'Equal Opportunities' policies were first modelled in Britain in the early 1980s. In 1980, the Commission for Racial Equality listed 73 employers who had adopted their draft Equal Opportunities policy. By 2004, three quarters of all workplaces had a formal written Equal Opportunities policy, up from 64 per cent in 1998. Trying to understand why the Equal Opportunities revolution happened, when the conditions seemed so hostile to such change, is the goal of this book.