But even before the EU started meddling, free trade in textiles got off to a bad start when some of the more ideological, anti-free trade charities started campaigning against it. Christian Aid took out advertisements attacking the end of quotas: it preferred the Multi-Fibre Agreement's quota system, believing that so-called managed trade works better than free trade. They wrongly feared China would be a success but only as part of a race to the bottom, cutting the wages of workers as competition intensified.

But Chinese textile workers actually command relatively high wages of $120 or so a month. In the last two years, Chinese producers invested $25bn to retool and streamline their facilities. During the past 20 years, thanks to free-market reforms and free-trade, 200m Chinese have been lifted out of poverty, though there are still 160m Chinese living on less than $1 a day. Chinese imports should not just been seen as a way of getting cheap clothing for the West, but also as a way of helping lift people out of poverty.

It is not just the poor Chinese who are gaining: globalisation has also been great for many workers across Asia and Latin America. In a forthcoming paper, Benjamin Powell and David Skarbek, two economists at San Jose State University, have produced the first rigorous analysis of the wages paid in textile factories in poor countries. Their findings confirm that free trade and multinational corporations are good for poor workers in poor countires: even though the wages in the factories of western multinationals may appear paltry by our standards, they are by far superior to anything else available locally. Working in a western-owned clothes factory is often the only way out of poverty for many local workers and such jobs are highly valued.

While more than half of the population in the 10 countries Powell and Skarbek studied lived on less than $2 per day, in 90% of the countries, working a 10-hour day in the apparel industry is enough to lift a worker above - often far above - that standard, the authors found. In Honduras, a nation often criticised by protectionists, the average worker in the textiles industry makes $13.10 per day, even though 44% of the population has to make do with under $2 per day.

But instead of letting countries compete, Christian Aid wants them to be guaranteed market share. Claire Melamed, Christian Aid's head of trade policy, says, bizarrely, that free trade does not work because it requires perfect information, held equally by all buyers and sellers. This is nonsense. Yet she somehow believes that bureaucrats and politicians can successfully centrally-plan the world textiles industry.

The result of putting bureaucrats in charge in the past was to unfairly skew the market away from developing countries. By fussing about how jobs are distributed between developing countries, Christian Aid has missed the bigger picture. It has helped the real villains get away with rigging the market, once again, against the developing world. French and Italian textiles manufacturers successfully lobbied for European quotas to stop their jobs being transferred to China.

European producers claim that the increase in Chinese imports is too much of shock for them to cope with. Yet they have had a decade's notice that the Multi-Fibre Agreement was going to end on 1 January 2005. European producers have stuck their head in the sand, imagining that someone was going to save them from overseas competition. But even Mandelson will be powerless to rescue them in 2008 when quotas will breach WTO agreements. The EU's latest, desperate move is merely putting off the inevitable.

Mandelson's behaviour has been disappointing to say the least. When he took office as EU trade commissioner, he was hailed as a great champion of free trade (though not by this newspaper). Harlem Desir, a French MEP, denounced his appointment saying that his free trade views were unacceptable. Desir need not have worried: despite Mandelson's rhetoric, he has allowed himself to cave in to special interests. Mandelson, who will always remain a spin-doctor at heart, initially tried to blame retailers for the stockpiles, but he has faced a growing backlash. Pressure from the governments of Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark led him to organise crisis talks with the Chinese authorities, aiming to bring forward some of next year's quotas.

At the heart of Europe's fear of China's economic strength is the zero sum game fallacy that Europe loses out if China does well. Free trade does indeed hit European textiles makers, but the European economy is not all textiles. Thousands of jobs rely on a successful retail sector providing consumers with cheap clothing. Cheap clothes allow European consumers to buy a greater range of products; the quotas act as a regressive tax on the poorest Europeans who spend a greater proportion of their incomes on clothing. French President Jacques Chirac's worry about French textiles jobs indicates a static view of the economy that is all too common in Europe. On the contrary, if consumers spend less on clothes, they will spend more on other things.

The European Commission has no business interfering in trade. Mandelson's ridiculous and destructive quotas have brought confusion to the marketplace and raised prices for consumers. Bringing forward some of next year's quotas or any other such compromise is too little, too late: the restrictions should all be repealed immediately and Mandelson should hang his head in shame.