Who built Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the individuals who made Britain better.

• The sugar baron who gave Britain something money couldn’t buy

At the start of 1976, Jayaben Desai was just one of the many thousands of South Asian immigrants who had fled political persecution in East Africa to settle in the UK. By the end of the year, she had become one of the most prominent trade unionists in the country – building a groundbreaking strike against her employers that united immigrant women and the white-dominated trade union movement.

As the UK continues to fracture along racial lines thanks to politicians like Suella Braverman questioning long-held notions of Englishness and identity, Desai’s story is one that exemplifies what it means to be British. 

Desai was born in 1933 in what is now the coastal state of Gujarat in India, back when the British Raj still ruled supreme. She moved to Tanzania – then under British rule – when she married her businessman husband, Suryakant Desai. Like Braverman’s own father, Christie Fernandes, Desai was part of a wave of South Asian migration to East Africa, seeking better opportunities and a more comfortable life in another corner of the British Empire.

But as Tanzania and other colonies gained independence, the lives of South Asians in the region became increasingly unstable and uncertain – in Uganda, for instance, president Idi Amin ordered the mass expulsion of Asians from the country. Desai and her family decided to take their chances in the “mother country” instead, becoming “twice migrants” in the process. 

In the UK, the comfortably middle-class Desai family experienced a calamitous fall from grace. Desai’s husband became an unskilled labourer while the mother of two eventually ended up at Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories, a factory in Dollis Hill, north-west London. Many of her fellow 400 or so workers were, like her, South Asian women in desperate need of a job. But Britain in the 70s was not a welcoming place. 

The openly fascist National Front was on the march, at one point becoming England’s fourth-biggest political party in terms of electoral support. Their policies included forced deportations for all non-white immigrants, a call that has echoes in Restore’s proposal of mass deportations. South Asian communities were targeted by racist thugs – in the summer of 1976 Gurdip Singh Chaggar, an 18-year-old Sikh student, was stabbed to death in Southall, west London. 

The Grunwick factory was no safe haven from discrimination. Asian workers were paid less than employees at other similar factories. They faced threats of unfair dismissal and were forced to work compulsory overtime. Humiliatingly, they even had to ask their white managers before taking a bathroom break.

Fed up with the working conditions, Desai led a walkout that grew to more than 100 colleagues on a punishingly hot day in August, telling their boss: “What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. There are many types of animals in a zoo.  Some are monkeys who dance to your tune, others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr Manager.”

As a mother of two who clocked in at a diminutive 4ft 10in, Desai did not look like your typical 70s union leader. But her “strikers in saris” managed to capture the imagination of the wider trade union movement.

After they joined the white-collar union Apex, Desai and her strike committee met workers at more than a thousand workplaces all over the UK and rallied them to their cause. Workers flocked to the factory to show their solidarity, with 1,300 showing up on the picket line. By July 1977, that had swelled to 20,000 in a single day.

Staff at the local post office refused to handle orders for Grunwick, which meant the mail-order film processing business nearly collapsed. The number of people joining Desai’s picket line continued to grow – all to demand better working conditions for a comparatively tiny group of South Asian migrant women. 

Did Desai’s strikers win? They didn’t. After two bitter years, the strike was called off after bosses at Grunwick refused to cede to the workers’ demands. Apex and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) stopped backing her strike when they felt the dispute couldn’t be won.

But Desai achieved a deeper solidarity than one conferred by the support of corporate bodies. “We have shown that workers like us, new to these shores, will never accept being treated without dignity or respect,” she told her strikers at their final meeting. “We have shown that white workers will support us.” 

Ultimately, that was Desai’s victory – the one that assured her place in the history books. Seen at the repellent level of racial politics, which appears to be back in fashion today, this Gujarati transplant from Tanzania had little in common with her allies. Yet her cries for help did not go unnoticed – despite their apparent gulf of difference, Desai made clear to other workers and members of the trade union movement that they had a shared stake in this fight.

Today, far-right activists like Tommy Robinson, who is more prominent than ever thanks to the support of the billionaire Elon Musk, claim that our British values are incompatible with those of people like Desai. Both Reform and Restore have announced that they would shut down the asylum system completely if they got into power, with Reform home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf claiming that “Britain is full”. Balaclava-clad anti-migrant activists disrupt local communities while political agitators stoke hatred by harking back to a time before immigration “ruined” Britain.  

These far-right voices would have you believe that British identity and being an immigrant are fundamentally irreconcilable propositions. But the values that Desai fought for – fairness, tolerance and respect – are ones that many of us associate with Britishness itself.

As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Grunwick strike this year, it’s worth remembering what Desai, who died in 2010, showed us: that an attack on one marginalised group of workers concerned wider society too. Desai built a Britain in which empathy and common ground were not only possible, but could create a solidarity movement that spanned a whole country.