BITTER allegations of slave labour conditions on the £550m Queen Mary 2 today took on an extraordinary new twist.

The cruise liner - the world's longest, tallest and widest - is at the centre of an acrimonious row between foreign workers and the French shipyard where it is being built.

The shipyard building the vessel, which will have Southampton as its home port from December, says the dispute is smearing the reputation of the 700 firms connected with the QM2.

More than 20,000 people have been involved in the construction of the transatlantic ship, which can take 2,620 passengers and a crew of 1,253.

Accord to managers at Chantiers de l'Atlantique, only 2,000 of the personnel working on the 150,000-tonne QM2 are from outside Europe.

In a broadside to critics in its weekly bulletin, the yard hinted that union leaders had been stirring up trouble by publicly reporting slave labour claims.

It cited headlines like "modern slavery" and "shipyard of shame" regarding mainly sub-contracted work.

The article added: "We are seeing a deliberate attempt to destabilise shipbuilding in our region.

"We must refute it and combat it, for it is the future of our business and the preservation of jobs in our region which is at stake."

There have been a string of widely reported allegations about labour by foreign workers.

But the shipyard, which is a subsidiary of troubled French engineering giant Alstom, said in its statement that critics were seeking to give the false impression that the yard was an area where the law was not applied, where the company was seeking to maximise profits by dodging its financial, legal and social obligations via the use of companies employing exploited Third World labour.

According to the shipyard, only three cases of "illegal and inadmissible social practices" had been uncovered, and the vast majority of the 700 firms had given "total satisfaction". The statement added: "It is normal that these intolerable practices should have been revealed.

"It is unacceptable, however, to throw discredit on the hundreds of other collaborating companies working normally on the Saint Nazaire site, or on the principal contractor, which is Chantiers de l'Atlantique."

Meanwhile, the shipyard has terminated the contract of a Romanian team working on the QM2's air conditioning system against a background of industrial unrest. A "global failure" to honour the contract was blamed.

The shipyard is under pressure to deliver the goods on the 74-metre-high QM2, which will be Cunard's flagship.

But the ship's sea trials last month off the Brittany coast went well, and a second round of trials is scheduled for next month before the delivery of the vessel to Cunard on December 13.

She is due to enter Southampton Water at nightfall on December 19, although there is speculation that the date may be changed.

One well-placed Cunard source said an estimated one million people will see her in.