THIRTY years after the traumatic year-long dispute at Wapping, which cost 5,500 jobs, Murdoch’s News Corp still sits on top of the pile of media conglomerates.

The phone-hacking and bribery scandals rocked the political Establishment but have left Murdoch virtually untouched.

His relationship with the Tory government seems as close as it was in the 1980s. Once again there are grudging admissions of cosy meetings with David Cameron, George Osborne and reciprocal attendance as honoured guests at the Murdoch Christmas soiree. ‎

None of this has been a surprise to the many victims of News Corp and its former UK arm News International — the phonehacking victims, the workers sacked when the News of the World was closed in an attempt to head off the scandal and the much greater number thrown out of work in 1986.

In the front line of Margaret Thatcher’s war against trade unions, print workers were blamed almost universally for their own sackings.

The myth that the dispute was about new printing technology continues to be peddled by media historians and others, but in truth it was about corporate power, the building of a media monopoly and the annihilation of working-class resistance.

But the left papers supported the dispute and the Morning Star as Britain’s only socialist daily ensured that it was able to offer a daily report and authoritative commentary.

The Star published the notorious letter from the solicitors’ firm Farrer’s that revealed the conspiracy to provoke a dispute in order sack an entire workforce.

The company’s relentless pursuit of the unions by legal action during the year-long dispute forced into the open evidence that the management had set up shadow companies and recruited a pirate workforce long before the dispute began.

At the 25th anniversary in 2011, an exhibition was produced to tell the workers’ story.

Later a website and oral history were added. The exhibition continues to be in demand and is currently on display at the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives in East London, not too far from the fateful Wapping site.

This supplement links the events and pain of the 1986-7 dispute with the state of the media today, to show how its foundations were laid.

It is a tribute to the heroic struggles of the strikers who fought to regain their jobs and rights to free and independent trade union recognition and collective bargaining.

• Ann Field is a retired national officer of Unite.