THIRTY years ago this April – on the first day of that month, ironically – I obeyed my trades union and went on strike in support of a group of journalists who had been locked out of their newspaper’s offices.

Yes, lock-out… there’s a term you never hear used anymore. To the uninitiated, this was a tactic once used by companies, a sort of stoppage-in-reverse where the worker was forcibly prevented from performing his or her duties.

Eventually, lack of money would often spread dissent in union ranks, so furthering the management’s aims.

For me, the strike lasted three months. In the end, I was forced by financial circumstances to give up a junior executive role with my company – a very difficult decision, indeed – and started a new working life with the Berrows Organisation at Evesham.

The whole affair had been a fiasco from start to finish. The union was led by nincompoops and armchair generals driven mainly by ideology.

I recall how they uniformly remained unmoved on the rare occasions when our plight was drawn to their attention.

Sickeningly, the head honcho was a ‘communist’ who subsequently jumped ship to found his own business in Australia.

The working class can kiss my … some revolutionary, eh? And one minor player ended up as a Blair henchman who would later be outed and shamed as a man who had a taste for bullying his staff.

Still, as Bob Dylan once said, it’s life and life only.

But whenever I see some modernday phoney on the Left hurling dogma down from the moral high ground, I think of that beautiful spring day when some of us risked a great deal… and all in the name of hopeless causes.