‘Workshy Brits’ reject the new Land Army. I don’t blame them.

I was surprised to see this story (below) in today’s Daily Mail:

I wasn’t surprised to read the story itself because anyone could have seen that one coming. But it’s in the Mail, that’s the odd thing. For many years, the Mail has been imploring migrants to go home or not come here in the first place. Granted, it’s Covid-19 and not our new immigration laws that has prevented foreign workers coming here this summer, but it could be both that ensure they don’t come here next year. Philip Johnston from the worker’s friend, the Daily Telegraph, added his bit: “If we want a Land Army, it needs to be easy for ‘workshy’ Brits to sign up.” Most Brits, who by the way are not ‘workshy’ have raised their middle fingers to that one.

The failure of the new Land Army project was inevitable. Fruit and veg picking is back-breaking work and all for the minimum wage, less tax and national insurance. That and having to drive, often to the middle of nowhere, to do the work has plainly not appealed to furloughed workers who understandably wanted to top up their incomes in these difficult times. But they didn’t want to top up their furloughed incomes by working full time and the farmers only wanted full time workers.

It will be interesting to see what the government does now because otherwise there will be Everest-sized mountains of rotting food and waste on our green and not all that pleasant land. I wonder what they will do.

The easiest and most obvious thing to do would be to try and recruit from the usual EU countries and fly in workers, keeping them isolated and quarantined until their work is done. That’s possible, I suppose. If they don’t, what’s next?

Calling in the real army to join the land army, perhaps, or by forcing the sick, disabled and long term unemployed out into the fields in exchange for their benefits on special buses from Jobcentres? I can see a few logistical problems there, not least in social distancing. I’m not sure the question is soluble.

Things will be much the same next year, but with one crucial difference: the transition period with the EU will be over. The government, by demanding that foreigners must be capable of earning over £25,600 a year in Britain has effectively ended the overseas fruit and veg pickers from entering the country. Quite grotesquely, a solution could be at hand. By the middle of next year, the economy could be such a wasteland that people will be falling over themselves to find work, any work, to put bread on the table.

If we are still in any form of lockdown this time next year, it is impossible to imagine workers will still be furloughed. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has already said he cannot save every job and the likelihood is that the country will lose thousands of companies and millions of jobs. It could be that there will be stiff competition for fruit and veg picking jobs and even if there isn’t Jobcentre advisors will be telling all the new benefit claimants, who never thought in a million years they’d be on the dole, that they would need to accept any job they were offered or they would lose their benefits. The vicious sanctions regime imposed for years on the very poorest will be unleashed on those who now have nothing. It will be a terrible experience.

I’m not going back over the old EU arguments again. We’ve left the EU and there’s no going back. But if we don’t negotiate sensibly with our European friends over the coming months about our future relationship, I fear desperately for the future. Forcing skilled women and men to work in the fields to pick fruit and veg was never what I expected to see when ‘taking back control’, nor indeed the farmers themselves who voted to leave the EU in overwhelming numbers. It’s tempted to add that they’ve made their bed and now they’ll have to lie on it, but I won’t.