A GENTLEMAN from Burley wrote [Letters, July 19] that “free movement does not work” (that is, free movement of people between countries inside the European Union). But freedom of movement is one fundamental freedom that the EU supports, in contrast to those that it suppresses. Open borders between EU countries enable the supply of labour to meet the demand for it, keeping wages lower than they would otherwise be.

Well-off people profit from the way that the EU has dragged wages down through free movement within the EU. And then they accuse anyone opposed to open borders of being “racist”. The sanctimonious grandees who dominate our major political parties, arts and cultural institutions and media – the great and the good – often benefit from employing low wage labour from the EU in their town houses and country gardens.

So we have the leader of the Labour Party, swept up into lecturing the working classes of northern England from his Islington town house, against the evils of something he calls “racism”. This “racism” is why they vote for UKIP he reasons, even though UKIP have no “racist” policies. What he calls “racism” is the worry of less well off people about competition for jobs and housing arising from mass immigration, and about its impact on schools and municipal services, and on the quality of their lives.

This delirious fantasy about the “racism” of the swinish multitude is merely one side of the vanity of those among the professional classes with fashionably “progressive” political views. It expresses their snobbish disdain for those they regard as their moral and social inferiors. Anti-racism is a cloak for their greed, and greed for cheap labour is disguised as anti-racism. Greed for cheap labour is why the EU will fight tooth and nail for free movement across open borders, as free movement does work, for many influential people.

Ralph Prothero, Southampton