There was clearly a danger that the dispute could have been diverted into a chauvinistic blind alley, but it didn't happen. Union activists gave short shrift to far-right British National Party infiltrators. The strikers didn't scapegoat the foreign workers; they blamed the government and the employers. And the real nature of the strikes was driven home by the hundreds of Polish migrant workers who joined the walkouts at Langage power station in Plymouth: this was a campaign not for privileges for indigenous over foreign workers, but against the use of foreign-based contract Labor to exclude or undercut all workers in Britain.

But the narratives of a protectionist threat and working class racism are so ingrained in the mainstream British media that news reports simply adjusted reality accordingly. In the BBC's main evening TV news bulletin, one striker was shown saying, "we can't work alongside of them", in a reference to Italian and Portuguese workers. The second part of the sentence - "we're segregated from them" - was cut, turning the meaning of what the man was saying on its head and giving the false impression that local workers were refusing to work with foreigners. Meanwhile, tabloid newspaper journalists tried to convince picketing workers to be photographed with Union Jack flags.

"The reporting of the strikes was based on a massive misconception," Paul McDowall, Unite shop steward at the Lindsey site, insists. "The real purpose of our action was quite simply to protect the terms and conditions, pay, welfare and health and safety that we've built up over many years - and that remains the case. It had nothing to do with xenophobia."