AGGRIEVED workers obviously want to make the maximum impact when they withdraw their labour, and London’s firefighters are certainly gaining headlines by planning to strike on Bonfire Night.

But they are not the right kind of headlines.

It is a fallacy that all publicity is good publicity. Just ask Wayne Rooney.

All the headlines are not about the merits of the firefighters’ case but about their questionable decision to strike on the most incendiary night of the year.

The firefighters, therefore, are putting up a smokescreen that is hiding their own arguments. The debate now is not about the rights and wrongs of management’s change to shift patterns. It is about whether any group is right to cynically, or callously, choose the most impactful and sensitive time to strike – be they postal workers at Christmas or continental air traffic controllers on the first day of the school holidays.

For a strike to be effective, workers have to take the public with them.

The public will not now be weighing up the strength of the firefighters’ case. They will simply turn off and walk away shaking their heads slowly – much as Labour leader Ed Miliband did yesterday.

Firefighters will argue with some justification that in their line of work there can never be a right time to strike.

But Bonfire Night is indubitably the wrong time.