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In order to set the scene; a few years ago Steve a friend bought a villa just outside the little Andalucia town of Competa which lies a few kilometres from Nerja up in the mountains on the edge of the Natural Park of the Tejeda and Almijara mountain ranges.

When they sold their business and house in England Steve and his wife moved out to Spain to take up permanent residence. Steve, unlike many ex-pats has immersed himself in the local culture, and being a amicable gregarious sort of chap has cultivated a good relationship with the locals, learning the language and the local traditions.

My wife and I have visited them on several occasions and have taken great enjoyment at hospitality of the region and its people, with Steve as our guide we have spent many pleasurable hours exploring the surrounding countryside the little whitewashed mountain villages and partaking of the local foods and wines.

Unlike Britian there is a strong local community feeling in the area, perhaps something to do with the relatively recent civil war and its aftermath where in parts of the region constant fighting continued between the resistance movement and the Civil Guard until the 1950s. Immediate evidence of this communal spirit can be seen when one enters any of the local supermarkets, most goods on the shelf originate from a very localised area, although some international goods are available they will generally be found tucked away at the bottom of the shop, almost as is the owner is ashamed to display any evidence of his own disloyalty.

On one visit Steve suggested a picnic outing to an abandoned village about 12 kilometres away, it was known locally as the lost village and had been abandoned in 1949 after the conflicts and reprisals that the inhabitants suffered forced them to leave the village, some of the survivors going to Competa and others to Frigiliana.

Every family tried to rebuild their lives as best they could, but every time they returned to visit they saw how their beloved village was turning to ruins, into a ghost town. Steve had heard about the village because the parents on of a bar owner he knew in Competa had been born there.

The day we visited it was just a collection of ruins, not one house was intact, most had been reduced to rubble, the streets were overgrown with scrub, with the only real evidence of any care, found in the little church yard, that was if not pristine at least it showed some indication of recent human activity.

My wife has just returned from holiday with our friends Val and Steve and the real highlight she tells me was a second visit to “the lost Village”, although it had been abandoned it had not been forgotten, everyone took a small part of El Acebuchal away in their hearts, especially the children, who watched bewildered as they and their families had to leave their houses, the place they all called home and the places where they played. Those same children dreamt of their return and seeing the village again, as it once had been.

In 1998 Virtudes and Antonio “El Zumbo” returned to El Acebuchal with the intention of making that dream a reality. The restoration of the first house was completed in 1998 shortly after my visit, and by the year 2003 mains electricity arrived in the village, the process speeded up by the creation of a neighbours association.

In 2005 the streets of the village were repaired and on 25th June of that same year, they reinaugurated the village of El Acebuchal with it’s first Mass in 50 years.

The village has now been fully restored but now 4X4 and tourism have replaced the mules from Torrox, Frigiliana and Nerja which were the life blood of the village as they were loaded up with fruit, vegetables and fish and taken over the mountain passes to the villages of Fornes & Jallena, where the mule handlers sold their goods and exchanged some for flour.

El Achebuchal was the meeting point and Inn to rest the animals, whilst the men ate, had a glass of aniseed liquor and commented on their journeys. Today the Inn has been reinvented as a tapas bar where according to my wife the lady of the house cooks some incredible real traditional dishes, which thankfully do not even nod in the direction of internationals cuisine.

In this the 50th year of the European Project instead of celebrating the fact for propaganda purposes, it might be better to reflect that the rebuilding of this village would have been possible in any case but has been achieved with the assistance and the grants from the EU Structural funds. The Junta de Andalucia financed the restoration of the villages to encourage rural tourism run by local people and The Junta de Andalucia (regional government) has received substantial resources from EUStructural Funds (ERDF, Cohesion Fund, ESF) to promote development policies.

So for me personally although I am delighted that the forsaken ruined village in the Andalucian mountains has been restored to something greater than its former state and the families who were forced out of their homes can now benefit for their hardship, and it can be reasonably argued that this is evidence of the good the Union can do. It is still a bittersweet thought that the money we are sending to the EU so that the people we do not elect can decide what can be done with it, might be better retained at home and spent on our own infrastructure our own hospitals our own villages which are dying because of lack on investment opportunities available to the people we do elect.

Is it not self-defeating for GB PLC to allow our money to be spent on increasing the tourist industry in rural areas of Spain and compensating Spanish families for grievances against the Spanish government when there are deserving villages in Britian that could do with some investment.

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The statistics, published by the British Government on Tuesday (22 August), reveal that 447,000 workers from the eight eastern countries that joined the EU just over two years ago have applied to work in Britain – of these 427,095 have been approved.

As the biggest of the new member states, Poland also has the largest numbers of workers in Britain with well over half coming - 264,560 - from the country. The next in number are Lithuanians and Slovakians.

All well and good and it has been shown by the government that this influx of EU Nationals has been a net benefit to GB PLC.

Although figures reported in the press also this week have shown that these new immigrants are able to claim child benefit and other benefits for their children and families back home.

The other point is that this very large addition to the work force has had the effect of forcing labour cost down, which might well be good for Britian but cannot be good news for the resident work force.

I am tempted to wonder if this has been factored into the equation.

However the point of this post is that the figures are so very much higher than originally predicted by the UK labour government which prior to the May 2004 enlargement suggested that between 5,000 and 13,000 would apply to work in the UK. Those news papers which were suggesting higher figures were pilloried for scaremongering by the government, yet the real figure is even higher than those papers were suggesting.

According to Euobserver “The government has defended the original estimates by saying that they were based on the assumption that many more of the original 15 member states would also keep their markets open to workers from the east.”

But if I remember correctly it had already been made clear by the other members that they would be placing a moratorium on workers form the East, I belive Germany Austria and France have just extended this for a few more years, and will now allow not workers in until 2011. Only Britian Ireland and Sweden fully opened their doors and fully implemented the treaty agreements.

If the figures had been marginally higher or even twice as high than government estimates, they could be forgiven for a miscalculation, but thirty two times higher is some mistake, and just indicates that when it comes to the EU our government is quite prepared to lie to the British people.

We are now hearing a great deal about the next EU enlargement; Bulgaria and Romania are set to join either next January, or at the latest the following January. Both the Conservatives and the Government are suggesting that this time they will put some restrictions on workers from these new members.

But again we are being lied to by the politicians, who should know full well that that once Bulgaria and Romania join their citizens will have every right to come to this country and as David Rennie point outs

“Whitehall officials say stoutly that they have the power to impose limits on Romanian and Bulgarian “access to the UK labour market”. But what does that actually mean? It basically means the Government could create some new offences, specially to cover Romanians and Bulgarians: working without a work permit, or employing someone from those two nations without a permit.

Given that we cannot close our borders, and average household incomes in Romania and Bulgaria are a tenth of those in Britain, it is not hard to guess one major outcome of creating such new offences: thousands will come anyway, but this time as criminals.

As a convinced free-marketeer, I must admit to moral qualms about welcoming people to live in my country, then turning them into criminals, just because they want to work for a living.

But if moral arguments do not work, try self-interest. Expanding Britain’s black economy is not a good idea. It would be bad for the health of society. It would reduce tax revenues, and hurt British workers, too. As long as east Europeans are working legally, their broad pay and conditions can only fall so far.

Once people are on the black, employers can treat them as near-slaves, putting far more pressure on legal workers. ”