I'm sure, at the time, that Brown thought it was a coded way of drawing support back from the BNP, but his "British Jobs For British Workers" slogan might backfire. So far, there are hundreds of workers, at 13 locations up and down the country, who have walked out, due to Total giving a £200 million contract, at a Lincolnshire oil refinery, to an Italian firm.
Of course, Total gave the contact, since British workers weren't willing to accept inferior terms and conditions, but that's not the spin the media coverage (and the union slogans and placards) are giving it. It's being portrayed as nationalism, rather than a class issue.
80% of new jobs (from 1997 to 2007) went to immigrants, both EU and non-EU. This, combined with answers to Tory written questions on youth who are not in education, employment or training, paints a picture of an entire generation who didn't benefit from the economic "boom". That generation will now pay a high price during a steep economic downturn ... and will be rather susceptible to this kind of nationalistic sloganeering.
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I suspect it is a little more complicated than that - presumably foreign companies can pay locally appropriate wages to their foreign staff to work on British sites - which British workers wouldn't accept and might even be illegal under the Minimum Wage legislation.
But then, if you think about it, as sterling slides against the euro, at some point it is going to be worth their while for the British workers to go to Spain, Portugal or wherever to get employed by the foreign contractor to come back and work here. I wonder how the contractors are faring economically given their contracts are presumably worth a lot less than they were...
This is how it is with a common market. Sooner or later Europeans are going to decide not to bother coming to get jobs here - then we'll all be totally screwed and most of our low quality jobs will suddenly not happen.
Would an EU-wide minimum wage do the trick?
I doubt that is ever going to happen.
looks like the bnp are going to do very well in future elections me thinks
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