Strikes against EU Posted Worker Directive

There is a good article on the strikes by Rod Liddle in this week's The Spectator, linked here. The following is a short extract which raises a question not highlighted by Mr Liddle: At Lindsey, Total — a French firm — has taken on 100 (soon to be joined by a further 300) Italian and Portuguese contractors who are housed on a barge floating on the water at Grimsby. The contract is worth an estimated £200 million. Lord Mandelson warned the strikers against ‘xenophobia’ and insisted that the British workers had not been discriminated against. It usually takes ages to discover that what Peter Mandelson tells you is false in some way, and usually it requires government inquiries and even police involvement and maybe a resignation or two. But on this occasion he was proved to be demonstrably wrong within the hour, which saved us all a lot of time. A spokesman for Total said that the work being carried out was specialised and needed a close-knit workforce which could converse in a common language, i.e. Italian. If that latter statement had been ever remotely true for one moment, then the fact that the foreign labour force is actually split between Italians and Portugues immediately disproves the point.