Yet another vindication of former Ineos convener Stevie Deans acts as a reminder of the high personal price he paid for standing up against that company's union-busting bosses.

The Grangemouth owners waged a vindictive smear campaign against a man they saw as a fundamental barrier to their plan to attack the terms and conditions of the union members who elected him to represent them.

A craven anti-union media - this paper being an honourable exception - and spineless politicians afraid to stand up to the firm's bully-boy threats to pull the plug on a crucial petrochemicals plant placed Deans and his family under an unbearable strain.

In the end it cost him his livelihood.

News that police have found "no evidence of any criminality" in emails seized on Deans's work computer will come as little surprise to those who know this decent hard-working Scot.

However, the anti-union poison whipped up by the company's bosses, who chose in a crude smear tactic to leak parts of the documents to the Sunday Times, continues to linger over the Labour Party and the whole movement.

The complaints of "victimisation" from Ineos managers, who at the time were threatening to extinguish hundreds of livelihoods, by a few peaceful activists holding Unite union placards was seized upon by the Tories to threaten more shackles on the right to protest.

But the relatively tame treatment received by bosses acting on behalf of a billionaire industrialist pale in comparison to Deans's trial by media and the hounding that he and his family have faced at the hands of a rag-bag of rightwingers reaching all the way up to Westminster.

The response by Labour has been misplaced too.

Instead of standing up robustly for the right to protest, against the blackmail tactics of Ineos, and recognising trade unions' vital and historic role in its own party structures, Ed Miliband was like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

The party's bruised Blairite right wing seized their opportunity to mount a counter-offensive against increasingly vibrant trade unions which they saw as a threat to their own power.

The final outcome of discussions on future links between the unions and party will be decided in the next few weeks, hopefully in more sober circumstances than the hysteria that surrounded the Grangemouth dispute.

Whatever the result, in all this there has only been one real winner - the Tories and their backers. They have revelled in driving a wedge into the heart of the Labour Party at a time when the labour movement should be uniting to focus its energies on creating a future that rids us of the social crisis created by this rabid government.

Unite general secretary Len McCluskey did not mince words yesterday.

"The anti-union hysteria whipped up by certain sections of the media and their friends to pursue a spiteful agenda has been shocking.

"Their witch-hunt has been exposed to be without foundation and a lie.

"Stevie Deans is a decent and honourable man who has been smeared and hounded with a callous disregard for him and his family."

There are those who will be hoping that the treatment meted out to this solid trade unionist will act as a warning to other potential "trouble-makers."

Those hopes are destined to be dashed.

While an exploitative society remains, in which millions are forced to toil for a pittance to make others billions, there will always be people like Deans who choose to stand up and be counted.