Our Unite members at Ineos in Grangemouth took a massive hit last week when billionaire capitalist owner Jim Ratcliffe held a gun to their heads and shut the plant as he played out his one-man war with the union.

Instead of criticising Ratcliffe for blackmailing not only his own workforce but also the community of Grangemouth, and indeed the whole Scottish economy, the media predictably turned on Unite for daring to stand up to him at all.

Equally predictably the ultra-left is pedalling its usual destructive criticism of our union.

Please resist this nonsense talk of sell-out by general secretary Len McCluskey or anyone else, or that somehow our strategy was wrong and that "mistakes were made." Let's be clear - there was no sell-out and mistakes were not made.

Although claiming this massive oil refinery and petro-chemical production centre was loss-making, Ratcliffe did not offer rational talks on the survival of the plant. Instead he began this summer by attacking and victimising our Unite convener Stevie Deans, more to do with his personal opposition to Unite's role in the Falkirk Labour Party selection debacle than industrial relations on the site.

It was not exactly the best way of inspiring trust for difficult negotiations about the survival of Grangemouth.

With the workforce already united in Deans's defence, and with a massive vote for industrial action already in place, he announced a non-negotiable package of concessions from the strong Unite workforce.

Even though no strike actually took place, he carried out his threat to close the plant and call in the receivers, blaming Unite throughout for putting their own jobs at risk.

I say our members had no choice. We are strong, we are united and we are fighting trade unionists and none more so than our terrific members at Ineos Grangemouth. But we're not stupid either.

We need those jobs and we need this plant. I say our members did the right thing - fighting all the way right to the end but then deciding democratically for survival when the writing was on the wall.

I will always support our members no matter how difficult the decision they have to make.

Not only have our 1,000 members at Ineos been forced to agree a three-year pay freeze, a loss of a number of conditions and attacks on their pensions but also a number of very serious attacks on the union which have no financial relevance to Grangemouth's survival.

Ratcliffe is quite simply imposing a blatant and vindictive punishment on his own workforce and their Unite union organisation for the resistance they have shown him.

As if the persecution and elimination of Deans were not enough, Ratcliffe is also demanding major cuts to the facilities and paid release of the other union officials on site.

Worse still, he has demanded a three-year strike-free clause, something which should be illegal in any civilised democracy.

The fact that is he considers himself so powerful and untouchable that he can demand his workers leave their basic human rights at the gates when they walk inside his plant.

Maybe there is a potential case there for the European Court of Human Rights, I don't know.

A word here too about Deans. I know him. He is a man of incredible integrity and honesty who is well respected across the whole of Unite as well as within his own workforce - proved beyond doubt by the fact they readily balloted overwhelmingly to strike in his defence.

He is chairman of the Unite regional committee, the most senior lay member position in the union in Scotland.

He was also chairman of Falkirk Labour Party and was keenly following Unite's political strategy of encouraging trade union members to join the party and win it back for working-class values.

Such was Unite's success in the Falkirk selection process that the right-wing Blairites - and their Tory allies in the press and big business - cried foul.

Deans was vilified in the press and suspended along with Unite's preferred candidate for selection Karie Murphy.

The truth is Unite did nothing wrong. Unite was exonerated and Deans and Murphy's suspensions were eventually lifted.

But that was not enough for Ratcliffe who was determined to exact his own revenge. On July 17 Ineos suspended Deans from work, his laptop was confiscated, his suspension broadcast to the employees and he was barred from his role as a pension trustee.

Although he was reinstated by local managers a week later, Ratcliffe ordered an intensified search of Deans's emails during August.

Ratcliffe's political links may not be clear but he is known to have a close association with David Cameron's campaign strategist Lynton Crosby and we can assume that UK plc's neoliberal business elite fully support the Murdoch-led vendetta against Unite's growing political and industrial influence.

It looks as though Deans was made to pay the price. Faced with a disciplinary interview earlier this week which seemed designed to humiliate and destroy him on trumped-up charges, he decided to resign instead.

For Cameron to dare to use the floor of the Commons this week to proclaim that resignation as proof of his guilt was not only an absolute disgrace but further evidence of the neoliberal political agenda that was always at play here.

Yes, the hit that our members took was considerable - and a shocking signal of just how ruthless 21st-century capitalism can be in our nasty neoliberal capitalist state under Cameron's Tories.

The champagne corks will no doubt be popping in boardrooms across the country in celebration of Ratcliffe's trouncing of Unite.

It is after all a rare example of defeat for our union, and one which is unlikely to be repeated easily elsewhere.

The real lesson here, which of course our media barons do not want us to discuss, is that such incredibly important strategic assets like Grangemouth must not be left in the hands of unaccountable Swiss-based tax-avoiding capitalist barons like Ratcliffe.

No better case for nationalisation has been seen in this country. He must be laughing all the way to the bank, with public money stuffed into his coffers, significant labour savings under his belt, and absolutely no public scrutiny of his opaque finances and tax avoidance scams - and to top it all, escaping public opprobrium thanks to our fawning capitalist media which attacks Unite for the crisis instead of the real villain of the piece.

None of us in Unite, let alone our members in Grangemouth, believe for one minute that the site was loss-making or that this was anything other than a bid to exact revenge from its workforce and in particular Unite, the union most hated in the nation's boardrooms, for its stunning success in a range of recent disputes - Crossrail, London Buses, Besna electricians, oil tanker drivers, Lindsey and many more.

Let's be united in giving our Unite members at Ineos a massive round of applause for the tremendous fight they put up and solidarity to them for being blackmailed into submission and support for the decision they made.

They won't forget this experience. But they'll understand more than any of us why the nation must take control over Grangemouth before Ratcliffe holds the country to ransom again.

Martin Mayer is chairman of United Left in Unite