It's cruel European judges who are destroying jobs The jobs are going out all over Europe. The euro has created a crisis of unemployment. Forget recession and austerity; Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain are all in a depression, with unemployment at 1930s levels and no end in sight. There is an urgent need for jobs, growth, hope. It might have been thought that this would now be recognised even by the most obscurantist trade unionists and the most obsessive Euro-fanatics. Not so, to judge by the latest outbreak of Euro-nonsense. In order, no doubt, to distract themselves from the hardships faced by their many unemployed members, some Spanish trade unionists grew concerned with the plight of workers who fall ill on holiday. Throughout Europe, employers tended to take the view that although this was bad luck, the employee would not be able to claim an extra holiday allowance to compensate for the days on which he was laid up with sun-stroke or unable to move far from the Imodium bottle. One might have thought that this would not have been a problem in Spain, where the natives are used to the heat and have robust digestive systems, but it may be that Spanish trade union leaders are delicate creatures. Anyway, they went to the European Court of Justice, took action under the Working Time Directive, and won. The judgment will be binding on all European countries. Of itself, this will not add much to the unemployment totals. Our government estimates that it could cost British employers around £100 million a year. Spread throughout the economy, that is an irritation, not a catastrophe. But it is an unnecessary irritation. It sends all the wrong messages. A violation of common-sense, it adds to the job-stroke which is having such serious consequences in most of the EU. It reinforces the impression which many employers have formed over the past few decades: that hiring workers is risky and should be avoided wherever possible. Britain must take a little of the blame, because we nurtured a dangerous fellow. According to Keynes, "practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." In the present case, it is more a matter of impractical men, who believe themselves to exist on the highest intellectual plane, but are actually the slaves of a defunct Labour politician. In the 1950s, Anthony Crosland argued that we could take capitalism's strength for granted. A future Labour government would be able to heap up the tax burden as well as the regulatory one - and the capitalist milch cow would continue to pour out the milk. Through experience, we in the UK have learnt that Croslandism is as flawed as any other form of socialism, but Europe, albeit unwittingly, is still in his thrall. Since the 1950s, employers" options have opened up. They can replace men with machines. They can dispense with highly paid and truculent first-world workers and relocate manufacturing to countries where the locals are cheaper, docile and grateful. This creates difficulties. Although the right to work is economic nonsense, any advanced society will wish to run its economy as near as possible to full employment. A few years ago, the US had achieved that, by making it easy for employers to hire and fire. As a result, American workers had far fewer rights than their European equivalents, but anyone who wanted a job could have two of them. The judges who ruled in favour of the Spanish trade unionists would regard that as cruelty. But who is being cruel? Surely it is those judges, who know nothing about business, care nothing about the problems faced by employers, and are promoting a system that is destroying jobs. European employment law is of a piece with the euro. Both of them are doomed attempts to defy economic reality, imposed by officials who are insulated from economic competition and are so besotted by their own Euro-fanaticism as to be blind to the consequences of their actions. In their hands, the ECJ should be renamed to reflect its true function: The European Court of Economic Injustice. Euro-fanaticism is the most powerful narcotic known to man. It renders the user incapable of grasping reality. It is also the most dangerous. The illegal drugs destroy individuals. The Euro-drug destroys the life chances of millions. It is creating social problems which will scar Europe for years. If only the Euro-drug addicts had contented themselves with self-destruction. Spain is especially troublesome, with youth unemployment at 50 per cent. Even if half of them are moonlighting in Uncle Pedro's paella parlour, that leaves a vast number of poor, discontented, alienated youngsters who are being cut off from society just when they should be moving into adulthood. That is the way to create a large, permanent underclass. It is unlikely to be a quiescent one. Spain has a growing population of unassimilated immigrants, many of whom find themselves competing with Spaniards for scarce resources: not a route to social harmony. There are unresolved regional tensions. Spain's democratic tradition is recent and shallow, as opposed to the tradition of political violence, which has gnarled and sturdy roots in a long history. I have never known a political elite which takes so much of its identity from its country's supposed future, so little from the past. The shunning of the past does not help to create national self-confidence. This is a political elite which is afraid of its own country - or perhaps it merely knows it too well. Europe's problems far exceed the latest footling nonsense from the ECJ. Nor would they be solved by a British withdrawal. Our self-interest is bound up with our neighbours" fate. We do urgently need a renegotiation so that the EU's power to interfere with us is circumscribed: no more social chapter, no more Working Time Directive, and those are just the canapés. But Europe is our continent. We want to trade with it; we do not want floods of economic migrants pouring in from southern Europe, full of grievances. Our problems will not end until the EU renounces self-harm, and there is no sign of that. The Euro-fanatics seem determined to condemn this poor, bashed-about, beautiful old continent to further suffering. Just when it seemed that Europe had crawled away from the chaos and conflicts which had threatened to destroy it, instability is back on the agenda. Yet all this is happening in the name of idealism. The Euro-vandals still believe that they are pursuing the European dream. It would make a superb black comedy, but for one detail. It is actually a tragedy, with hundreds of millions of Europeans in the cast.