As a boy,David Jones watched the cocklers in his home town of Morecambe. This week,he returned to find local fishing families undercut by Polish slave labour, ruthless gangmasters and the cockles picked to near extinction - all to provide paella for the Spanish.

Byline: DAVID JONES

AT DAWN on a clear winter's morning, the northward view across Morecambe Bay presents one of the most beautiful scenes anywhere in Britain.

On the horizon, the snow-capped Lake District peaks are silhouetted jaggedly against the dramatic red-grey skyline. At low tide, shimmering tidal channels ribbon the serrated mudflats; scavenging seabirds dive and soar.

As a proud Morecambe native - or a Sand Grown 'Un, to use the local argot - this is the bracing early morning tableau to which I was born and raised.

At first glance, when I returned to my home town this week, nothing much seemed to have changed since I first went paddling and hunted for crabs in the rock-pools 40 years ago.

Venturing to the western mouth of the bay, however, and on to the vast, windswept expanse known as Middleton Sands, I discovered a squalid racket which I had assumed would have ended with the Chinese cockle-pickers' trial at Liverpool Crown Court.

It is a human and environmental scandal - involving violence and greed - that says much about the dark heart of Britain's low-waged labour market since we opened our borders to cheap, Eastern European workers.

Sadly, it threatens to destroy a centuries-old way of life on this tranquil stretch of the Lancashire coastline, already suffering from the demise of deckchair-and-donkey summer holidays, which brought tourists flocking here when I was a boy.

In those days, the cockle beds were the preserve of redoubtable local fishing families who harvested them to supplement their income from whitebait, shrimps and flatfish.

They were respected names with generations of experience: the Woodhouses, the Bensons, and the Shaws. They were as renowned as the Baxters, purveyors of potted shrimps to the Royal Family.

Because they knew every nuance of the weather and terrain, these 'shell-men' were never in danger of being sucked down by the treacherous quicksands, or trapped by a tide that rises faster than a man can run. To such skilled artisans, calling out the lifeboat was seen as …