‘Let them pick fruit.” Suella Braverman has been likened to Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French revolution for her patently preposterous suggestion that British people doing nothing might actually work to make ends meet.
A batch of statistics showed in 2023 that migration the previous year was close to one million and the Home Secretary wondered why we were importing so many people to do jobs that could be done by the resident population.
It is hardly a new observation. Gordon Brown banged on about British jobs for British workers and so did Theresa May. By ending free movement from the EU, Brexit was supposed to release the pent-up British desire to do the jobs that the Europeans were taking in their droves. Yet it hasn’t worked out that way.
We now have between five and seven million people under the age of 65 not in work. Some will be students, others stay-at-home mothers, still more early retirees. But quite a lot are people on benefits, with many of them signed off as ill.
The Office for National Statistics said that half a million people have left the labour market because of long-term sickness since 2019, a phenomenon attributed in part to the after-effects of Covid-19, albeit one that is less pronounced in other countries that went through the same pandemic.
The latest employment statistics show an economic inactivity rate of 21 per cent and more than one million vacancies, though both have fallen marginally in recent months. More than 700,000 have quit the workforce entirely since the start of the pandemic.
It might be thought, therefore, that we do not need mass migration to do the work when we have so many people available. But that assumes, of course, that they are willing to do it and the problem is that they aren’t. After all, even if a few hours of instruction is always needed, who needs to be trained to pick fruit?
As a student, I spent several summers on fruit farms – hops in Kent, peas in Yorkshire, raspberries in Scotland. The hops were the hardest, although by the time I worked in the fields the days when London’s East Enders decamped en masse for the harvest had long gone.
George Orwell spent two months in 1931 on a Kent hop farm, keeping a journal that eventually became the novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter. One itinerant character in the book moans that he can’t get any work because “home pickers” had collared all the jobs. As to being trained, one picker says: “Hops don’t need no experience. Tear ’em off an’ fling ’em into the bin. Dat’s all der is to it, wid hops.”
By the 1970s, hop-picking had long been mechanised but the job was still not easy. The field workers loaded the bines onto a tractor and they were taken to a shed to be stripped of their flowers mechanically, but they still cut your hands and face to ribbons.
Of course, I was doing this to earn some extra money, not to live on. For the locals who needed the cash, these jobs were crucial. I remember travelling to Scotland to pick raspberries on piece rates. My daily offerings were meagre but sufficient for my purposes. Local families, however, worked hard and earned good money. Foreigners were part of the scene (as they had been since the Middle Ages) but they were a minority. Nowadays they make up 90 per cent of the seasonal workforce.
So why are so few people doing this now? For decades we have brought in temporary workers from eastern Europe and this has continued despite Brexit. The Government launched a seasonal worker visa in March 2019 with a quota of 2,500 places per year. However, numbers have risen every year, with the quota increasing to 38,000 in 2022. Yet still thousands of tons of berries and flowers are going unpicked. Even during the pandemic, when foreign workers could not travel and the Government launched a “Pick for Britain” appeal, just a few hundred took up the opportunity.
We hear the same gripe from the hospitality industry, that they need overseas staff to work in bars, wait in restaurants and sell coffee and sandwiches because locals won’t do it. The shortages are even more pronounced in the care and health sectors, with more than 100,000 visas issued last year for foreign employees.
Yet instead of asking why this is, the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, denounced the Tories for perpetuating the idea that “British workers have forgotten how to do things for themselves”. He added: “Their vision of the future of work in this country is ‘Let them pick fruit’. Well, our party will never have such low ambitions for working people.”
No, Labour’s ambition is that, if people don’t want to work, they should be able to live on benefits, something that was never the purpose behind the welfare state. Its founder, William Beveridge, set out to banish the Five Evils of Want, Ignorance, Squalor, Disease and Idleness. The first four have largely, if not entirely, disappeared from British society through advances in agriculture, education, housing and medicine. But idleness, far from being slain by the welfare state, has become entrenched in large parts of the population and yet no politician dare say so.
How have we created a society in which hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, choose to live off their fellow taxpayers and consider that they are entitled to do so? Almost everyone accepts the need for a safety net to help people when they get into difficulties or cannot fend for themselves through no fault of their own.
But when there are families in which two or even three generations have never worked, there is clearly a problem. A businessman friend who advertised for apprentices to learn a skilled trade particularly associated with the town in which it is based was dismayed to receive not a single application despite a large number of welfare-dependent local people.
There is always talk about linking benefits to work, either by moving to Universal Credit so as not to penalise people taking up jobs or by cutting payments if employment is offered but refused. Yet nothing seems to produce the desired response, which is a cultural revival of the old belief that to take something out you should be willing to put something in. DT.
The evil of idleness plagues Britain and nobody can be bothered to slay it.