VITAL talks begin today to resolve the firefighters' strike. Quite simply, those talks must be successful.

There are positive noises. John Prescott is suggesting that there is room for manoeuvre over the modernisation plans; Andy Gilchrist of the Fire Brigades Union is now talking of 16 per cent as a potentially reasonable rise.

This all sounds much more like it.

Firefighters do deserve decent pay awards, as do many other public sector workers. But if they were to get a 40 per cent rise, they could easily wreck the fragile British economy. Other workers would, understandably, demand similarly huge rises. All manner of past economic evils could come back to life, from inflation to high interest rates.

The Labour Government won the last election on the basis that it was putting up taxes and pumping money into the public sector. Come the next election, the British public will demand a return on their taxes. If all of their investment has evaporated on vast pay rises with none left for equipment, buildings, training and new methods of working, Labour's credibility will be ruined. Indeed, the whole concept of the "public services" will be in doubt because the Tories predicted Labour's tax-and-spend policies would end this way and the Tories would be right. And the Tories' way forward - indeed, the only way forward given Labour's failure - would be some form of break-up and privatisation of our public services.

Equally, though, the Government and the employers must know that an eight-day strike will cause the deaths of innocent people. These deaths may come in a house fire, or they may come in something so shocking we can barely imagine it - and if the North Africans arrested in London were really plotting a cyanide attack on a tube train, it would have had unimaginable consequences.

So, while this is a firefighters' strike, the Government and employers do have a responsibility to ensure that the public are well protected. For all the bravery and ingenuity of the soldiers - and the humanity of the firefighters who broke their own strike when lives were at danger - the protection afforded by the Green Goddesses will not do.

This newspaper has been arguing the cause of conciliation in three centuries now. In Victorian times, it tried to calm the violent struggles between the workers and the ironmasters or mineowners.

As was the case then, so it is now. It sounds dreadfully liberal and wishy-washy, but negotiation, arbitration and conciliation are the only ways forward.