Forget the Tories. The real opposition to the new government are doctors, landowners, Greenpeace and Channel 4. Stephen Pollardreports

So that's it, then. A 167 seat majority, the Tories in ruins and a Prime Minister supreme. Opposition? Hah! There may be no parliamentary opposition to worry about - at least from outside his own party - but if that meant no opposition at all, new Labour's first term would have had a very different complexion.

The real opposition, as one former adviser to Tony Blair put it to me, is the "sour-faced gits . . . the same shower that kept us out of power for two decades". It's the green groups, consumer groups and the unions.

Labour may have spent the past four years fretting lest it spark a hostile editorial in the Daily Mail, but it was wasting its energy. As 7 June showed, the Mail's opposition is a busted flush. It no longer has any ammunition with which to wound. It has taken a second landslide for Labour to realise that the most powerful opposition is not coming from the right, it's on the left.

The public sector unions have already started to flex their muscles. Bill Morris of the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU) took to the airwaves and newspapers to warn against private sector involvement in the running of public services, which will "make the NHS look like Railtrack on a bank holiday". John Edmonds of the GMB union spoke recently about the "real sense of anxiety" about such proposals. Dave Prentis, the Unison leader, launched his union's "Positively Public" campaign, demanding an end to private contracting.

For four years, the public sector unions have had to grin and bear it, desperate not to be seen as responsible for sacrificing a second term. That self-denying ordinance would almost certainly have ended whatever the government had decided to do with the public services, but the manifesto's hints of further contracting with private companies have given the unions the perfect vehicle for re-establishing themselves as a force in the land. (There are now more than 300 trade union-sponsored Labour MPs.)

It is not just the big TUC member unions that are preparing for opposition. If anything, the professional organisations are even more brutal street-fighters, with none of the unions' stretched loyalties to Labour. No union, for instance, would have considered holding the sort of press conference that the British Medical Association carefully scheduled for the last fortnight of the election campaign, to reveal that 56 per cent of the UK's 36,000 GPs are prepared to resign, en masse. Hamish Meldrum, the deputy chairman of the BMA's GPs committee, used the occasion to lambast the government. GPs, he said, are "at the end of their tether . . . the result demonstrates the depth of disenchantment, despair and disillusion". The message the BMA intended to send was clear: if such modern-day saints are despairing, things must be bad. What attracted little attention was the cause of the ballot: the BMA is in the middle of negotiating a new GPs' contract, and the resignation threat was as brutal and typical a strike threat as any union has ever made. If the BMA does not get the contracts it wants by April 2002, the doctors will consider resigning - striking, in ordinary language.

Not to be left behind, the outgoing general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, Christine Hancock, has been increasingly vocal in her criticisms, culminating in her vituperative description of our "third world" medical facilities during the campaign. The government's handling of the NHS, she added, was "offensive".

In some ways, the government has already discounted trade union opposition; it knows what to expect, and how to handle it. But the professional organisations are another matter altogether. The government's strategy for the second term is based on, at best, neutering their threat or, at worst, taking them on and defeating them. The opposition that they pose is far more potent, as they tend to carry the weight of public sympathy and support.

It is not just the BMA that likes to use election campaigns to shore up its negotiating position; earlier this month, David Hart, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, decided that the appellation "third world" applied equally to schools and to the NHS. When the inquiry into teacher workloads reports in the autumn, you can guarantee that, whatever its findings, the National Union of Teachers and National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers will see them as a provocation to strike action.

There are also those whose opposition carries force not because of any inherent power, but because the government chooses to worry about them. The Country Landowners' Association is hardly a force in the realm. Its power to damage any government, let alone one with so large a majority, is almost non-existent. Yet in the negotiations and decisions over the right to roam, one debilitating effect of new Labour's fear of making enemies was that the views of the CLA were treated as a paramount concern, to such an extent that, surreally, Ewan Cameron, a former president of the CLA, was made chairman of the new Countryside Agency, charged with mapping out those areas to be opened up.

Thus, whom the government takes seriously, and whom it dismisses, depend not just on a clinical calculation of their potential for causing problems, but on a variety of factors. It is simply trite to observe that the government fears consumer or environmental groups with the power to mobilise support - and possibly votes. Take Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. In the public consciousness, there is little to differentiate them, but in the government mind, they are very different. Friends of the Earth operates from a consistently oppositionist stance; Greenpeace, on the other hand, picks its issues. On some, such as forestry policy, it offers support; on others, such as GM crops, it opposes and is willing to take direct action. Thus the views of Friends of the Earth are dismissed and its opposition ignored as a lost cause, while Greenpeace finds its counsel sought at ministerial meetings and wields powerful influence.

The armies of fuel protesters made much of their ragtag-and- bobtail amateurism. Yet not only would their cross-country co-ordination and split-second timing have been astonishingly assured, even in a genuine army, but the subtlety of their public relations strategy - calling off their action at the height of their popularity, just before they were about to lose mass support - almost certainly shows that some kind of deal was done.

One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to be struck by the congruence of interest and tactics between the Countryside Alliance and the fuel demonstrators (and also, incidentally, with the Conservative Party; many of the Alliance's upper echelon are Tory ex-officials and MPs). After all, they proclaimed it themselves - many of the protesters' cars bore Countryside Alliance stickers, and many of the foot soldiers were the same. They even carried banners inscribed "No Hunting, No Petrol".

The rural lobby likes to portray itself as ignored by Labour. The facts are rather different. Beyond the obvious statistics - that farmers receive subsidies amounting to more than those given to all other industries put together - the response to foot-and-mouth shows the significant depth of the government's fear of their opposition. It is difficult to think of any comparable industry that would have been compensated out of taxpayers' funds for a misfortune such as foot-and-mouth - and not merely compensated, but compensated at generous rates, often above the direct financial loss.

The government has spent the entire outbreak in fear of criticism by the National Farmers' Union, to such an extent that it has, in effect, handed over control to what is nothing more than a vested and cosseted interest. Indeed, only 53,000 of the 180,000 farmers in England and Wales are members of the NFU. Despite compelling evidence of the success of vaccination elsewhere, the NFU's opposition meant that a wasteful and horrific - but, to many farmers, profitable - slaughter policy was introduced, which has still not yet succeeded in eliminating the disease. For a large part of 2001, the real leader of the opposition - and a far more powerful figure than William Hague - has been the NFU's Ben Gill.

Just as new Labour is prepared to buy off the Countryside Alliance and the NFU, so too its dealings with polluters over the climate change levy show the power of big business (in this instance, chemical company) opposition. In the March 1999 Budget, Gordon Brown announced a tax on the business use of energy. It was, said Michael Meacher, "the greenest Budget we've ever had". According to briefings at the time, it would be levied at a rate of 0.6p per kilowatt hour for electricity. The chemical companies threatened merry hell and, by the time of its implementation on 1 April this year, it had been reduced to 0.43p, with the heaviest users - by definition the heaviest polluters, such as the aluminium and cement industries and the maltsters - being granted an 80 per cent rebate.

Big business opposition, such as that to the climate change levy, is, in its own way, as unsubtle as that of the trade unions. After the US, the UK is the world's largest recipient of foreign direct investment, attracting about one-third of global inward investment and 40 per cent of all US and Japanese investment into the EU. It takes little more than a hint, however veiled, when it is time for the next investment decision, that Germany or any other EU country is suddenly looking remarkably competitive, for everyone to sit up and take notice. That was clearly the tactic used in opposing the climate change levy, and it works well. The Fairness at Work legislation, passed in 1999, which allows employees to vote for the right to union recognition, was so watered down after complaints by the Confederation of British Industry as to be almost meaningless. To win recognition, a ballot must be passed by 40 per cent of all those eligible to vote.

The new opposition is thus not, after all, especially new. The unions, professional organisations, countryside and farmers' groups, vested interests, the liberal-left chattering classes, consumer groups, business, we've been here before with all of them. In fact, there is only one real newcomer to the ranks. Tony Blair's complaints in the final fortnight of the campaign, that the media were ignoring the real issues in favour of personalities and froth, may have been self-serving, but they were no less true for that. Given the commercial bent of most of Channel 4's output, it is something of a surprise that its coverage stood apart, with the most sustained, analytical and powerful attempts to burst the new Labour bubble. Throughout (and before) the election, it carried critical films by the likes of Noreena Hertz and Nick Cohen. Mark Thomas is given regular platforms for his agitprop comedy, and Bremner, Bird and Fortune are in a league of their own. Channel 4 has become the de facto leader of the media opposition.

The rest of the opposition may have long service medals, but the combination of an impotent, unthinking parliamentary opposition and a government with a clear history of backing down in the face of determined resistance means that such forces have all been given a new lease of life.

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