‘But what’s worth more than gold?’
‘Practically everything. You, for example. Gold is heavy. Your weight in gold is not very much gold at all. Aren’t you worth more than that?’
‘Well, in a manner of speaking-‘
‘The only manner of speaking worth talking about. The world is full of things worth more than gold… Good heavens, potatoes are worth more than gold!’
‘Surely not.’
‘If you were shipwrecked on a desert island, what would you prefer, a bag of potatoes, or a bag of gold?’
‘Yes, but a desert island isn’t where we live!’
‘And that proves gold is only valuable because we agree it is, right? It’s just a dream. But a potato is always worth a potato, anywhere. A knob of butter and a pinch of salt and you’ve got a meal, anywhere. Bury gold in the ground and you’ll be worrying about thieves forever. Bury a potato and in due season you could be looking at a dividend of a thousand per cent.’
So oddly, over the last few weeks, I have had the same conversation, about Brexit and fruit pickers in the East of England, about four times.
I say oddly because the only previous time I had it was in 2015, with a woman who had grown up in a rural area of the East of England. Since then, zero, then January and February this year, four times.
Now, I should say right away that all four of the people (none of them imaginary) I had this conversation with are decent, sensible people: three Remainers and a Leaver. This isn’t aimed at them. But obviously events this week mean the topic is relevant in more ways than one, so here we are.
Now, basically the argument is designed to ‘understand’ why people in some parts of the UK voted to leave the EU.
It’s pretty flawed from the outset, because literally the only two demographic indicators shown to have any relation to the reality of the 2016 referendum were someone’s age (the older you are, the more likely you are to have voted Leave) and the level of education they’d completed (the higher that level of education, the more likely you are to have voted Remain: this, by the way, is not an indication of ‘intelligence’. We may look at it another time, but it has more to do with ‘experience’ than with ‘knowledge’, or indeed ‘cleverness’).
Geography, and indeed income, have absolutely no relevance to Brexit whatsoever. It’s perhaps heartening to some people to pretend ‘the poor’ and/or ‘Northerners’ voted to leave, but in fact the Home Counties and the rest of the South East were at least as enthusiastic about leaving as ‘the North’, where every major city bar one voted Remain, and the average wealth of Leave voters was in fact higher than that of those who voted remain.
Anyway, what I am saying is that the ‘fruit-picker’ argument is not actually grounded in reality.
What it IS, however, is an effort to ‘understand’, which is sorely lacking in much of the debate. Once again, this is not to attack those who have considered and shared this argument.
Anyway, it goes: ‘Some people in the East of England really DID see their livelihoods ruined because of people from EU states coming in and undercutting them for all the fruit-picking jobs.’
Now, we’re quickly going to look at that and then move to the second thing.
Because, sure. It’s good to try to understand why some people voted Leave, and it’s absolutely true that some of them were driven to it by anger and frustration, verging on despair, about the way their lives were going. We really must engage in that debate.
But the problem is that this despair and frustration was not ‘caused’ by EU nationals working in the UK, nor, as the suggestion is in this case, was it in fact even an unintended negative outcome of them being here.
Here’s why: so, let’s take a fruit farm (because ‘fruit-picking’ seems to be the ‘industry’ cited always in this argument).
I admit I am not an expert, but I am going to make a (very generous, I think) estimate that the fruit-picking season is from 1 June to 30 September each year. So, four months, or a third of the year.
I have, in fact done some research, which indicates that the minimum (if you are messing about, eating the strawberries you pick and are paid by weight of fruit at the end of the day) you might expect to take home from fruit-picking is £10 per day. So, if you worked seven days a week (which you wouldn’t), for the entire 122 day ‘picking season’ (which you wouldn’t), you could expect to earn £1,220. This is not an income on which a person can survive.
Of course, you can sign up for a contract, which would earn you on average about £150 per week, which over the course of just over 17 weeks (no single farm would employ you for all 17 weeks, but let’s be as fair as we can) would bring you in £2,614.29. For four months’ work.
Now, you may, under this contract, have your shelter and food provided, but even if so, this is hardly enough to see you through the year.
The point is that ‘fruit-picking’ may be a subsidiary income for some, but it is the major income of no-one in the UK. The vast majority of ‘fruit-pickers’ have always been people travelling in from outside the area to take on the task, and those ‘incomers’ – whether holiday-makers or people from outside the UK looking for quick cash and/or a place to stay while ‘finding their feet’ – are not ‘under-cutting locals’. The jobs just don’t pay well, for anyone. They never have.
In effect, the ‘fruit-picking’ argument is a rare combination of Leavers’ rhetoric and an actual situation in which non-‘locals’ can genuinely be said to have taken jobs, but they haven’t taken them ‘from locals’: EU citizens are just the latest addition to a pool which includes travelling people from all over the world, including the UK itself.
But the thing is, that point in itself has become more pertinent still in the wake of the Tory government’s latest proposals for a ‘points-based immigration system’.
The system itself has been covered at length – it shows no understanding whatsoever of how language works (the easiest and best way to learn a language is to live and work where it’s actually spoken) or of the fact that there simply aren’t enough UK citizens capable of taking the jobs Priti Patel is chasing workers out of (she claims there are eight million ‘idle’ people, of whom more than seven million are in fact either too sick to work, carers, or students), and in fact creates a system in which the lowest-earners in the UK are to be chased out, to encourage the lowest earners born in the UK to fight one another for jobs which pay far less than the average national wage.
But one argument that’s been used in relation to this is ‘good luck getting British people to work for £1-2 per hour’.
And this is a problem.
First, because it’s true. It’s extremely unlikely that British people are going to rush out to take up physically-demanding, outdoor jobs which pay a pittance, especially when there will be so many other jobs – nurses, physiotherapist, new teaching staff, police officers, suddenly vacant, and so few people to do them. Food might literally rot on the branches, which, given we are unlikely to have any trade deals in place, could possibly lead to very serious problems across the UK as food supply runs short. It is true that perhaps the government will force people to pick fruit, but this is hardly the same as ‘people getting the jobs they want and deserve’.
But second because it actually underlines a very serious fault in the current UK system.
We pay people almost nothing to supply the country with an absolute necessity product: food.
There are several reasons why this might be.
We have had 41 years of governments which refuse to regulate the market and the market literally doesn’t care whether people starve to death.
Successive governments have stopped and then prevented unionisation which might have allowed workers to negotiate a decent pay-rate.
In the deregulated economy farmers have been put under increasing pressure by supermarkets to cut costs (in fact, this benefits many consumers) and one of these has been wages in the agricultural sector.
What we know it isn’t, as laid out above, is EU workers ‘pushing down wages’.
But this system has now left us on a knife-edge.
Because by pulling out the workers with its xenophobic dog-whistle ‘points-system’, the government has now set up a system under which either:
a) Food will go un-gathered, leading to starvation.
b) Farmers, in order to increase wages and make sure food reaches supermarkets (bearing in mind they are also set to lose the EU payments on which many farms now rely), will increase the amount they charge the latter for produce, leading in turn to prices being forced up for everyone
c) The government effectively pays people to pick fruit, by supplementing farmers’ payments to the level of a living wage, or
d) The government will hand cash to the farmers for the same purpose.
Now. The government will not do c) or d) as it is an ideologically austere and ‘free market’ administration. b) would result in anger, unhappiness and in some cases hunger, disease and death among UK consumers, whose wages are likely to fall, and certainly not increase, in the next few years, and a) absolutely will cause mass starvation in a nation which has cut itself off from every trade deal it currently has.
We are on that knife-edge. We have been forced to it by the ludicrous excuse for a policy Priti Patel is attempting to pass off as ‘good for Britain’, but the ‘final push’ has only been possible because of 41 solid years of relentless neo-liberal deregulation, a failure and refusal by the UK government to do its job in any sector of UK politics or economics.
We are now in a position where we must accept that paying people almost nothing is unacceptable, but also that the alternatives, now, are quite possible to lead us to a disaster the country has seldom faced in its entire history.
This was not caused by the EU, or by EU citizens. It wasn’t really caused by farmers, or even the supermarkets who whipped them on.
This was caused by a neo-liberal experiment which, like Brexit, was devised for the already obscenely wealthy, for the already obscenely wealthy, and which has treated working people from the UK, EU, and all over the world as not only commodities to be taken advantage of, but as commodities to be driven into the ground.
No, British people will not want to work for £1-2 per hour. Neither should anyone else, and in any case the UK government is now denying ‘anyone else’ the ‘chance’ to.
As with everything else in this sorry country, at this sorry time, the UK made its own mess and is now staring catastrophe in the face.
And as with everything else in this sorry country, the problem is not ‘EU workers are willing to work for less than a living wage’ it’s ‘the entire UK system demands people must work for less than a living wage’.
‘Bury a potato and in due season you could be looking at a dividend of a thousand per cent.’ But not if you bury it here, now.
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