Not returning, Mr Brown? It feels like we’re already there, sunshine.

What with an oil price crisis, rocketing costs of living, “stagflation” and a clueless and exhausted Labour Government, it’s difficult to imagine what bit of late Seventies nostalgia we’re missing.

All we need now is a Sex Pistols revival and telly repeats of Are You Being Served? Thankfully, the worst excesses of the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent have yet to be repeated. So far, we have been spared blockaded hospitals and the dead left unburied. But with forecasts suggesting the financial squeeze is tightening further, unions are in an increasingly uncompromising mood.

More than a million working days were lost to industrial action in 2007, a sharp rise from the 755,000 in the previous 12 months, according to recent National Office of Stat­istics figures. Bellicose noises from the unions in response to Mr Brown’s calls for pay restraint suggest that trend is likely to rapidly worsen.

After nearly two decades of moderately tranquil industrial relations, strike figures are creeping relentlessly upwards.
Of course, the current crop of “awkward squad” union leaders is a different breed from the days when Arthur Scargill ruled the coalfields. With the exception of the RMT’s charmless bovver-boy leader Bob Crow, the modern union baron avoids Marxist, class-war rhetoric.

Today’s trade union language is softer. Where they used to demand workers’ control and nationalisation, now they want more work­place regulation and eco-friendliness.

But their ultimate objectives remain the same as ever – power and influence. And the public sector unions sense that Mr Brown’s Government is fatally weakened.

The unions realise, too, that the Labour Government has run out of money after the lavish spending on the
public-sector of the past decade. With tax receipts falling and Treasury borrowing out of control, Mr Brown’s only hope of buying financial breathing space is through trimming bloated state bureaucracy and holding
public-sector pay rises below inflation.

But unions seem unlikely to heed his call for belt-­tightening. TUC chief Brendan Barber effectively gave a two- finger-salute to the suggestion yesterday. “Claims that decent wages will lead to ­spiralling inflation are wrong,” he said.

Most dangerously of all for Mr Brown, the unions are well aware that his Labour Party machine is now almost wholly dependent on their generosity. A leaked internal memo from the public services union Unison said: “Now is clearly the time to strike, with the Labour Government in meltdown and the Labour Party facing a financial crisis.”

Mr Brown’s dire personal popularity has sparked a mass desertion from the debt-ridden Labour Party by the wealthy donors of the glitzy Tony Blair era.

Figures from the Electoral Commission show that more than nine out of every 10 pounds comes from the unions.

At the grassroots level, almost moribund local Labour Parties are increasingly dependent on union cash as activists drop out. But the comrades want something in return. “We have given a lot to these MPs and we have to start asking what we get from them,” one Unison secretary said.

Labour MPs, already aware they face a desperate fight to hold on to their seats at the next election, fear they cannot afford to turn away their paymasters. At the same time, their addiction to union money may also prove to be their downfall.

After all, the wave of militancy that culminated in the Winter of Discontent led to an electoral earthquake that swept Labour out of power for 18 years. No wonder Mr Brown is so tetchy about the Seventies.