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For its proponents, one of the greatest benefits for ordinary people of European Union membership is their right to move and work across borders. .

. But what exactly is it they want?

Perhaps it is just another facet of the rising tension all over Europe, with .

What would the strikers in Lincolnshire make of this? I am not quite sure what it is they are demanding when they say "British jobs for British workers".

Perhaps they back the UKIP line that if Britain were outside the European Union, it could simply make its own rules. But they are not quite clear whether foreign workers would be banned or given work permits in some cases, or something else.

Somebody I bumped into over the weekend suggested that the problem was the lack of a European minimum wage. I don't quite see that, but it's true that the dispute highlights a tension at the heart of the EU.

The fans of an economically liberal Europe-wide free single market might argue that what the workers in Lincolnshire fear is good for the economy as a whole. If Italian workers can do the job cheaper, then so be it. If Romanian workers undercut the Italians, then, they might say, even better. It's also precisely why many on the left in Europe are suspicious of an EU that doesn't put protections of workers' conditions above everything else.

But it is even more fundamental than that. It highlights the obvious lack of a European identity, or what the left would call "European solidarity".

I am not sure how far the strikers would take this. On the News at Ten on Friday, one of the voices raised in support of the striking workers was from Glasgow. What would the Lincolnshire workers have said if a Scottish firm, employing mainly Scottish workers, had been doing the job?

Would they have said "fair enough"?

Would they have said "the UK is a unitary nation state; we have no problem with people from other parts of Britain coming here to work; what worries us is people from the rest of the EU; we may be in a single market, but we see them as foreigners, not as fellow Europeans"?

Or would they have said "local jobs for local workers"?

And is it any different in other EU countries?

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