Many of the union reforms enacted by her Government have since been eroded. More difficult economic times threaten a return to union militancy, especially in key public infrastructure and services where it can inflict ruinous damage.

But it is not as if this particular dispute is about unacceptable union behaviour. Despite the RMT’s fearsome reputation for activism, it is hard to recall any significant seamen’s strike in a very long time.

That’s partly because the fleet has moved almost wholly offshore. Agency staffing of the type that P&O is trying to introduce to its domestic ferry operations is in fact the international norm in much of the industry. Shipping is today as globalised in the way it organises its affairs as the world it services. That goes as much for its labour practices as the legion of nationalities that crew its vessels.

As I understand it, the intention is to replace the four heavily unionised crews that staff each ship with just two un-unionised crews of agency workers, substantially drawn from the much cheaper labour markets of EU accession states. Brexit, it would seem, has done little to prevent this kind of backdoor free movement of labour. In any case, it brings the P&O ferry operation back into line with standard practice elsewhere in much international shipping.

So why not go through the normal process of consultation and persuasion that is the modern way with big restructurings? The answer seems to be that P&O believed it pointless negotiating with a union as strongly opposed to change as the RMT, and thought that to do so would only add to the disruption to trade and travel that current actions have brought about.

Nonetheless, the result of the stealth approach adopted is that the company gets the blame for the consequent chaos, not the union. One local Labour MP calls it “predatory capitalism”, and it is hard to disagree. Our dwindling band of native seamen are having their jobs seemingly stolen from them.

As a then still young journalist working at The Times, I had direct experience of a similarly brutal approach to “modernisation” when Rupert Murdoch overnight relocated his newspaper operations to Wapping, leaving the print unions high and dry. Having to cross a screaming picket line of sacked former colleagues was a miserable experience, but I did it nonetheless because the behaviour of the unions in steadfastly refusing much needed reform had been so appalling. 

Nor could there be any possible justification for the “Spanish practices” then prevalent, many of them not just morally and operationally indefensible but outright corrupt.

Yet P&O is not quite the same thing. The substitute workers at Wapping tended to be perfectly nice people from much the same background as their sacked predecessors, only previously they had been locked out of such jobs by monopolistic print unions. 

I don’t really see the same level of defensive protectionism with the crews who up until this week used to staff P&O Ferries. Certainly they cannot be blamed for the losses incurred as a result of the pandemic, which by the way pale to insignificance set alongside those of many other travel and freight operators.

All companies need to move with the times, but it is hard to imagine Lord Sterling, who once used to head the wider P&O group and did much to modernise the UK fleet in the 1980s and 1990s, behaving in this way. 

That’s not to say he wouldn’t have done it, only that he would have done it very differently.