Last week’s strike at the Total oil refinery at Lindsey in north Lincolnshire over the decision to use Italian workers on a construction project spread into wildcat strikes at Britain’s power plants and refineries from Milford Haven to Grangemouth.
They may only have involved a few thousand strikers, but they still had a “high octane” political resonance, said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. As the economy deteriorates, Brown’s “clunky mantra” – globalisation is good – sounds as hollow as his latest “sermons on protectionism”. Globalisation has losers too, and many have been low-paid British workers, whose wages were undermined by cheap migrant workers. So Brown’s 2007 “British jobs for British workers” soundbite – now scrawled on many a protester’s placard – was “profoundly devious”.
But this isn’t just about Britain, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. People everywhere are scared of losing their jobs. France, for example, was “semi-paralysed” on Thursday by nationwide strikes. Meanwhile, there have been riots in Greece and protests in Spain, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary and Bulgaria. Responses to the crisis will vary “depending on who gets the blame and who seems to offer the most plausible responses”. The Great Depression ushered in Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal in the US. But in Germany, it “pushed open the door for Adolf Hitler”. Here in Britain, the “torrent of initiatives” spewed out by Downing Street has not reassured the public while the far-right British National Party has “seized on this dispute with particular relish”, said Dominic Lawson in The Independent. It may be “over-dramatic” to see this as the spark that will revive fascism, but we are still in dangerous territory. The demands of strikers at Lindsey imply that Italian workers should be sacked and replaced by British workers. This is “seriously wrong”. Where would it leave British workers in other European countries?
Quite so, said Rawnsley. Indeed, there are more British passport holders living in other EU states than citizens of those states living here. The prosperity of the EU has been built on free trade: economic nationalism would almost certainly turn a severe downturn into a long depression. So Brown is right to argue against it.