“A quarter of a century on, the Grunwick dispute remains one of the most significant in modern industrial history. In a sense, the strike was typical of a pattern of similar disputes before and since: a factory with a few hundred workers, a slowly building sense of injustice and a long standoff between employer and worker. But even then, Grunwick seemed a different kind of battle. This was a historic meeting between a traditional trade unionism, still relatively sure of its power, and a growing band of black and Asian workers who were beginning to find an industrial and political voice. Arthur Scargill bought down his Yorkshire miners in a bus - there was even fighting talk of shutting the pits. Grunwick workers travelled to more than 2,000 workplaces over 40 weeks to enlist support. The strike seemed to draw in every progressive movement of the day. "Black and white unite and fight" demanded the banners in Chapter road. Socialist feminists did their picket duty and wrote sternly of the military tactics of their trade union brothers. Jayaben Desai, in her sari and white cardigan, handbag crooked over her arm, was a feminist heroine of the age. Yet perhaps the most lasting consequence of Grunwick and other mass disputes during the 1970s were some of the anti-union laws of the 1980s, particularly those outlawing mass pickets. Today, it is possible to see more clearly the fraud that lay at the heart of the argument advanced by what was then called the "new right", particularly over Grunwick. A few hundred Asian men and women asking for the right to join a union and negotiate from within it was hardly the best example of an overweening and arrogant union movement it claimed was running the country. By any reckoning, Grunwick was a just cause, whose supporters included moderates such as Shirley Williams. In 1977, an independent court of inquiry chaired by Lord Scarman criticised mass picketing but upheld the workers' claim to union recognition. But it was a lost cause: George Ward, the Grunwick owner, refused to give in. This, despite a last-ditch hunger strike by Mrs Desai and four colleagues on the steps of the TUC. The strike fizzled out in early 1978. No walkout since, bar the miners' strike of 1984-5, has quite achieved Grunwick's fame or progressive significance. In the early 1980s, I went to a small factory near Birmingham to cover a similar dispute, led by a group of Asian workers protesting about pay and conditions and the right to union recognition. This time, the streets were empty. As union power declined, so did media coverage - if there's no punch-up, so what?”