Dawn of new age of industrial unrest | Web encouraged every skilled man to strike | Comment: British Jobs and British Workers | Q&A: British industrial strikes | Phrase that has come back to haunt Brown | A whole new European world of work

The Italian and Portuguese workers billed as the stormtroopers of an invading army intent on stealing British jobs looked pretty miserable yesterday.

Ten miles up the Lincolnshire coast, almost 1,000 people were demonstrating their outrage at the awarding of a construction contract at Total UK’s giant oil refinery to a company that employs only foreign labour.

Before the morning ended, what had begun as a local grievance had spread rapidly to power plants across England, Scotland and Wales.

As news of more walkouts reached the scaffolders, welders, platers and steel erectors shivering outside the entrance to the Lyndsey refinery at Immingham, each announcement was greeted with applause and loud cheers. It may have been cold enough to bring tears to the eyes, but fuelling this crowd was a collective sense of solidarity and a determination to stand up for a principle borrowed, as they were only too happy to remind him, from their Prime Minister: British jobs for British workers.

Back at Grimsby docks, 92 employees of the Italian contractor IREM, cast as the villains of this industrial showdown, were waiting on coaches to be ferried to work.

What has passed for home in the two weeks since they arrived in Britain is what must be one of the ugliest vessels ever to have floated on water. A uniformly grey, rusting, flat-roofed, three-storey block of a barge that looks like a Soviet prison ship — and probably feels like one — is moored near fish sheds and freight warehouses in a distant corner of the docks.

It was not so hidden that a group of 40 Lyndsey demonstrators were unable to track it down. They were visiting the docks, a 34-year-old scaffolder explained, with the polite aim of inviting their European cousins on “that immigrant vessel” to “go back to your own country”. With the protesters came a large police presence. After a short discussion, the Italians were asked to leave the coaches and dutifully returned to spend another fruitless day, employed but not working, on the barge.

Those few who ventured forlornly on deck later to gaze at the furore on the quayside must have wondered what they had let themselves in for. It recalled a scene from Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, though it would have seemed downright rude yesterday to whisper of a time when British construction workers were known to visit other countries in search of work.

For the union activists who climbed on the back of a trailer to address the crowd, the blame lay not with the hapless European workers but squarely at the feet of Total UK. Its 500-acre complex processes ten million tonnes of crude oil a year.

The company says that no British redundancies will result directly from awarding IREM the construction contract for a £250 million unit to process crude oil with a higher sulphur content. It insists that the Italian workers “will be paid the same as the existing contractors”.

Such assurances rang hollow to Philip Whitehurst, a plater who, like many of his fellow protesters, has been told that his labour will no longer be required after February 17. “We’re being put out of work and the Italians are replacing us. We’re more skilled than them and we live here. None of it makes sense unless they’re not on the same terms and conditions as us.”

Paul Elvin, a 47-year-old plater from Scunthorpe, was there “because my 19-year-old son is sitting unemployed at home while a barge-load of Italians is shipped in to meet a shortage of labour that doesn’t exist”.

The biggest cheers were for Kenny Ward, an unemployed union activist, who told the crowd: “The Government needs to know that it’s not right, what’s happening here. I’m a victim, you’re a victim and there’s thousands of others across the country. We’re victims of discrimination against the British worker.

“This has been going on for years and finally the lid has blown off. We’re the best-qualified workforce in the world, but we’ve been used and abused by greedy employers. Enough is enough.”

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