In 1984 I was at secondary school in Wakefield, where the playing fields backed on to a training college for West Yorkshire Police.

One afternoon, while meandering reluctantly to rugby practice, I encountered an extraordinary scene.

Hundreds of uniformed police in full riot gear could be spied through a hole in a high fence bellowing provocatively at another group of policemen in civvies.

The latter were pelting the former with wooden (and therefore not especially dangerous) bricks.

What was also surprising was the palpable alarm on the face of the commanding officer when he realised they were being watched.

He sent me on my way with a guttural northern curse, making it clear that I had seen something I shouldn’t have.

Why was he so sensitive to a nosey schoolboy?

Only years later did it dawn on me what I had witnessed - a full dress rehearsal for the Battle of Orgreave.

This was the dramatic and violent confrontation between police and picketing miners at a British Steel coking plant which proved to be a turning point in the history of organised labour in this country.

As everyone knows, the miners were beaten – in some cases literally – and trade unions went into a seeming death spiral thereafter.

More than a quarter of a century later, as hundreds of thousands of public sector workers strike in defence of their pensions, the corpse would seem to be twitching.

But this time it looks and feels very different.

This is hardly your textbook altercation between horny-handed sons of toil and the shock troops of the hated boss classes, on the Fred Kite model. (And if you don’t know who Fred Kite is, I commend to you the 1959 Boulting Brothers film I’m All Right Jack, starring Peter Sellers as the cartoon shop steward of that name and a deliciously louche Terry-Thomas).

No, today’s is very much a white-collar insurgency, as teachers, court staff, passport workers et al down their Bic biros and man (person?) the picket lines.

So what has all this to do with solicitors, apart from insofar as it disrupts their working day?

Well consider this.

In some quarters recent developments are being interpreted as a renewed assault on what the Conservative-led government regards as ‘vested interests’ standing in the way of its wider agenda.

This is to shrink the role of the state dramatically and marketise those parts of the economy that continue to be shielded from the full, purgative blast of neoliberalism.

The deficit is simply a cover for this agenda – we are not Greece.

The conspiracy theory, if it is one, is backed by circumstantial evidence. Look at the civil legal aid reforms.

Continued provision on the same model was and is affordable.

Indeed, the Law Society presented a plan for alternative savings in any case, with which ministers barely seemed to engage.

Over 5,000, overwhelmingly hostile, respondents to the green paper were simply ignored.

Similarly, the government-commissioned Hutton report acknowledged that public sector pensions continue to be affordable and that their share of GDP will actually decline over the next few decades.

What the government really wants, say its most trenchant critics, is to reduce terms and conditions of employment to the point where whole swathes of the public sector will be attractive to profit-hungry asset strippers.

In the NHS meanwhile, a wholesale privatisation scheme which appeared in neither governing party’s manifesto seems to have foundered in the face of opposition of one union which can continue to boast huge power - the British Medical Association.

Ah yes, the BMA. This morning we learn that the doctors have voted overwhelmingly to ballot for industrial action if the government decides to tamper with their own, generous, final salary pension scheme.

This will surely give the prime minister pause for thought.

No government picks a fight with the medics if it can help it, mainly because voters love the men and women in white coats (in a way they don’t love lawyers, alas).

Even the left-wing firebrand Nye Bevan had to ‘stuff their mouths with gold’ to get consultants to back the establishment of the NHS.

Plus ça change, etc etc.

We must wait and see how all this plays out.

But today’s dispute is not one the coalition can afford to be seen to lose - much as Margaret Thatcher would not have survived had she yielded to Arthur Scargill.

The historical parallel ends there though.

This time the losers, if losers they turn out to be, will be very different.

It’s not the foundries and pits that are deserted today, but the courtrooms and classrooms, and soon perhaps, the surgeries.

Today’s ‘vested interests’ are not the miners or steelworkers, but the teachers and the doctors. And the lawyers too.