Strikes in France, demonstrations in Russia, and ‘Buy America’ campaigns in the United States. These protectionist moves seemed far away from Oxfordshire. Even the workers demonstrating at the French-owned Lindsey oil refinery in Immingham, Lincolnshire, seemed fairly distant.

But this week at least 50 workers walked out of the ageing German-owned Didcot Power Station in support of those same men in Lincolnshire who have been photographed waving placards bearing Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s words of 18 months ago: “British Jobs for British Workers.”

A total of 626 people work at Didcot Power Station, owned by RWE of Essen, Germany. About 350 are employed by RWE’s subsidiary, RWE npower, while the rest work for contractors. The wildcat strikers were all employess of three contractors: Doosan Babcock, Cape, and Hertel UK — itself a subsidiary of a Belgian company.

The dispute at Lindsey, which triggered walkouts at several major plants across the UK as well as at Didcot, including Sellafield and Heysham nuclear power plants, Grangemouth oil refinery, and power stations in Scotland, Cheshire and Nottinghamshire, centred on the French company Total’s award of a £200m contract to an Italian company. This, in turn, brought in its own Italian and Portugese workforce.

On the face of it, the issue seems simple: if there is a job in Britain to be done, and a foreigner is doing it, that job is lost to a British worker.

A 47-year-old scaffolder at Didcot, for instance, who did not want to be named, told The Oxford Times on Monday: “The atmosphere was terrible. We’re all angry about the foreign workers. I would rather be at work because I’ve got bills to pay, but the Government isn’t listening, so if we have to stay out, we have to stay out. We feel this is our only option.

“If we had a message for the Government it would be: ‘look at the English workers before the foreign workers’.”

Of course, many economists argue that the benefits — for everyone — of an open labour market in the modern industrialised and internationalised world are greater still. Indeed many say that the slump in the 1930s came about thanks to governments protecting the jobs of their own nationals.

Mari Sako, professor of management studies at the Said Business School, Oxford, and an expert on globalisation, explained: “There will always be winners and losers in a nation, though the size of the national pie may grow as a result of moving toward free trade.”

But she added: “Entreating the general public to go for free trade when one's own job is at risk or lost will not get us very far. I do not advocate protectionism but a wise public policy that temporarily compensates or subsidises job losers who can retrain and or relocate.”

Worryingly enough for anyone who feels that the single EU market has enriched lives all over Europe, the unofficial strike action in Didcot took place against a background of state aid, a form of protectionism, being handed out as bail-outs to banks and car companies in many European countries.

And workers, as taxpayers, may well feel entitled to ask that banks, funded by them, should lend at home first.

Ironically, this last point may become very relevant at Didcot Power Station in the very near future.

Leon Flexman, a spokesman for RWE npower has told the The Oxford Times that the coal-fired station A, which employs 265 people and powers two million homes, must close between 2012 and 2015 at the latest. Huge investment will be needed to fund its replacement.

Now the debate is hotting up about exactly what will replace station A.

It was built in the 1960s, designed by Frederick Gibberd (who also designed Liverpool’s Roman Catholic cathedral), and was the subject of a Greenpeace anti-pollution demonstration a couple of years ago, at which demonstrators claimed that 60 per cent of power produced there disappeared straight into the sky.

Mr Flexman said: “We remain committed to the Didcot site and are investing £60m in station B. But we are still uncertain about the future of station A.”

He added: “We are building gas-fired stations in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire and expect planning permission for another in Pembroke.” He added that a decision on the future of station A would be announced soon, certainly before 2011. But given that it takes four or five years to build and make operational a gas-fired station, it seems that time is running out for that option.

RWE owns nuclear power stations in its native Germany, but Mr Flexman has said that a nuclear station in Didcot is “extremely unlikely”. So a modern, coal-fired plant, producing little carbon dioxide, seems on the cards.

The Didcot A station was designed to function on British coal. Now, however, the three million tonnes of coal arriving at the power station’s railhead every year is imported from South Africa or Russia. British coal, with one per cent to 1.5 per cent sulphur content, compared to just 0.4 per cent for its foreign rivals, does not produce low enough emissions to satisfy current regulations.

Watch this space to see what sort of power station will keep the lights burning in Oxfordshire homes after 2015 — and what nationality the workers who build it will be.