The much-looked-to social Europe is being buried by this trend, all the "positive protection" for workers rights called for in your editorial are impossible to allow in a world of ever more open borders increasingly dominated by cheap exports from China.

In the face of this, where is the union support for textile import quotas to save European jobs? Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson have only one alternative to such protection.

This the patronising delusion that if we just invest adequately in skills and technology, the British will be able to outmanoeuvre the Chinese in the race up the value-added ladder.

Yet China and India, are fast developing their own lower-cost but highly skilled expertise in these areas too.

Almost 20 per cent of China's exports are now classified as high-tech and it turns out 2 million graduates a year.

As a first step towards highlighting the failure of European governments' free-market policies, the unions should demand the answer to two questions from Gordon Brown.

First, what it is exactly that Europe will still be able to export rather than import from China and other cheap labour, hi-tech competitors? Second, given the rising tide of Chinese imports and resulting European job losses and declining tax revenues, what are the implications for public sector finances?