When I was a sixth former I picked strawberries to earn money in the school holidays. It was boring, back breaking work, though the 5am starts set me up nicely for being on GB News Breakfast in later life.
I only lasted a few weeks burning myself to a crisp in the fields, and I could see why most people don’t want to do it. The only compensation, other than a few quid at the end of the week, was the farmer’s permission to gorge on as many strawberries as I liked. “You’ll soon get sick of them,” he said.
How right he was. For the next decade I couldn’t look a strawberry in the face, much less eat one. Take me to Wimbledon and I’d go as green as the grass on centre court at the sight of the tournament’s traditional juicy nibbles.
Before Brexit, Eastern Europeans from countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and Poland were happy to spend six months dossing down in caravans and working their socks off as agricultural labourers. Free movement meant there was no pesky paperwork to complete, and as they didn't spend much money while they were here they had a sackful to take home to their families. Nowadays we have plenty of foreign football managers but not enough fruit pickers.
So much so that the Government had to extend the number of seasonal worker visas to 30,000 and although they come from as far away as Nepal, Kenya, Barbados and the Philippines to replace the EU ones, farmers complain they still do not have enough for all the picking which needs doing.
Given all that, it is hardly the time for another rebel Tory faction calling themselves New Conservatives to come up with an undoable plan - rejected out of hand by No10 - to cut migration by 400,000 in time for the next election.
There are now so many of these ridiculous splinter groups being set up by Conservative MPs that the opposition no longer sits in front of Rishi Sunak in the House of Commons, but on the benches behind him.
One New Conservative, the Ipswich MP Tom Hunt, told journalists at the launch: “No job should be seen as beneath anybody. I spent four months as a radish picker.” He also confessed to doing a “brief spell in the Leek Department”. To political journos the ‘Leak Department’ is that Thames Water of Whitehall where many of their best stories come from, but they were bright enough to clock that Hunt was still banging on about his career in vegetables.
The purpose of this weird anecdote was to make the point that British workers could do these jobs instead - which makes Tom a bit of a turnip.
Employers are keen on foreign workers because they can pay them 20 per cent less than British ones. And it is the lack of them which, according to the London School of Economics, has added eight per cent to food prices since we left the EU.
Not content with making fruit & veg unaffordable, the New Conservatives also want to further paralyse the NHS by slashing access to the UK for overseas care workers. This would be madness. One in ten posts in adult social care are unfilled, which adds up to 165,000 vacancies.
Without foreign carers to help plug that gap more people who should leave hospital can’t because there is nowhere for them to go.
A £250million Government initiative to reduce bed-blocking only brought numbers down by three per cent from 14,060 to 13,657 in a month, and the busiest hospital trusts have wards where up to a third of patients should be in a care home instead.
It's as if the 25 MPs led by Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates who make up New Conservatives have taken one look at the PM’s dire poll ratings and are now looking for ways to drive them further into the ground. Half-baked, ill-thought out ideas, no matter how populist, do the Tory Party no electoral favours.
That does not mean we should do nothing about legal immigration, but what is done needs to be properly targeted. It's all very well making it less attractive for foreign students to study in the UK, but that means they will go somewhere else denying British universities up to £30,000 in fees which they can use to fund other important work.
Simply bringing down immigration numbers at all costs without taking into account the knock on effects would cost us all in the long run.
from GB News https://ift.tt/VRhYd58
When I was a sixth former I picked strawberries to earn money in the school holidays. It was boring, back breaking work, though the 5am starts set me up nicely for being on GB News Breakfast in later life.
I only lasted a few weeks burning myself to a crisp in the fields, and I could see why most people don’t want to do it. The only compensation, other than a few quid at the end of the week, was the farmer’s permission to gorge on as many strawberries as I liked. “You’ll soon get sick of them,” he said.
How right he was. For the next decade I couldn’t look a strawberry in the face, much less eat one. Take me to Wimbledon and I’d go as green as the grass on centre court at the sight of the tournament’s traditional juicy nibbles.
Before Brexit, Eastern Europeans from countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and Poland were happy to spend six months dossing down in caravans and working their socks off as agricultural labourers. Free movement meant there was no pesky paperwork to complete, and as they didn't spend much money while they were here they had a sackful to take home to their families. Nowadays we have plenty of foreign football managers but not enough fruit pickers.
So much so that the Government had to extend the number of seasonal worker visas to 30,000 and although they come from as far away as Nepal, Kenya, Barbados and the Philippines to replace the EU ones, farmers complain they still do not have enough for all the picking which needs doing.
Given all that, it is hardly the time for another rebel Tory faction calling themselves New Conservatives to come up with an undoable plan - rejected out of hand by No10 - to cut migration by 400,000 in time for the next election.
There are now so many of these ridiculous splinter groups being set up by Conservative MPs that the opposition no longer sits in front of Rishi Sunak in the House of Commons, but on the benches behind him.
One New Conservative, the Ipswich MP Tom Hunt, told journalists at the launch: “No job should be seen as beneath anybody. I spent four months as a radish picker.” He also confessed to doing a “brief spell in the Leek Department”. To political journos the ‘Leak Department’ is that Thames Water of Whitehall where many of their best stories come from, but they were bright enough to clock that Hunt was still banging on about his career in vegetables.
The purpose of this weird anecdote was to make the point that British workers could do these jobs instead - which makes Tom a bit of a turnip.
Employers are keen on foreign workers because they can pay them 20 per cent less than British ones. And it is the lack of them which, according to the London School of Economics, has added eight per cent to food prices since we left the EU.
Not content with making fruit & veg unaffordable, the New Conservatives also want to further paralyse the NHS by slashing access to the UK for overseas care workers. This would be madness. One in ten posts in adult social care are unfilled, which adds up to 165,000 vacancies.
Without foreign carers to help plug that gap more people who should leave hospital can’t because there is nowhere for them to go.
A £250million Government initiative to reduce bed-blocking only brought numbers down by three per cent from 14,060 to 13,657 in a month, and the busiest hospital trusts have wards where up to a third of patients should be in a care home instead.
It's as if the 25 MPs led by Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates who make up New Conservatives have taken one look at the PM’s dire poll ratings and are now looking for ways to drive them further into the ground. Half-baked, ill-thought out ideas, no matter how populist, do the Tory Party no electoral favours.
That does not mean we should do nothing about legal immigration, but what is done needs to be properly targeted. It's all very well making it less attractive for foreign students to study in the UK, but that means they will go somewhere else denying British universities up to £30,000 in fees which they can use to fund other important work.
Simply bringing down immigration numbers at all costs without taking into account the knock on effects would cost us all in the long run.
0 Comments
Don't share any link