It’s not miners and binmen this time. It’s you. Or people who look like you.

In recent weeks, we have seen doctors, criminal barristers, and teachers (in an unprecedented show of solidarity) give notice of industrial action against coalition policy. Whether you sympathise is to some extent immaterial; there is a trend here that is not party-political.

What is happening (and it started in earnest under Labour) is that the unrestrained free market is now encroaching upon ‘middle class professionals’ en bloc. Formerly independent, often self-employed, professionals are slowly yielding to the forces of commoditisation and corporate co-option that have encroached upon so many areas of the public realm.

‘Professionals’ embody more ‘vested interests’ to be cleared away in the cause of a particular kind of freedom.

Perhaps this is good for ‘consumers’. But there may be unforeseen consequences, as Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson intimated in their seminal book on the 2007 Crash, The Gods that Failed: ‘An independent professional class has value beyond its utility as a source of advice and as a bulwark against the power of companies and the state,’ they warned.

Professionals level the playing field, in other words - not for consumers per se, but for consumers as citizens. This is in danger of being forgotten.