Next Gen News

• Liverpool chairman expects £300m deal next week
• Profile: prospective new owner John W Henry
• Timeline: Life under Tom Hicks and George Gillett
• Comment below or email Steve Busfield or on Twitter

2:10 pm: On the subject of the coming together of the "national sports" of the US and England, the BBC has "When baseball meets football". Two great links in that piece:

• Henry and his partners, Werner and Lucchino were declared Best Owners in Baseball by Sports Illustrated in 2009

• Earlier this week the Red Sox owners took out a full page advert apologising for missing out on the play-offs

1.57pm: Back on the Liverpool Red Sox theme, Eddie Smithwick emails:

"I can reliably inform you the First Base bar was baseball themed but has been closed for 3 years. I drive past it on my way home each day. What I can confirm for you is that baseball is played regularly a little further down the road at Maiden Lane sports field throughout the summer. As for Liverpool being renamed the Liverpool Red Sox, you have more chance of Roy Hodgson winning manager of the season...."

1:35 pm: It hasn't yet been suggested that Liverpool might become Liverpool Red Sox, and surely the potential new owners would be foolish to even contemplate it, but an email from John Penton points out:

"Liverpool, and Anfield in particular, is a hotbed of English Baseball. There is a bar, not too far from Anfield , called First Base that is full of baseball memorabilia. Take a look at the English Baseball Association website and, if you look under 'History', you will see there is even a suggestion that Liverpool seamen brought the game to the USA. Baseball is coming home!!!!!!!"

1:31 pm: A very useful Q&A from the Press Association tackles some of the complicated financial questions:

Q. Why are Hicks and Gillett so against the offer?
A. They believe the price of £300million grossly under-values the club - and because they would each take a massive financial hit.
Q. But £300million seems like a lot of money - isn't that far more than they paid for the club in 2007?
A. Yes, they paid £219million, funded entirely by bank loans, but since then the debt has swelled due to interest and other fees to £280million, and they have invested £144.4million into Kop Holdings via a company registered in the Cayman Islands, which was then lent to Liverpool.
Q. What would Hicks and Gillett be left with if the £300million buy-out goes ahead?
A. Around £200million would go towards paying off the Royal Bank of Scotland and Wachovia debts. RBS would be likely to leave around £30million of the debt as a credit facility for the new owners. Only after all the other creditors are paid would any left-over cash go to Hicks and Gillett towards the £144.4million loan they put in.
Q. What about the penalty fees that Hicks and Gillett have built up with RBS?
A. They are about £ 45million but they are certainly subject to legal challenges, too.
Q. So what size of loss are Hicks and Gillett contemplating?
A. A sizeable one, even as much as £100million.

1.14pm:Video interview with Barry Glendenning for sale Liverpool: "They 'Re only interested in huge profits"

12.28pm: To recap the events of the last few hours in the life of Liverpool Football Club:

• The board of Liverpool FC has agreed to sell the club to the US owners of the Boston Red Sox baseball team. In a statement on its website, Liverpool said it had accepted a bid from New England Sports Ventures (NESV), which owns the US baseball team, in defiance of the club's American owners. 9:58 am: The deal with New England Sports Ventures would value Liverpool FC at about £300m.

• However, any deal would be subject to lengthy litigation after the club 'S owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett attempt to dismiss the chairman, Martin Broughton , and two other board members, who were prepared to accept the NESV offer.

• In response, an official statement from the club said the deal had gone through. The club accused the American duo of opposing the offer because the bid would not give them enough profit for their shares.

• In a Q&A on the Liverpool FC website, chairman Broughton says he is confident the deal will go through. But the sale will be subject to a court hearing that the board is acting legally. Broughton said: "Essentially when I took the role they (Hicks and Gillett) gave a couple of written undertakings to Royal Bank of Scotland. Those written undertakings included that I was the only person entitled to change the board and that was written into the articles of the covenants, and also that they would take no action to frustrate any reasonable sale. And I think they flagrantly abused both of those written undertakings."

• More about prospective new owner John W Henry in this profile.

• David Conn explains what might happen next, and the crucial role is played by the Royal Bank of Scotland, who gave Liverpool Oct. 15 deadline to repay debts.

• Timeline of life under Hicks and Gillett

12.31pm: "Liverpool FC sale could take weeks to complete", say lawyers, reports Owen Gibson.

Daniel Liptrott, partner, Eversheds, says:

Maxim usually sell something that would be the owners of assets that must approve the sale of it. However, water has become murky when other stakeholders are involved, as debts to suppliers in a situation of LFC.

When the chairman, Martin Broughton, was brought in at the behest of RBS, the bank â€" owed £237m â€" ensured that the balance of power on the board resided with Broughton, the managing director, Christian Purslow, and the commercial director, Ian Ayre.

They have argued that they have a duty to act in the best interests of the company and the principal lenders, while Gillett and Hicks have so far blocked any sale that does not return a substantial profit on their original investment.

12.20pm: So, Liverpool chairman Martin Broughton clearly thinks that the owners are acting unconstitutionally and that the sale will go through. He also has some words about the potential/likely/possible new owners:

Why, in your opinion, is the New England Sports Ventures Law of the new owner of FC Liverpool?

I think both of them would have been excellent new owners. New England have a lot of experience in developing, investing in and taking Boston Red Sox - as the closest parallel - from being a club with a wonderful history, a wonderful tradition that had lost the winning way, and bringing it back to being a winner. Their commitment to winning is what it's all about there and they've extended it from Boston Red Sox to Nascar and other things, but Red Sox is the main one.

Will the debt burden be removed completely?

To all intents and purposes, yes. All of the acquisition debt that was involved in the current owners acquisition will be removed completely. We'll still have what we call normal working capital debt and there's a facility there for the new stadium which will remain in place, but to all intents and purposes all the major debt that has been causing our problem has been paid off.

Is there a commitment from them to progress the new stadium project?

12.14pm: Liverpool FC's official website now has a Q&A with Liverpool FC Chairman Martin Broughton on the takeover. Here are some key parts of that Q&A:

Can you explain exactly what the situation is right now?

It certainly has been dramatic. The latest position is that we have a sale agreement in place, we've agreed the sale to New England Sports Ventures, that sale is subject to a number of conditions like Premier League approval and other normal conditions. The specific additional condition is that it's subject to confirmation that the Board acted validly in drawing up the sale documents.

Last night fans read a statement on the official website claiming that the owners had sought to remove Christian Purslow and Ian Ayre from the Board. What was the reasoning behind this and were the owners successful?

The court will ultimately decide whether the owners were successful. The reasoning behind it was that the owners felt we were reviewing two bids which they considered undervalued the club and therefore they wished to remove Christian and Ian and replace them with Mack Hicks, who is Tom's son, and Lori McCutcheon, who also works with him.

We don't think it was valid to do it. Essentially when I took the role they gave a couple of written undertakings to Royal Bank of Scotland. Those written undertakings included that I was the only person entitled to change the board and that was written into the articles of the covenants, and also that they would take no action to frustrate any reasonable sale. And I think they flagrantly abused both of those written undertakings.

Just to clarify, what needs to happen now for the sale to be finalised?

The key thing is the court case. We need to go to the court to get a declaratory judgement, which is for the court to declare that we did act validly in completing the sale agreement, and then the buyers can complete the sale. We have to get Premier League approval and I'm certain that's not going to be an issue. There are one or two minor things like that but the key issue is the court, which should meet I would think next week sometime. That is the most likely time, in short order.

Maybe the owners of a block sale of LFC in the New England Sports business?

Well, we have to win a court case. So effectively yes, if they win the court case, they can block the sale. But then we may have one or two other thoughts in mind as well.

Could the sale process be dragged through the courts for months before a resolution is reached?

No, I don't think so. We should get a declaratory judgement I would have thought probably by the end of next week, in short order. There is an appeal process but that is also very fast.

12:09 PM: A lot of debate below the line appears to be about whether Liverpool will/should/might be docked points should they go into administration. PA quotes sources saying that Liverpool will NOT be docked points. But that is unofficial at the moment.

12:03 pm: StreetStories.com, that, say, "Premier online site covering managed futures, hedge funds, commodity trading advisors (CTA) and a large market traders master the last 40 years", has an interesting background on John Henry W ' glory years as a fund manager . In 1992 Henry was Number 6 in the Financial World: Wall Street 100:

Back when John Henry was raising soybeans, he reaped a $75,000 windfall one day by hedging his crop. Although today he ascribes that feat to "pure luck," he was hooked for life on the futures market. By 1981 Henry was managing money full-time, plying six mathematical models he devised to trade everything from currencies to grain futures. Last year, on the strength of long stakes in Japanese bonds and assorted currency wagers, he outshone renowned rivals Paul Jones and Bruce Kovner by posting a 69% gain in his biggest fund, the Financial and Metals Portfolio. At year-end, Henry, 42, was overseeing more than $690 million in assets.

11:54 AM: Reader Alex Gale offers this theory via email:

What if this bid acceptance/refusal is a ruse? Due to all the publicity it is pretty much official that, should the club revert to ownership by RBS, they will sell it at probably much the same price as the bid to the Red Sox chap. This in turn smokes out any other potential interest, god knows where from, most likely Thailand or a Gulf State, even China and they are forced to make a bid before the bank takes ownership. The price goes up and the two yanks come away having at least covered their investment cost…

11.38am: I think it might be worth repeating from a piece elsewhere, David Conn trying to explain what may happen from here:

As for what happens next in this endgame being played by Broughton, Purslow and Ayre against the bank deadline of 15 October, it is still in flux. Hicks and Gillett sought to remove Purslow and Ayre yesterday to prevent the three, as a majority, approving a sale of the club to John W Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, or another, unnamed, Asian buyer. Neither, apparently, would have delivered a personal payday to the Americans. The statement said: "This matter is now subject to legal review."

The power, everybody knows, rests with RBS, the collapsed bank now 84% owned by the British taxpayer who bailed it out. Yet the last thing the bank wants is to be in charge of a football club as high-profile, crisis-hit and emotionally volatile as Liverpool. All along, the possibility most pondered has been for RBS to reclaim the club on 15 October, if Hicks and Gillett do not pay up, with a buyer lined up for the bank immediately to sell to.

There are many twists lying in wait before so clinical a solution can be orchestrated, especially with the club's three directors having decided to make no secret of their opposition to Hicks and Gillett.

11.34am: Interestingly, the Liverpool Echo's version of this story states: "Liverpool FC sold to New England Sports Ventures"

It is not until the last paragraph of the story adds: "The statement also said the sale conditional on the approval of the Premier League, as well as dispute resolution conference room and other issues,".

11.26am: Checking the comments below the line, I thought this was interesting post from New-York reader therentedhat:

Henry's a good owner, but he has changed Fenway to help it make more money for the team, while not building a new stadium, primarily because Red Sox fans won't allow it...

I put it to you this way. I was talking to an friend of mine who has a fairly superficial understanding of the football...

He asks me, "What about Liverpool?"

I respond, "They are broke. They have Gerrard and a couple of other players, but they're broke."

"Broke, how that possible?"

\\ "They are in joint possession of the owner of the Texas Rangers and the owner of Montreal Candians. "

\\ "Oh, shit."

Pop those corks on the Merseyside tonight. You've earned it with all that marching and sign making and that.

The Sox got destroyed by injuries this season and still were in it to the 2nd to last Sunday of the season. If the Sox had Youk and Pedoria they would have won close to a hundred games this year.

11.06am: Here is the reaction from some Liverpool fans websites. Barry Glendenning also considers some of the other views (not necessarily that the brand Red):

On Twitter, Manchester United fan and Sky television presenter Eamonn Holmes said. "We don't buy baseball teams - because we don't understand it, so why don't these American companies take the hint and follow by example?" he tweeted, speaking for those unable to distinguish between a shortstop and a pitcher. Self-styled joke-loving Kopite Davylpool was quick to respond, telling Holmes "we don't buy baseball teams because we can't afford them", before labelling him… ah, go and see for yourself.

10.49am: US tycoons George Gillett and Tom Hicks offered £435m to buy Liverpool in early 2007 and when the deal went through it valued the club at £219m. The plan was to build a new stadium too, but a year later the pair were barely speaking to each other. The relationship with the supporters deteriorated fast, with Tom Hicks Jr, a board member, responding to an email from a fan with a foul-mouthed tirade. In April this year Gillett and Hicks announced the appointment of British Airways chairman Martin Broughton, to oversee the sale of the club, saying: "Owning Liverpool Football Club over these past three years has been a rewarding and exciting experience for us and our families. Having grown the Club this far we have now decided together to look to sell the Club to owners committed to take the Club through its next level of growth and development."

This year a string of possible deals have been touted, including Chinese investor Kenny Huang, a consortium of Middle East investors and private equity firm Blackstone.

And then, in September, Hicks decided to try to maintain control, and he tried to refinance debt of ?? 237m Royal Bank of Scotland. If you were unable to find a new loan, Texas may be forced to abandon their investments on 15 October. From that date looming, and the ?? 60m fine variety of opportunities, comes the Revelation of John W Henry 'S bid.

10.34am: Liverpool will not be docked points if it goes into administration, according to Press Association sources. The PA story says:

There have been suggestions that if Tom Hicks and George Gillett block a £300million takeover for the club by New England Sports Ventures, owners of the Boston Red Sox baseball team, then their holding company would be put into administration by the Royal Bank of Scotland over their unpaid £280million debts.

This will not lead to an automatic deduction of points for the Reds however - Premier League to clarify the rules regarding the parent company, so that if the club itself is fully solvent entity - like Liverpool - the penalty should not apply.

A Premier League source told Press Association Sport: "The aim of the regulations is primarily to capture clubs who have gone into insolvency. This is manifestly not the case with Liverpool Football Club."

10.11am: So, who is the man who now wants to take over Liverpool FC? John W Henrymade his fortune in hedge funds before using it to treat their sports interests, with the Boston Red Sox baseball team in NASCAR, a huge American Series racing. In accordance with this profile , his personal fortune was worth about £540m before the credit crunch, meaning that he is not in the Abramovich league.

He does, however, have a good track record of success with his teams. He owned a string of minor league baseball teams, and then the Major League Florida Marlins, before he and his partners in New England Sports Ventures, Tom Werner and the New York Times Company, bought the Red Sox in 2002.

Within two years of purchase Red Sox, he helped to end "The Curse of the Bambino" . (The Red Sox went 86 years without a World Series after selling the legendary Babe Ruth to their biggest rivals, the NY Yankees).

Liverpool fans may also be pleased to know that Henry resisted temptations to move the club out of the historic Fenway Park and instead developed the old stadium.

Likewise, his Nascar team won their first Daytona 500 in 2009.

10:08 am: I see that below the line there are many, many questions. Obviously we will be trying to work out the answers to as many of them as possible today: clearly the most important of which is, will this deal happen? But then there are questions about how it could happen, what will Hicks and Gillett do, what do we know about the Boston Red Sox owner, is another American taking over a major English sporting institution a good thing, etc etc etc.

9.16am: Liverpool's celebrity supporters produced this video against Hicks and Gillett.

9:09 am:

So, Liverpool, bottom of the Premiership after their worst league start for donkeys, think they may have found a saviour. But the current owners, reviled by many, are not happy. This could be tricky to unpick.

Through the day we will try to unpick the details, work out who will end up owning the club, and gauge the reaction of fans, the league, the various claimants.

8:25 am:

Liverpool Football Club has agreed the sale to the US owners of the Boston Red Sox baseball team, the club announced this morning.

In a statement on its website, Liverpool said its board had agreed the sale of the club to New England Sports Ventures (NESV), owners of the Boston Red Sox, New England Sports Network, Fenway Sports Group and Rousch Fenway Racing.

However, the sale of a fire in the Conference Room of battle, revealing the degree of the split at the highest club level. Late last night's American owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, was believed to have rejected the offer NESV , despite the three other directors at Liverpool being prepared to accept it.

This led to an official statement from Liverpool accusing Hicks and Gillett of opposing the offer because the bid would not give them enough profit for their shares.

However, this morning the club announced that the sale had gone through.

\\ "I am pleased that we were able to successfully complete the sale process that was thorough and extensive", said chairman Martin Broughton Liverpool.

"The board decided to accept NESV's proposal on the basis that it best met the criteria we set out originally for a suitable new owner. NESV's philosophy is all about winning and they have fully demonstrated that at Red Sox."

"We've met them in Boston, London and Liverpool over several weeks and I am immensely impressed with what they have achieved and with their vision for Liverpool Football Club," Broughton added.

\\ "By removing the burden of the acquisition debt, the proposal allows us to focus on investment in the team. I'm just disappointed that the owners have tried everything to get things happening, and what we have to go through trials in order to complete sale. "

The sale is conditional on Premier League approval, resolution of a dispute concerning Board membership and other matters.

Lucy Ward and family have swapped their delightful Tudor home in a leafy English market town for a 10th-floor flat in a Stalin-era apartment block in Moscow. Quite a culture shock ...

It's 1 September, and in a packed school hall in Moscow the warm air is thick with the scent of flowers. Every child carries an elaborate bouquet â€" the grandest featuring tiny flashing lights or fresh fruit â€" and golden balloons hang in clusters from the ceiling. White ribbons cascade from ornately plaited hair, and pupils wear their finest outfits â€" white tights, black patent shoes and something sparkly for girls; scaled-down suits for boys.

In the middle of all this are my two daughters, looking by turns impressed, surprised, confused and puzzled. Personal rapid decline in ground-and-run they are used to: it's the first day of the school year in the Russian style, so it is has a name - the Day of Knowledge - and his own ritual: the sound "first call" to open the road to knowledge.

For our family â€" my partner, Liam, and daughters, Ailis, 10, and Maeve, seven (our four-year-old son, Ned, had already started at an international school here) â€" this was one of those "how did this happen?" moments that have struck regularly since we moved to Russia in the summer.

How on earth did we come to leave our beloved dog, house and garden in a market town near Cambridge for a modest flat on the 10th floor of a Stalin-era apartment building on Komsomolsky Prospekt, Moscow?

The answer, as for many British families here, is work: Liam is employed by an asset management company specialising in Russia and is doing a stint in Moscow. That makes me, in expat lingo, a trailing spouse, and the kids, I suppose, trailing children.

Except that we don't view it like that. Liam has a longstanding interest in Russia, having lived here in the mid-1990s; and my 18th birthday present was a week-long trip in 1987, when St Petersburg was still Leningrad and there was nothing in the shops.

This time, we hope to turn a work-driven move into a shared experience for our family. Once our plans were fixed, the children had weekly Russian lessons, and the girls came to Moscow for a few days to visit their new school. And we did our best to help Ned understand what was going on.

Ailis remains the most cautious â€" she is missing her final year at primary school, has had to wave goodbye to her best friend and was enjoying growing independence in our small town. All three miss Rosie, our dog (staying with the people who are renting our house), but the younger two children have simply taken their world with them.

The girls face the most dramatic change: while Ned has started his school life in an international school teaching the English curriculum, Ailis and Maeve attend a Russian private school. They will be taught a special personalised curriculum â€" lots of one-to-one Russian lessons, plus English lessons tailored for them.

Each morning they must change from outdoor to indoor shoes, and they have been allocated a locker each to take winter boots and clothing. They are fed repeatedly, including breakfast, lunchtime soup and a main course, plus cake and fruit in the afternoon. They play outside in much smaller playgrounds than the playing fields they are used to and will do so even when the temperature drops to -10C or less. They stay at school longer, but do their homework there, with help from teachers. So far they have settled well, even joining a school theatre club and acting in Russian. They are already patronising about my accent â€" watching their mum look silly in shops is an unexpected bonus of our move.

In order to choose the school makes you as an emigrant family to determine the kind of life you want to lead abroad. Setting up in another country, you have a clean sheet on which any attempt to carbon copy or redraw your lifestyle.

For us, another big change has been our home â€" we have swapped a three-storey, half-refurbished Tudor house with three quarters of an acre of garden for a compact flat with a tiny balcony on the 10th floor of a block overlooking one of the main six-lane arteries entering the centre of Moscow. The whole apartment is arranged along one corridor. It is furnished from Ikea throughout and feels a bit like sitting in the showroom.

Some expat families in Moscow opt to live in (or are sometimes allocated through diplomatic jobs) one of several compounds for foreigners around the city. We couldn't have afforded a compound home anyway (Moscow rents, and indeed all prices, are astronomical â€" an average flat let to a foreigner can easily cost £5,200 a month), but we neither want nor need one.

But the delight taken by Russians in childhood is something Brits could learn from. While British schools might argue legitimately that fussing over potentially distressed four-year-olds as they say goodbye to their parents only prolongs the agony, the enormous sense of occasion engendered by the Russian bouquets, balloons and songs instils in children the idea that they are important to their country and that their education is too.

Beyond the playground, we have crossed the Moskva river via a nearby footbridge and begun to explore Gorky park, where a funfair offers an unexpected counterpoint to the post-cold war image of a hard-partying city awash with flashy new wealth. We pass a square where couples join free outdoor dancing lessons, and Ned and I spin on a boating lake in a plastic duck while nearby children enjoy rides on a camel.

The paths and open areas in the park are flooded for skating in winter, and our kids are now fitted out with skates and ice hockey kits thanks to donations from fellow expat families who have helped guide us through the Moscow maze.

Thus, we have a few weeks and, while barely able to buy a ticket for the still glorious underground Soviet era, all we can do, I think, let's start with what we experience first hand - if my stilted, chats with Natasha, my friendly old neighbor in the apartment next door, or the efforts of Russian teachers went to greet our daughters.

In the end, our family is living its own version of Moscow life: we've brought our British ways and attitudes with us, inevitably, but with luck we'll take something of Russia back when we go home. We have a long way to go and a lot to learn but the five of us are in it together.

In 1968, a strike by female employees at Ford laid the groundwork for the Equal Pay Act. It seemed like a great triumph, but the truth has proved very different

Rip off your pinny, reach for the Biba frock, get that asymmetric bob: it's the 60s all over again. Feminism's second wave is brewing, Barbara Castle is first secretary of state and the 187 women who sew car seats at the Ford Dagenham plant are out on strike.

Don't do it. It is the wrong cause at the wrong time. Rising unemployment, a government set on cuts, employers reluctant to concede so much as a pay rise in line with inflation mean one last heave would be a wasted effort. Instead, review the past and contemplate its lessons. One lesson really: equal pay legislation hasn't worked.

So much noise has been made about equal pay for so long, to so little effect, that it can be hard to remember how we got here. The industrial world of the 60s, portrayed so vividly in Made in Dagenham, is another country. Back then, manufacturing contributed more than a third of the national income, and the production line was the ancestral home of the alpha male, the skilled worker. At Dagenham, Ford's flagship UK plant, there were 300 men to every woman worker, and pay negotiations began at the top with the skilled men, worked down past the semi-skilled and the labourer, right to the bottom of the heap: the women.

Ironically, it was a step towards modernisation, a plant-wide job evaluation, that triggered the women's strike. Their work â€" machining covers for car seats â€" was graded as unskilled. But as the women protested at the time, if their work was really so simple, anyone could do it. When challenged, the evaluators had no idea how to put a seat cover together. Their work was classified as unskilled only because they were women. Unfortunately, there was no law against this.

The pay system was built on differentials between one sort of worker and the next, and as far as the trade unions were concerned â€" despite some vocal support for equal pay, and reluctant union backing for the Ford machinists â€" the emphasis was not on questioning them, but maintaining them. It was never spelled out, but paying women the same as men, in whatever grade, would be like pulling out a brick at the bottom of the heap. The whole structure would topple.

The problem was not only that employers paid the worker and not the work; there was also a stubbornly enduring assumption that women had no right to be in the workplace. They were indispensable during the war years, but after that they were expected to go home and have babies. By the 60s, it was thought that a woman at work was either looking for a husband, or earning pin money.

On the whole, the Dagenham machinists did not consider themselves feminists. It was a sense of injustice that motivated them: the unfairness of earning only 87% of the men's rate. They eventually settled for 92% â€" an extra 2p an hour â€" and a few years later equal pay legislation was introduced. Like so much political change, this was largely a matter of coincidence and random events: a desperate bid to shore up a shaky Labour government that had lost its bearings, to give Castle a boost after she had been left bloodied by union opposition to reform, to meet the demands of entry to Europe â€" and to find a quick answer to silence the small but newly influential women's lobby among MPs.

The commitment was given at a time of eye-watering pay restraint, when any pay award had to be justified not in terms of justice but increased productivity. Experts gloomily predicted that equal pay legislation would add £600m to the national wage bill. Equal pay was therefore often painted as less a victory over injustice and more a threat to the national economy.

Sometimes political decisions made in the heat of battle are brilliant, but the Equal Pay Act was never more than a concession of principle. It had its triumphs â€" it did finally end the categorisation of workers by sex in pay negotiations â€" and it did lead to a small across-the-board increase in women's pay. Nonetheless, its five-year introductory period gave employers time to redefine the work of female employees so that they could not compare their jobs with those of their male peers. And it was always up to individual women to prove that they were doing equal work of equal value â€" not for the employer to justify the difference.

The situation improved after 1983 when the act was amended â€" employees now had to prove they did "work of comparable value", rather than exactly equal value. Supported by their unions, a series of defining cases was brought. But they were won at huge personal cost to the individuals prepared to take this long, hard road. It took 11 years and a final appeal to the European court of justice, for example, before speech therapist Pamela Enderby won recognition that her line of work, which is mainly done by women, was of comparable worth to that of clinical psychologists and pharmacists, who are predominantly male.

Women in local government have had to struggle with devious settlements that have used bonuses to maintain the pay gap â€" and when they have challenged them, the councils have threatened to cut some men's pay rather than raise women's, with predictably angry results from male workers. Other councils have found legally sound ways of enhancing men's jobs to enable them to maintain the gap. The act's historic impact may actually be that, in making it marginally easier to enforce women's right to pay parity, it has ironically made it harder to achieve.

In her panoramic survey, The Equality Illusion, feminist writer and activist Kat Banyard is still convinced that an equal pay law that actually works could make the difference. She and the Fawcett Society, where she was campaigns officer, argue that making employers conduct a compulsory pay audit â€" a review of relative rates of pay, according to gender â€" would expose the scale of the inequity and ignite calls for justice. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that employers will buy into the idea, (and plenty that they won't) and no prospect that even a Labour, let alone a Conservative government would impose it. That's not to say it isn't worth trying. Only that it is no quick fix.

Nor, as Banyard acknowledges, is there a guarantee that this change in the law would change behaviour â€" any more than outlawing sex discrimination has ended sex discrimination.

In 2004, then prime minister Tony Blair set up the Women and Work Commission to explore the stubborn refusal of pay practice to fall in line with the law. Its first report identified how, from early in their school careers, girls make choices that lead directly to lower earnings than men: they choose the wrong kind of GCSEs, duck the hard subjects that better-paid work demands.

The commission came up with dozens of suggestions for improved career advice and wider work experience for girls, but two years later a follow-up report found little had changed. The final gloomy report, last year, concluded that the government might have been talking the talk, but it was mostly hot air.

Outside the public sector, the industrial conditions that made pay discrimination so blatant are fading from memory. The high-profile unfair pay cases now come from the late 20th century equivalent of the shop floor: the City. And women with a claim use sex discrimination law rather than cumbersome equal pay legislation.

Meanwhile, arguably as much harm as good has been done by repeated attempts to insert talented women into a man-shaped world â€" just ask about the experiences of the women elected to parliament for the first time in 1997. The jeering discourse of tokenism is one more way of undermining women of ambition, and it deters other able women.

So perhaps it is time to accept that the Equal Pay Act, with its focus on gender inequality, has failed. It has failed partly because it was never meant to work: the economic crisis of the late 60s was no time to be revolutionising pay structures. And it has failed because it was out of date before it was introduced.

The real question is whether workplace equity can be brought about some other way. Even in the 60s, campaigners knew that the more effective, straightforward way of ending low pay for women was to introduce a minimum wage. As Banyard points out, poverty has a female face: 70% of low-paid workers are women.

At the dramatic climax of Made in Dagenham, the central character, Rita, played by Sally Hawkins, cries out: "We are not separated by sex, only by the will of those who are not prepared to go into battle for what is right, and those who are." But that is just what the campaign for equal pay has done: separate by sex.

There are signs that we are ready to think anew about how people are paid. Bankers' bonuses have stirred a sense of injustice. The BBC has been running a "what are they worth?" exercise, inviting people to rank jobs in terms of their value to society. London Citizens' Living Wage campaign has transformed our understanding of what millions earn in the capital â€" and what's needed for a basic human existence (£2.80 above the minimum wage of £5.85).

The fight for equal pay is a fight for justice, which is the only valid purpose of a progressive society. But fighting for one group is a contradiction in terms. Low pay affects women most, but it is not only a problem for women. If Made in Dagenham stirs us into any battle it should be for a living wage â€" and justice for everyone.