Our workers paid the price of EU dream admits union boss Red Len

UNION baron Len McCluskey last night declared the enlargement of the EU into Eastern Europe had been a ‘gigantic experiment’ conducted ‘at the expense’ of British workers.

The leader of the country’s biggest union – supposed to be campaigning to stay inside the EU – said it had led to ‘sustained pressure on living standards, a systematic attempt to hold down wages and to cut the costs of social provision for working people’.

His intervention came amid the publication of a report claiming that unskilled EU migrants cost each British family more than £200 a year. Benefit handouts, the cost of education and healthcare bills bump up the amount paid by taxpayers to £6.6billion a year, the report said.

Mr McCluskey – known as Red Len – delivered a devastating verdict on the decision to allow workers from eastern Europe into the EU from 2004.

Writing in the Guardian, he said: ‘In the last ten years, there has been a gigantic experiment at the expense of ordinary workers. Countries with vast historical differences in wage rates and living standards have been brought together in a common labour market. The result has been sustained pressure on living standards, a systematic attempt to hold down wages and to cut costs of social provision for working people.’

His comments will heighten fears that working-class Labour supporters will fail to turn out on Thursday – or vote for Leave.

However, a group of eight independent leading economists have published a paper saying the influx from Eastern Europe and elsewhere into low-skilled jobs has led to a heavier burden on communities.

Economists For Brexit cites a paper published by the Bank of England which found mass migration had driven down wages of millions of Britons. But it said that skilled migrants offered a ‘huge economic boost’.

It analysed the total taxation contribution of the 1.2million EU migrants in the UK considered unskilled and compared it with the cost in welfare payments and use of the NHS and education.

The think-tank calculated that a family of four EU migrants, with two children at primary school and a stay-at-home mother, would pay £1,271 in tax and national insurance a year, but cost £30,496 in handouts, schools and healthcare – a net cost of £29,225. A single EU foreigner would have a net cost of £849 per annum.