The strikers at the Lindsey Oil Refinery have won 102 more jobs for local people. Janet Daley and John Redwood are delighted:
Janet Daley: "I wonder if those local people in Lincolnshire will be willing to forget how the political leaders of their country traduced them when all that they were demanding was a fair opportunity to earn a living? For that egregious sin, they were smeared with the charge of "xenophobia", accused of being benighted bigots who failed to welcome foreigners into their midst, and generally pilloried as the reactionary scum of the globalised earth. Any politician (or media commentator) who dared to express sympathy for them was attacked as "populist", "opportunist" or worse. And most of this abuse was being hurled by people on the Left."
John Redwood MP: "I do support free trade, and I don’t think strikes are a good way of resolving disputes. Yet I do take my hat off the strikers this morning who highlighted the manifest injustice of EU law, and have won the concessions of some jobs for locals."
Meanwhile Nigel Farage MEP is using the controversy to make the case for leaving the EU.
The Right is hugely confused by this issue. Concern for British workers is tempered by concern at wildcat industrial action. Belief in free trade is offset by scepticism about the fairness of the European Union's single market. This story will run and run as the recession deepens and will be a new test for the party's attitude to capitalism.
Tim Montgomerie
2.15pm Comment from Charles Tannock MEP: "UK MEPs have always supported the "posting of workers directive" and the proposed "services directive" precisely to allow UK firms to compete for contracts in the single market, and vice-versa. Of course ideally a number of these workers will be recruited in the receiving host member state particulalrly if they have the requisite skills and the pay de,manded is reasonable but this cannot be mandatory as it defeats the whole object of the single market, which involves open competition. Its funny when I posted a while back on ConHome criticising the idea of free and totally unfettered trade globally I was lambasted as a quasi socialist by some of the same types who now defend excluding EU companies with their acompanying short term contracted staff from bidding for contracts in the UK. Sometimes people are so blinded by their hatred of the EU they will ditch all their previously sacred economic principles, and that goes for UKIP which claims to be a global free trade party." Originally here.
Recent Comments