Like shall speak unto like

[Walterp]

I'm an immigrant myself, my ancestors being one of the half dozen or so tribes settling in Wales from the North a good few years back. It's one of the subconscious reasons why I get on well with Northerners, but less well with Southerners - we share DNA. (It also explains why Germans so admire the English - they share a fair bit of DNA, too).

The English are less keen on people they don't share DNA with; they don't like immigrants. (Or anyone else, really, except ex-colonials with, naturally enough, the desirable amount of English DNA - CANZAUS is just DNA spelt differently).

So it's generally acknowledged that British farming needs immigrant workers to staff its pack-houses, abattoirs and milking parlours (not to mention care homes, hospitals, and an endless list of other menial, low paid but essential jobs) but doesn't actually want them there.

It's another unsolvable Brexit paradox.

Shouldn't UK farmers just recognise that we need to train more British youngsters instead, pay them more, and make working conditions and prospects more attractive?

 

[ewald]

Surely then we should all be best buddies with the Poles, Latvians and Lithuanians - must be a fair bit of shared DNA there?

Interested to know how we can pay locals a lot more and still survive as an industry......

 

[7610 super q]

At the rate the minimum wage rises every year, working in packhouses should soon be on par with bankers pay......
I'm not really comfortable with large ' farming ' companies growing thousands of acres, employing half of Poland to supply supermarkets with cheap food. This sums up everything that is wrong with UK agriculture.
Not that long ago in the late 80's, there were 15 family farms in West Wales growing about 20 acres of organic veg each. Nice little income, and each place employing a few local staff.
Now it's in the hands of one company growing 5000 acres of carrots, with 1000 acres of organic grown on the side, most likely employing bus loads of Russkies " Cos we can't find locals who want the work, don't you know"

How the f**k did we get into this mess........

 

[Bald Rick]

The English, like their language, are mongrels and will carry a lot of different ethnic genes in their DNA include Afro Caribbean so that doesn't stack up although I will concede that Northerners (like North Walians) do not like their southern counterparts much. Southern Softies is one of the more polite terms I believe.

As for labour, we are finding it very difficult to get staff not so much due to pay (as we believe it's a fair wage) but due to the hours. Anyway there has been TV programmes on items such as fruit picking where the farmers just could not get local UK pickers as they have too comfortable a life lying in bed collecting dole money

 

[Walterp]

The English, like their language, are mongrels and will carry a lot of different ethnic genes in their DNA include Afro Caribbean so that doesn't stack up although I will concede that Northerners (like North Walians) do not like their southern counterparts much. Southern Softies is one of the more polite terms I believe.

As for labour, we are finding it very difficult to get staff not so much due to pay (as we believe it's a fair wage) but due to the hours. Anyway there has been TV programmes on items such as fruit picking where the farmers just could not get local UK pickers as they have too comfortable a life lying in bed collecting dole money

I'm not with you on the DNA point - the amount of 'kith and kin' anti-EU correspondence I read in the papers, and the different strands of tribal DNA within Wales is, I suggest, fairly telling evidence.

I have seen no better explanation.

On the commonplace 'the dole pays better' argument, it refutes itself - just pay workers more, and make the job more attractive.

An example from teaching is apposite - we are paying £20,000 + per annum, and are then surprised when STEM graduates abandon teaching and emigrate within a few years of qualification. The problem - and its remedy - is so elementary that refusal to acknowledge and act on it is perverse.

Hospitals and doctors the same.

(But farmers are the worst).

 

[sidjon]

Did our family tree and my grandparents were all born in different countries (Holland, Ireland, Spain and Cornwall) , I seem to have more problems from the Nimbys who have moved into the local area then anyone who was born in a different country.

 

[Henarar]

What a load of generalised rubbish
certain people want this because they "are" ......... or there ancestors came from .........
absolute crap and I would love to see anyone prove it

 

[beefandsleep]

what a load of shi ite. I stopped reading halfway through, actually, as soon as I read the word Brexit. Get over it and stop talking such utter and absolute balls.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Any pictures of the new Leyland?




I've yet to see a business suffer due to employing people who really want to work there.

 

[Bury the Trash]

 

[Walterp]

What a load of generalised rubbish
certain people want this because they "are" ......... or there ancestors came from .........
absolute crap and I would love to see anyone prove it

It is susceptible to proof, actually.

DNA tests are now cheap and routine, so that national studies have been carried out.

None of the results are particularly surprising: Yorkshire has the highest Anglo-Saxon DNA, Lincolnshire is full of Danish DNA whilst the South is more diverse. Most of the research simply confirms what historians already knew.

Wales has its own myths and legends, but the more prosaic reality is that it was largely settled by Northerners in the early Dark Ages. That, to me, was fresh information.

No one has come up with a more convincing commentary, despite the cat-calling.

Nor, more significantly, has anyone said what needs to be said: 'we need to pay more, train better, retain more.'

 

[RagnarHairybreeks]

One of the simplest solutions is to make the dole a nine to five job. Unless you are in the classroom getting training, or out on a verified interview, you don't get paid unless you arrive at nine and leave at five.

Suddenly the state gets 1.6 million workers for free.

Get 'em out litter picking or getting chewing gum off pavements, doesn't matter. I bet those farming jobs will suddenly look very attractive indeed (and folks won't get institutionalised by getting up at half past ten and sitting on the sofa watching day time telly all day).

But yes. I agree. The OP statement is rather daft.

 

[Walterp]

what a load of shi ite. I stopped reading halfway through, actually, as soon as I read the word Brexit. Get over it and stop talking such utter and absolute balls.

But Brexit is replete with paradoxes and contradictions; it's interesting just pointing them out, and querying what the solutions might be.

Immigrant labour is merely one of the contradictions: English farmers need immigrant workers - but they don't want them. Nor do they want to pay their fellow-citizens more, or make the job easier for them, either.

'Get over it' doesn't count as a solution.

 

[RagnarHairybreeks]

As it happens I voted against, and am still very much against Brexit, but British farmers don't need immigrant workers, what they need is the people on the dole to get off their posteriors and take the jobs. Win / win for both the general taxpayers and the farmers alike.

 

[Walterp]

One of the simplest solutions is to make the dole a nine to five job. Unless you are in the classroom getting training, or out on a verified interview, you don't get paid unless you arrive at nine and leave at five.

Suddenly the state gets 1.6 million workers for free.

Get 'em out litter picking or getting chewing gum off pavements, doesn't matter. I bet those farming jobs will suddenly look very attractive indeed (and folks won't get institutionalised by getting up at half past ten and sitting on the sofa watching day time telly all day).

But yes. I agree. The OP statement is rather daft.

Arthur Street recounts how this worked out, the last time the UK tried this in the 1930's.

Farmers would collect conscripted unemployed from Labour Exchanges in the morning, and return them after a day's work. The forced labour aspect of this meant that neither side was happy, little effective work was done, and the experiment you suggest failed on a national scale. If you are interested in more detail, 'Farmer's Glory' recounts the story.

Instead, Mr Street later turned to Italian and German POW's. You can guess how that went (Pembroke Dock held a farewell party and play for returning German POW's after the War, we were so sorry to see 'em go. Mr Mark Muller, a local historian, records this in our local paper - his father was a POW who chose to stay).

History does not record a farewell party for the Italians.

 

[alex04w]

@llamedos

Can this be shifted to Brexit & Politics as yet another of Walts Brexit threads? There seem to be a few of them floating around in Agricultural Matters.

 

[DrDunc]

But Brexit is replete with paradoxes and contradictions; it's interesting just pointing them out, and querying what the solutions might be.

Immigrant labour is merely one of the contradictions: English farmers need immigrant workers - but they don't want them. Nor do they want to pay their fellow-citizens more, or make the job easier for them, either.

'Get over it' doesn't count as a solution.

But post Brexit there won't be a market for our produce that is over priced compared to subsidised imports.

Without UK agriculture, there won't be any necessity for dirty job stealing Johnny foreigner immigrants.

Post Brexit, problem solved.

 

[Bury the Trash]

Any pictures of the new Leyland?




I've yet to see a business suffer due to employing people who really want to work there.

 

[wasted years]

But Brexit is replete with paradoxes and contradictions; it's interesting just pointing them out, and querying what the solutions might be.

Immigrant labour is merely one of the contradictions: English farmers need immigrant workers - but they don't want them. Nor do they want to pay their fellow-citizens more, or make the job easier for them, either.

'Get over it' doesn't count as a solution.

My own opinion is that to fill jobs with home grown labour as opposed to immigrants is going to need the 'undoing' of jobs that the more 'lazy' or discerning workers do.
Go a mile down the road from here and hundreds of lorries every day cart bottled water to distribution centres , burning millions of litres of juice annnually and taking up the time of largely male workers that could be doing something more useful.
The worst part of it is that the water they carry comes from the same aquifer as the mains water that is pumped out of the ground less than 5 miles further on.
Then we need to purge the EA of all their staff and perhaps close some of the holiday parcs that soak up all the good folk in Penrith that could otherwise be doing the really crap jobs that we save for the immigrants that ,52% of the population seem to hate so much.

Live here no, wipe my mothers butt yes, but do it cheaply.

 

[RagnarHairybreeks]

@Walterp

That is not, if you actually read what I wrote, what I was suggesting.

Simply turn unemployment benefit into low paid scut work.

This makes it unattractive compared to the current 'sit on the sofa, collect the money and sign on once every two weeks' (which also makes people unemployable fairly quickly).

Real jobs, even if not too attractive by comparison to the sofa scenario, become attractive.

Posts become filled (not by conscription, but by choice).

Instead of paying for 1.6 million people to play video games and watch Jeremy Kyle you get them mobilised, either for the state or into the jobs you need filling.

Not that hard is it?