Labour did not change. Closer to justifying the word wreckage will be the prison officers and police, if they fight to the bitter end against the kind of employment reforms that everyone who has ever managed them knows are necessary.   But the other side of the picture is more striking. At the centre of it are union leaders who operate in a context that is different from the old days. The law now makes wrecking difficult. The professional attitudes of many of these leaders have more to do with providing for and keeping their members than with taking political positions. The acme of this style is John Monks, general secretary of the TUC, a thoroughly modern exponent of pragmatic and collaborative industrial reform, who is part of a union generation that would claim to have done much quietly to assist, in the health service and elsewhere, the kind of working changes that have to be negotiated rather than imposed if any real reform is to occur.   This is not the end of the story. A new batch of union leaders await election in key sectors, some pledged to a more combative attitude against the undercutting that private sector employers have brought to public service work. The old ideological certainties are being deployed to fire up the argument against the public-private partnership which the Treasury has proved so rampantly determined to impose on London Underground. Both sides are reeking of blind dogma.   There's still a big difference from the old days, though. These arguments now barely engage the wider public. There is no grand political contest. Everyone wants better hospitals and railways, but hardly anyone cares how these are organised, as long as they improve. To most people, I strongly suspect, the argument as couched by the prime minister, between wreckers and reformers, does not touch a reality they understand. It seems to them to be a sectional dispute, of an esoteric kind, not a large struggle for the future of Britain.   For the truth is that change is happening anyway. The NHS may be less far advanced than schools, but the argument about using private sector resources has been won and lost through force of circumstance. It is happening. The momentum is with it. There will be struggles at the edge. But no trade union seriously believes that this government intends to privatise the health service, any more than the schools. The third way, in that elementary sense, is winning. It is dull, slogging, unglamorous work, producing slow incremental gains, on a track that cannot now be reversed. "Wreckers" is a word that seems as anachronistic as it is emotive, thrown into an essentially consensual scene.   So why does Mr Blair think and talk like that? He is certainly a different man from the one who came to power. Years of office have finally, and much to his credit, removed his desire to please rather than persuade. The quick smiles have all gone, overtaken by the gravitas of struggle abroad and at home.   Perhaps it's the fate of all prime ministers to become Manicheans, even when, as this one does, they bestride the scene without a challenge. Evidently Mr Blair needs to believe there are wreckers, as a way of heightening the drama. Also, however, it's a kind of alibi for the ineffable delay that bedevils all institutional reform: a substitute for the billions of pounds which, far more than the expulsion of wreckers, will be needed to fulfil his pledge to make the NHS a health service to be proud of.