THE Nobel peace prize winner and former Polish president Lech Walesa has invoked his famous fight with communism in a new struggle, this time against the European Union.

The former leader of Poland’s Solidarity trade union has condemned an attempt by the EU to close most of the Gdansk shipyard, where Solidarity was founded by Walesa and his colleagues in 1980 and the roots of communism’s downfall in eastern Europe were planted.

The EU is demanding that two of the three slipways must close, which critics say will lead to the death of heavy industry in Gdansk, bankruptcy of the yard and the loss of up to 3,000 jobs.

“The European Union should help us to bring efficiency to the shipyard, and we should not lose it as part of some stupid political game,” Walesa said last week.

The EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes wants to shrink the shipyard to ensure free competition among European shipbuilders, now dominated by the technology of docks in western Europe and low wage economies in the Far East. Polish shipyards have had £875m in subsidies since Poland joined the EU in 2004.

“These days I see our victory was too easy; it was bloodless,” Walesa said. “We were too exhilarated at the time to reap the rewards.”

The strike at the Lenin shipyard spread quickly and within weeks millions of Poles, from coal miners to farmers, laid down tools and brought the country to a standstill. After nine years of government reprisals and protests from Solidarity the workers were finally able to taste freedom.

The roar of heavy industry - and protest - that characterised Gdansk’s waterfront in the 1980s is already a faint echo. Some 90% of the jobs have been cut in the past 18 years, leaving empty workshops to be filled by a museum, a marina, an arts centre and luxury flats.

EU membership and low-cost airlines are rapidly changing Gdansk into a tourist destination. A short walk from the dilapidated industrial areas is the restored 16th century old town, at the heart of a tourist industry surging on one of central Europe’s hottest summers on record.

“I know Gdansk is changing fast but everything we have now is thanks to those workers. I think the EU doesn’t see that,” said Jan Sierpinski, 24, a university student. “I would be very sad to know work is stopping at the shipyard.”

Last week British sightseers gathered around three crosses that mark the killing of 44 Polish demonstrators by riot police. If the EU gets its way, the monument may become a symbol of the death of Gdansk’s shipbuilding industry itself.

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