WE'D better get ready for the regular appearance of placard-waving pickets, because I believe we are going to see the biggest union conflict since the miners' strike of 1984.

This time it won't be cloth-capped pitmen, but a mighty host of civil servants and council employees protesting at the large-scale job losses in the public sector, which, by general consent, have become inevitable.

Mind you, we can't say we haven't been warned. Only last September TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber predicted there'd be riots in the streets if the Government took the axe to the army of six million state employees.

Only this week, union bosses promised to "unleash hell" on an incoming Tory Government. So we are talking about a battle royal, no matter who's in charge. And as always, it'll be the foot soldiers who suffer the pain, not the chiefs.

It's worth mentioning that strikes in the public sector now outstrip those against private employers by 15 times. And this is during a recession which so far has had little effect on people who work for the state.

So I think even Gordon Brown, the man who has created 600,000 extra jobs in the state sector, realises that the power of the white-collar unions has to be curbed once and for all to bring the privileged workers they represent into the real world.

I know the job of unions is to look after their members, but when millions are out of work in a recession, how can they plead that people in the public services are a race apart, who somehow must be protected?

All right, I know our MPs have set a poor example by accepting a rise of £1,000 a year, or 1.5 per cent. They obviously feel exempt from the pay freeze just imposed on senior state employees. But that's Westminster for you.

We've had a foretaste of things to come with a two-day strike of 250,000 civil servants in various jobs, including staff at income tax offices, who are hardly the sort of people to excite public sympathy in any circumstances.

Those out of work – and the figure is one in five adults in Stoke on Trent – can hardly have much fellow feeling for this week's strikers, who are angry because their redundancy pay will be restricted to around £60,000 if they lose their jobs.

I'd say that's a very generous settlement by the standards of most working people facing redundancy. It would be beyond the means of private firms. But in the state sector the money's available because we all help to pay the bill.

In fact, sympathy is the last word I'd use in relation to any strikes which affect public services. For the vast majority of us they are a damned nuisance and a reminder of the bad old days of the 1970s when unions could hold the country to ransom.

On a wider front, I think the Government, Labour or Tory, will have to get to grips with the soaring salaries of senior council staff. I understand that last month the councils refused to comply with an order to reveal the figures, because, according to one report, it would lead to a national outcry.

That's an area which must be a leading contender for cuts. In Stoke-on-Trent we have council officers who are paid more than many people who run their own companies and provide employment. How can that be justified?

And all the while council employees are guaranteed index-linked pensions at 60, while people in the private sector are warned there may come a time when they have to carry on working until they are 70 to get even a state pension.

Addressing these inequalities, I feel, should be part of a root-and-branch reform in the state sector. Civil servants and the rest can't hang on forever to privileges which are denied to the rest of us.