Ever tried to shut the New Labour Treasurer up?

It was an heroic female called Jayaben Desai who led her low-paid fellow workers in a brutal, two-year fight for decent pay, treatment and conditions at the Grunwick film processing plant 30 years ago, but the commemorating audience in Kilburn's Tricycle Theatre today could be excused for thinking that the champion of that hour, and most since, was Jack Dromey, New Labour Party Treasurer, deputy general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, husband of Blair/Brownite Labour minister Harriet Harman and - as is, alas, becoming too, too clear - a man who believes that an audience will best enjoy an historical narrative if it is appraised, in detail, of his own contribution to it.

'There is nothing more noble than solidarity... I tell you... I think... I was... what I remember best about that day... I thought at that time...' In fact, Dromey starts to strike everybody as so horribly unstoppable that the poor bastard who is chairing this morning's discussion about Grunwick and the state of trade unionism then and since is eventually forced to grab Dromey by the sleeve and to try and to lift his wristwatch into Dromey's eyeline, in the hope that Dromey will take the hint. Dromey sees the watch, but is unmoved by the details on it. 'Two more minutes,' he says, incorporating this announcement effortlessly into his speech and dismissing the Chair as though the Chair was himself some dime-a-dozen char.

There are members of the audience - particularly in the theatre's gallery - who react poorly to this. They have not come here to hear from Dromey. They have not come to hear from anybody who is a) in with New Labour and b) too far gone in their relationship with New Labour to understand that a close relationship with New Labour is a hanging offence among trade union activists - and indeed most people other than themselves - at this point in history. It is true that Dromey was Secretary of the Brent Trades Council at the time of the Grunwick strike and, arguably, of some use because of it, but nobody gives a bugger about that now. John Reid used to be a firebrand communist. Jack Straw used to be a firebrand socialist. Peter Hain used to be a firebrand human rights campaigner. Oona King used to be black. It all seems a very long time ago, even to those who were around for it.

A couple of men in the back row of the gallery are happy to make this point. 'Fuck off, sellout,' one of them mutters as he watches Dromey shrug off the chair's hand.

'Do you think we'll hear from a trade unionist today?' the other asks. Which is, after all, what people want. Times are not good for trade union activists on the shop floor. Trade union membership is on the decline. New Labour has done nothing to repeal Thatcher's evil anti-trade union laws. Trade union bosses in Labour-affiliated unions like Unison are hunting down and perscuting union members who dare to criticise New Labour. Meanwhile, workers in New Labour's Britain work the longest hours in Europe and suffer stress, depression and financial hardship in record numbers. Equal pay is still just a dream in many sectors of the employment market. Pensions are threatened, in the few sectors where they haven't gone already.

People want to know what can be done to improve their lives and union membership, and they don't believe that close relationships between their unions and New Labour are the answer. Their unions give the Labour party money. The Labour party takes that money and completely ignores union requests for the party to stay away from privatisation, war, et cetera. Still, New Labour hem-kissers like Dromey drone on. Things take a particularly hairy turn during his speech when he starts blethering on about the day he was arrested at one protest or other, and was helped out by a 'beautiful lady lawyer... who became my wife - Harriet Harman!' - and then points the very person out in the crowd with a vulgar grin and a flourish of one of his pink, pudgy hands.

The handful of union flunkies who have positioned themselves around the great lady applaud loudly. The rest of the audience just sits there. A couple of members of it make retching sounds. 'Harriet Harman?' one of the guys in the back row spits. 'You're having a laugh. Harriet Harman. Harriet Harman?'

Hope and light relief arrives in the form of the now 68-year-old Arthur Scargill. As witty and fresh as ever for some reason, Scargill comes out with the most useful statement of the morning: he reminds these much-disillusioned strike commemorators that although the great fights for union and human rights haven't always run to victory, they're still as worthy of celebration as victory. Of course, he would say that, but people still find it helpful to hear.

'The ruling class doesn't celebrate victory, Scargill points out. 'Think of the Charge of the Light Brigade. Think of Dunkirk.' Our teams weren't exactly victorious in those events, but the ruling classes still celebrate the tremendous spirit they showed in the trying. So what if the miners lost and the Grunwick strikers - after hunger strikes, clashes with the police and support from workers across the country - were never reinstated at work? The fight counted, and almost counted for everything.

Scargill certainly thought so. He charged across the country to Grunwick with about 3,000 miners to join the picket lines there to show the low-paid black and Asian strikers, and their rotten managers, and the police, what solidarity was all about.

'I recall vividly the first approach made to me by the Grunwick strike committee,' Scargill says. 'They came to my home and they asked if I could help. They said to me it would be a 'real arresting experience.' And it was. Ha ha ha.' Scargill and the miners joined the picket line and then the police came up to him where he was standing in the street and they told him to move and he said 'why, I'm just standing in the street?' and the police told him to move again and he said 'why?' again and 'about three minutes later I was arrested for obstruction.' Meanwhile, back at his house, the nation's press had set up camp in his front garden, so his wife called the police and ask them to come and tell the media to move, or to arrest the media, because they were obstructing her garden. 'You've just arrested my husband for obstructing, so come and arrest these people for obstructing my house,' she said. This went on for a while and to cut a short story a bit shorter, Mrs Scargill was not assisted by the police. 'Double standards,' Scargill grins.

There were other problems, anyway, from people who were supposed to help strikers. Scargill recalls how 'the night before the Grunwick picket line took place, I was summoned to the TUC. I thought it was to organise a better picket. But I was asked to call the miners off. I told them to get stuffed. It was the TUC who betrayed the strikers, without any question.'

Governments, says Scargill, are equally spineless. There was a Labour government at the time of the Grunwick strike, and all it had to do was take the film processing plant and put it into public ownership while the Grunwick dispute was settled. Rolls Royce was put into public ownership when it was in trouble.

Jayaben Desai stands up slowly. She's tiny - probably not five feet - and old. Her long hair is white and patchy, and she doesn't move easily. Her hearing is very bad, and she has to look at Dromey a lot - he's sitting very close to her on the stage, grinning and scanning the audience like a pirate - because she needs someone to repeat the questions that she's asked. Thirty years ago, she walked out of the Grunwick film processing plant and told her boss that she wasn't putting up with the low pay - or the nastiness, rules and bullying - any more. The plant - a sweatshop - was staffed by hundreds of poor migrant workers - mostly women - to whom management did not believe basic human rights applied.

Hundreds of workers from the plant, and then thousands from around the country, joined Jayaben Desai on the picket. As the strike continued, she went on a hunger strike with several other women to show the public 'that we were serious.' It is somewhere around here that Dromey, who has spent much of the morning smiling at Desai and running his large, sweaty palm over her shoulder, stands up and points a big bunch of flowers at her. She turns to the audience then.

'What you must know is that it wasn't me,' she says in halting English. 'It was the time. It was the right time. It wasn't because it was me.'

'There were Labour ministers on the Grunwick picket line,' John McDonnell tells the audience. He was a student at Brunel University then, and was used to driving to Grunwick to join the strikers at the end of the day, and to seeing even a small handful of people from a Labour goverment publicly supporting strikers as well. Things were very different last year when hundreds of staff were sacked from Gate Gourmet for protesting about working practices and joined by BA workers in sympathy. Not a single Labour minister turned up to that protest or those pickets, McDonnell says. Not a single New Labour supports the Trade Union Freedom Bill that McDonnell is planning to take to parliament, either.

The bill - or act, as McDonnell hopes it will become - will give people the right to take industrial action without fear of dismissal, or victimisation, or having their pay cut by employers. It will also stop employers from hiring agency workers to replace staff during strikes, and allow people to strike in support of each other.

As McDonnell rightly points out, workers and trade unions in Britain today have the worst rights of any country in Western Europe. Solidairty and supportive action is in many ways the biggest problem. Unions face asset confiscation and potentially fatal financial compromise if they vote to go out in solidarity action with others [1] .

Scargill reckons you should go for it anyway. 'The trade union movement has to remember and learn that if the law is wrong, you defy it. You don't obey it,' he grins.