INDUSTRY chiefs made an extraordinary attack last night on the “protectionist” sentiments of US politicians.

Democrat candidates in the American presidential race and Republican politicians in Washington were accused of protectionist rhetoric.

Patricia Hewitt, the Industry Secretary, hit out at Senators John Kerry and John Edwards, the Democrat front-runners, over their opposition to the shifting of jobs from the US to the developing world.

In remarks supported by Digby Jones, director-general of the CBI, she criticised Republican congressmen who had berated President Bush’s leading economic adviser for saying that the policy was good for the economy in the long run.

With growing controversy in both countries about the outsourcing of call-centre jobs to India and other parts of Asia, Ms Hewitt told American politicians they should not “play politics with people’s jobs and people’s prosperity”.

The ferocity of her attack on Democrat candidates, made in a speech to industrialists at the Mansion House, provoked surprise last night.

It is unusual for ministers to criticise leading politicians from another country during an election, and particularly for a Labour minister to attack top Democrats.

But Ms Hewitt’s intervention showed that the wounds from Britain’s two-year battle with the US over steel tariffs have yet to be healed.

Referring to fury over “offshoring”, headlines about Polish migrants and benefit tourism and the death of Chinese cocklers in Morecambe Bay, Ms Hewitt said that free trade and the onward march of globalisation were hardly popular.

She said that the Republicans — “an Administration supposedly committed to free trade” — reacted with two years of unlawful steel tariffs when steelworkers’ jobs appeared to be threatened by foreign imports. They had finally been withdrawn “when the damage to United States manufacturing had become impossible to ignore”.

She said of outsourcing: “I well understand . . . how people feel when a company announces 1,000 job losses because they are shifting a call centre to India. But after two years of fighting against unlawful tariffs that damaged British steelworkers we are not going to turn round and pretend protectionism is suddenly going to help British office call-centre workers.”

Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Mr Bush’s council of economic advisers, said recently that concerns about outsourcing of US jobs to low-wage centres was overdone, provoking calls from Republicans for his dismissal, and claims from Democrats that it showed the heartlessness of the Bush Administration.

Ms Hewitt referred to the case saying that a presidential adviser “who dares speak the truth” had been threatened with redundancy by Republican congressmen.

She went on: “We know, the US knows, that protectionism is the road to recession. If we in government and business and the City want open, dynamic markets, and we do, then we have to make and win the argument that trade will benefit everyone, not a global elite, not a few but the many.”

Senator Kerry has backed legislation to require callcentre operators in other countries to identify their locations. He has even denounced “Benedict Arnold CEOs” who export jobs overseas, in a reference to the American War of Independence traitor.

Later the head of the CBI urged US politicians “not to betray free markets” by responding to fears about the so-called jobless US recovery with protectionist rhetoric.

Mr Jones said: “America is innovative enough and strong enough to facilitate business to be a force for good around the world.

“But to do so it must engage and rise to the challenge of globalisation, rather than simply take its bat and ball home at the first sign that globalisation does not mean Americanisation.

“I don’t like to hear talk of ‘Benedict Arnold CEOs’, which is completely unfair. Senior executives in US companies are doing exactly what they are supposed to do: delivering value for money to shareholders and consumers.”

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