British prime minister Gordon Brown has condemned wildcat strikes as indefensible amid frantic efforts to prevent the row over the use of foreign labour escalating into mass industrial action.
Mr Brown said he recognised people were “worried” about jobs being taken by workers from other countries, but stressed that the UK was part of a “single European market”.
He also sought to explain his pledge of “British jobs for British workers”, insisting he had only meant people would be given the skills to compete against other nationalities.
The comments, in an interview with the BBC’s Politics Show, came as efforts continued to stop tensions spiralling out of control.
Officials from government departments, unions, employers and the mediation service Acas have been in frantic discussions following a series of wildcat strikes that erupted across the country on Friday. The protests were prompted by a decision to bring in hundreds of Italian and Portuguese contractors to work on a new £200 million plant at the giant Lindsey Oil Refinery at North Killingholme, North Lincolnshire.
Unions claim Britons were not given any opportunity to apply for the posts.
Earlier yesterday, Business Secretary Lord Mandelson promised that the government would “make sure that both domestic UK law and European rules are being applied properly and fairly”.
“But it would be a huge mistake to retreat from a policy where within the rules, UK companies can operate in Europe and European companies can operate here,” he added.
“Protectionism would be a sure-fire way of turning recession into depression.” In his interview, to be broadcast today, Mr Brown was asked what his message would be to those thinking of staging sympathy strikes tomorrow.
“That that’s not the right thing to do and it’s not defensible,” he replied. “What we’ve set up as a process to deal with the questions that people have been asking about what has happened in this particular instance.”
He went on: “When I talked about British jobs, I was taking about giving people in Britain the skills, so that they have the ability to get jobs which were at present going to people from abroad and actually encouraging people to take up the courses and the education and learning that is necessary for British workers to be far more skilled for the future.”