The comrades take on the coalition

Nevertheless, the unions are far from a spent force: the 7m Britons who still carry union cards remain, collectively, an important social movement (by comparison, only around 4m people attend church once a month or more). Concentration in the public sector has helped to preserve their power. Strikes by transport workers can cause chaos if commuters are unable to get to work. A recent two-day walkout by workers on the London Underground, for example, caused widespread disruption in the capital; one estimate, from the London Chamber of Commerce, put the cost to firms at £48m ($75m) a day. A full-blown rail strike would be much worse. A walkout by teachers would require millions of parents to stay at home minding their children; binmen could leave the streets as filthy as some were in the "winter of discontent"; and so on.

All this is plausible, which is why some are suggesting further curbs on union powers. Policy Exchange, a right-leaning think-tank, argued on September 11th that bigger unions should be broken up and strikes made harder to call. The Chartered Institute of Personnel Development, a trade body for managers, has suggested a ban on strikes in key industries such as transport. For the time being, the government is taking a conciliatory line. Francis Maude, a Conservative who runs the Cabinet Office, said on September 13th that the government wanted a "partnership" with the unions, and ruled out a return to the days of "standoffs" between the two.

But with many government departments facing real cuts of 25% in their budgets over the next five years, that olive branch will almost certainly be spurned. The order of battle ought to be clearer after October 20th, when the government's spending review will spell out the exact shape of the retrenchment.

Keeping the public onside will be vital in any conflict--and there are early signs that the government is losing the battle. Although one poll conducted by the BBC suggested that 60% of respondents supported cutting the deficit in principle, another for the Times found that 75% felt the planned cuts were too deep and being implemented too quickly. It may get worse, too: some senior Tories reckon that voters have not yet grasped the sheer scale of the cuts--nor their potential impact on the users of public services, as well as their unionised providers--and that opposition will harden from next April, when they take effect in earnest. If the unions can get the public on their side, ministers will find it much harder to resist them.

(In the Econ before the vote)

Wind power