If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
That entire thread is hilariously insane. People from across the EU - and a couple of Americans - who honestly believe Britain is close to collapse. And famine.
Are they all reading the New York Times, and nothing else?!
It’s genuinely hard to fathom. One element must be Strasbourg Syndrome. Brexit is evil therefore it can only cause evil things to the evildoers responsible. It is a religious reflex at work
Yes, it sort of goes back to what I was talking about earlier today. The EU projects this image of perfection which causes people idealise it. We see it on here all the time. They have an almost religious zeal about the EU because in the back of their minds they know the EU is imperfect, the image it projects is false and they are overcompensating because they realise the moment they admit it isn't perfect those flaws and those minor imperfections add up, the doubt grows and suddenly the institution they place above all others a mess of undemocratic contradictions and the UK was right to leave.
Lots of people really believe the EU is the only game in town, their world is being shattered right now as the UK prospers completely outside of its structures. This is their worst nightmare come true.
I don't know why we bother getting dressed in the morning, Max. Because soon as you start gazing at us we may as well be naked.
You at least realise the emperor has no clothes, you still defend the EU for reasons beyond my understanding. Maybe it's part of your culture war, you don't hate the idea of leaving the EU, you hate the people that vote leave.
No, not quite that. Not sure Brexit has any clothes tbh. I see it how I've put it before. It's not about hating Leavers as discreet and whole individuals. We're all a mix of Remainy and Leavey impulses to varying extents. Eg I'm about an 80/20. I fight the 20 but it's there alright. And all told and in the round and put together the less elevated side of this country of ours triumphed in the Referendum vote. So that's the 20% of me + 75% of you + 95% of Nigel Farage + 5% of Keir Starmer + 99.9999% of Bill Cash + 50% of Boris Johnson etc etc ... this was enough and prevailed. Prevailed quite easily really. It was a mirage that it was close. We are Leave Nation.
Stop fighting it mate. Surrender to your maximum Leaviness. It eats you inside and is utterly futile anyways. Accept that it MAY be OK. If it is great, great. If not, wry shrug. Not your fault or mine.
Oh sure. It will be ok most probably. But I do think those 2 things. 1. It was our lesser side prevailing. 2. It wasn't really close. Most of the on the fencers voted R. Weight by passion and L won by miles. And tbh I'm fine with it now. I just want to GTTO! ✊🙂
Course these things are related. Brexit makes it hard to GTTO. That 40% base.
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
Remind me what Finlandization means again…? I guess she doesn’t understand the value of freedom
Classic Brexsplaining.
Of course the Finns are too daft to do democracy!
I don't know about daft in general, but the idea that a lack of HGV drivers is a permanent reality that won't be adapted to is ridiculous. As is the idea that a similar constitutional situation to Japan, Canada and Australia is a "myth".
Not sure the electorate would particularly appreciate a GE in 2022 when there is no obvious need for it.
I think it will be 2023 probably Q2 which is when elections normally are, but even that represents only a 3.5 year gap.
I can't see how he can go in 2022. It would have to be a winter election now, given the number of weeks involved.
An unnecessary GE in what may be a winter surge in covid and will almost certainly be crisis in NHS over flu and a looming lockdown would go down very badly I think.
it's 2021
i think
You don’t remember the November 2021 COVID Protection Suspended Animation Act?
Yours truly recently preformed a citizen's arrest, enforcing the Seattle Anti-Ukulele Ordinance of 1926.
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
That entire thread is hilariously insane. People from across the EU - and a couple of Americans - who honestly believe Britain is close to collapse. And famine.
Are they all reading the New York Times, and nothing else?!
It’s genuinely hard to fathom. One element must be Strasbourg Syndrome. Brexit is evil therefore it can only cause evil things to the evildoers responsible. It is a religious reflex at work
Yes, it sort of goes back to what I was talking about earlier today. The EU projects this image of perfection which causes people idealise it. We see it on here all the time. They have an almost religious zeal about the EU because in the back of their minds they know the EU is imperfect, the image it projects is false and they are overcompensating because they realise the moment they admit it isn't perfect those flaws and those minor imperfections add up, the doubt grows and suddenly the institution they place above all others a mess of undemocratic contradictions and the UK was right to leave.
Lots of people really believe the EU is the only game in town, their world is being shattered right now as the UK prospers completely outside of its structures. This is their worst nightmare come true.
A French minister has accused the British, today, of being ‘obsessed with France’, even as several other French ministers publicly announce plans to blockade Britain, ‘cut off all ties with Britain’, deprive Britain of electricity, ‘punish the British for Brexit’, ‘stop British exports’ - and this is just one day
Imagine if several British Cabinet ministers were making daily threats against France. That *would* be obsessive
You can watch French TV for days and the UK never features. Too much Telegraph can be misleading.
Mwanwhile I give you a rare Englishman who is actually admired.....Dr Rashford
But it’s the same on British TV. It looks much more to America (too much, for me) - but also increasingly to Asia, and China
Meanwhile a comparison between the home pages, right now, of Le Monde and the Guardian is quite instructive.
Both have about 50 stories. Just two of the stories in Le Monde are definitely about Britain: one is about Covid in the UK, the other about the Saudi-Newcastle takeover. Meanwhile in the Guardian there’s just one story ‘about France’ - but it is expressly about deteriorating Franco-Brit relations. So, about the same?
The UK-French-EU ‘obsession’ is mutual, but it is only happening in social media and only amongst politicians, Eurocrats, and geeks like us. It is a real thing, however. This is the pinned tweet of Finland’s ex prime minister, also mentioned below
‘Reading news about petrol shortages and other supply problems in the UK. Really sad to see what #Brexit is doing to a country that used to be great. Brexit is the biggest mistake a modern nation state has inflicted on itself in recent history. Hope to see an end to this mess.’
That’s his pinned tweet. That’s the opinion he has which he thinks is most important right now. Wtf. He’s Finnish. Lol
Hopefully in a few years when Brexit is accepted we can all go back to courteously ignoring each other, like normal neighbours
Finland's ex PM is on the money. There is a change in mood and it's not for the better. The Cote d'Azur doesn't feel part English anymore which is rather sad.
You can no longer saunter down the Promenade des Anglais and pretend you belong. Quelle dommage!
Some people are depressingly soulless but I suppose they have the advantage of being oblivious to what's going on around them
Jaywick is lovely this time of year, Rog. You should give it a go.
Has SeanLeon noticed today’s German case numbers yet, and spotted that yesterday’s published number of deaths has been reduced dramatically downwards?
You'd think by this point people would have learnt about
1) reporting delays 2) weekly cyclic effects created by the. 3) Reported on vs day of
Even Pesto is catching up with this, I believe.
If you go back to the actual comment I made, yesterday, on the odd German numbers, I explicitly asked ‘is this a statistical glitch?’ - because the figures were so out of whack
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
Remind me what Finlandization means again…? I guess she doesn’t understand the value of freedom
Classic Brexsplaining.
Of course the Finns are too daft to do democracy!
I thought that calling him an arrogant patronising shit would be offensive
In their zeal, Tory Leavers are now advocating the destruction of British agriculture just to prove Boris right. Unbelievable.
Hey that's not fair!
I've always been OK with the destruction of British agriculture.
[Actually I don't think it will be destroyed, I think we should follow the NZ model and have every confidence British agriculture can thrive - but I'm entirely OK with it being destroyed if I happen to be wrong on that opinion]
I really have to ask you 'ARE YOU A ROBOT'? I mean do you have a job like other people or are you living off an inheritance? You are so insensitive to how working people survive and what work is that it's clearly not something you have ever done.
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
Remind me what Finlandization means again…? I guess she doesn’t understand the value of freedom
Classic Brexsplaining.
Of course the Finns are too daft to do democracy!
I thought that calling him an arrogant patronising shit would be offensive
It came across as deluded more than anything else.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
I don't know where you are speaking from. But agribusiness votes Tory. Meanwhile, the vast majority of jobs round here are in, or dependent on, agriculture. Nary an imported worker, nor much of a subsidy to be seen. Nor much of a profit. Take away UC and the whole place would go tits up. You're talking early 80's industrial North. Votes Tory too.
You are HYUFD and I claim my £5
The right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it affects Tory voters.
Been accused of many things in my time.... Meanwhile. Quite apart from owt else. You think this PM will do what's right above Tory voters? Bless.
Yes I do actually.
It depends which Tory voters you're talking about afterall. "Business" tends to be pro-Tory traditionally but when it came push to shove this PM had the cojones to say "fuck business" when some chose to stand in the way of what needed to be done.
So that's business. And agriculture. And with it the rural communities. Any other Tory voters who actually do a day's work to be sacrificed for the pensioners?
Not for pensioners.
Businesses that are addicted to the crack cocaine of shipping in people to work for minimum wage while the taxpayer sponsors those people with housing credit, tax credits, universal credit etc to supplement their below living wages . . . they need to be told to fuck right off and pay a market rate.
Agriculture - same thing.
Let companies compete in a free market. Bizarre that free marketeers might still believe in a free market, rather than pander to client businesses and agriculture isn't it?
Has SeanLeon noticed today’s German case numbers yet, and spotted that yesterday’s published number of deaths has been reduced dramatically downwards?
You'd think by this point people would have learnt about
1) reporting delays 2) weekly cyclic effects created by the. 3) Reported on vs day of
Even Pesto is catching up with this, I believe.
If you go back to the actual comment I made, yesterday, on the odd German numbers, I explicitly asked ‘is this a statistical glitch?’ - because the figures were so out of whack
Before you Scott&Paste things, trying doing a little bit of research.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
And if post-Brexit transition takes that long but is worth it in the end . . . then it will have been the right thing to do.
Has SeanLeon noticed today’s German case numbers yet, and spotted that yesterday’s published number of deaths has been reduced dramatically downwards?
You'd think by this point people would have learnt about
1) reporting delays 2) weekly cyclic effects created by the. 3) Reported on vs day of
Even Pesto is catching up with this, I believe.
If you go back to the actual comment I made, yesterday, on the odd German numbers, I explicitly asked ‘is this a statistical glitch?’ - because the figures were so out of whack
Before you Scott&Paste things, trying doing a little bit of research.
But those were the figures the Germans themselves pumped out yesterday, I believe. Tho I guess I could have rung their Health Ministry in Berlin to demand an explanation?
Not sure the electorate would particularly appreciate a GE in 2022 when there is no obvious need for it.
I think it will be 2023 probably Q2 which is when elections normally are, but even that represents only a 3.5 year gap.
I can't see how he can go in 2022. It would have to be a winter election now, given the number of weeks involved.
An unnecessary GE in what may be a winter surge in covid and will almost certainly be crisis in NHS over flu and a looming lockdown would go down very badly I think.
it's 2021
i think
You don’t remember the November 2021 COVID Protection Suspended Animation Act?
Yours truly recently preformed a citizen's arrest, enforcing the Seattle Anti-Ukulele Ordinance of 1926.
Wasn’t that repealed as part of the Oboe Act of 1963?
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
Remind me what Finlandization means again…? I guess she doesn’t understand the value of freedom
Classic Brexsplaining.
Of course the Finns are too daft to do democracy!
I thought that calling him an arrogant patronising shit would be offensive
It came across as deluded more than anything else.
Well it comes down to the basic point: I value intangibles that you don’t value. So we have a different calculation as to the merits of Brexit.
Has SeanLeon noticed today’s German case numbers yet, and spotted that yesterday’s published number of deaths has been reduced dramatically downwards?
You'd think by this point people would have learnt about
1) reporting delays 2) weekly cyclic effects created by the. 3) Reported on vs day of
Even Pesto is catching up with this, I believe.
If you go back to the actual comment I made, yesterday, on the odd German numbers, I explicitly asked ‘is this a statistical glitch?’ - because the figures were so out of whack
Before you Scott&Paste things, trying doing a little bit of research.
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
Remind me what Finlandization means again…? I guess she doesn’t understand the value of freedom
Classic Brexsplaining.
Of course the Finns are too daft to do democracy!
I thought that calling him an arrogant patronising shit would be offensive
It came across as deluded more than anything else.
Well it comes down to the basic point: I value intangibles that you don’t value. So we have a different calculation as to the merits of Brexit.
That at the end of the day is the root of most of the disagreements on this site.
In some ways people talk past each other as they can't wrap the head around that other people simply don't prioritise the things that they do.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
Indeed, there are people who say it's impossible but we know from prior examples that it isn't. There's a bumpy ride and agribusiness will have to adjust to the new reality of not having low wage workers other than seasonal work for fruit/vegetable picking in fields.
Has SeanLeon noticed today’s German case numbers yet, and spotted that yesterday’s published number of deaths has been reduced dramatically downwards?
You'd think by this point people would have learnt about
1) reporting delays 2) weekly cyclic effects created by the. 3) Reported on vs day of
Even Pesto is catching up with this, I believe.
If you go back to the actual comment I made, yesterday, on the odd German numbers, I explicitly asked ‘is this a statistical glitch?’ - because the figures were so out of whack
Before you Scott&Paste things, trying doing a little bit of research.
What do you make of this one test says yeah, second says no I first mentioned yesterday, Mal, a bad batch of testing, or new variant or an known unknown?
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
I don't know where you are speaking from. But agribusiness votes Tory. Meanwhile, the vast majority of jobs round here are in, or dependent on, agriculture. Nary an imported worker, nor much of a subsidy to be seen. Nor much of a profit. Take away UC and the whole place would go tits up. You're talking early 80's industrial North. Votes Tory too.
You are HYUFD and I claim my £5
The right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it affects Tory voters.
Been accused of many things in my time.... Meanwhile. Quite apart from owt else. You think this PM will do what's right above Tory voters? Bless.
Yes I do actually.
It depends which Tory voters you're talking about afterall. "Business" tends to be pro-Tory traditionally but when it came push to shove this PM had the cojones to say "fuck business" when some chose to stand in the way of what needed to be done.
So that's business. And agriculture. And with it the rural communities. Any other Tory voters who actually do a day's work to be sacrificed for the pensioners?
I doubt many rural communities would be overly bothered to see the back of intensively reared pig farming and the imported workforce which goes with it.
As long as the grain fields and meadows with sheep baaing / cattle mooing remain people will be happy with what the British countryside looks like.
Precisely as I explained. Remove UC and you won't have much upland farming. It's aĺl agriculture round here. None of it intensive, barely any subsidised, barely any profitable. And not a foreign worker to be seen. Nor anyone above minimum wage.
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
Remind me what Finlandization means again…? I guess she doesn’t understand the value of freedom
Classic Brexsplaining.
Of course the Finns are too daft to do democracy!
They vie with NZ for the first democratic franchise.
Really? They were part of czarist Russia until 1918.
1917
In fact they were never part of Czarist Russia. They were a separate Grand Duchy in a personal union with Russia and Poland. Poland also had a separate parliament and legal system, although there was heavy pressure under Alexander III and Nicholas II to Russify it and bring it under direct imperial control.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
I don't know where you are speaking from. But agribusiness votes Tory. Meanwhile, the vast majority of jobs round here are in, or dependent on, agriculture. Nary an imported worker, nor much of a subsidy to be seen. Nor much of a profit. Take away UC and the whole place would go tits up. You're talking early 80's industrial North. Votes Tory too.
You are HYUFD and I claim my £5
The right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it affects Tory voters.
Been accused of many things in my time.... Meanwhile. Quite apart from owt else. You think this PM will do what's right above Tory voters? Bless.
Yes I do actually.
It depends which Tory voters you're talking about afterall. "Business" tends to be pro-Tory traditionally but when it came push to shove this PM had the cojones to say "fuck business" when some chose to stand in the way of what needed to be done.
So that's business. And agriculture. And with it the rural communities. Any other Tory voters who actually do a day's work to be sacrificed for the pensioners?
I doubt many rural communities would be overly bothered to see the back of intensively reared pig farming and the imported workforce which goes with it.
As long as the grain fields and meadows with sheep baaing / cattle mooing remain people will be happy with what the British countryside looks like.
Precisely as I explained. Remove UC and you won't have much upland farming. It's aĺl agriculture round here. None of it intensive, barely any subsidised, barely any profitable. And not a foreign worker to be seen. Nor anyone above minimum wage.
Then if they can't cope without taxpayer subsidies, what are they doing still trading?
UC is supposed to be a safety net, not a way of life.
Has SeanLeon noticed today’s German case numbers yet, and spotted that yesterday’s published number of deaths has been reduced dramatically downwards?
You'd think by this point people would have learnt about
1) reporting delays 2) weekly cyclic effects created by the. 3) Reported on vs day of
Even Pesto is catching up with this, I believe.
If you go back to the actual comment I made, yesterday, on the odd German numbers, I explicitly asked ‘is this a statistical glitch?’ - because the figures were so out of whack
Before you Scott&Paste things, trying doing a little bit of research.
But those were the figures the Germans themselves pumped out yesterday, I believe. Tho I guess I could have rung their Health Ministry in Berlin to demand an explanation?
A raw number is one data point. One data point.
One data point doesn't mean anything. You have to look at all it's friends and relations. Are they close by or do they live a long long way away?
Re header and @MikeSmithson. Endless header posts will not assuage your conscience. The Tories are currently the best placed to be in government. The other parties are simply hopeless, and that's especially the LDs.
Beyond the Tory party the next best placed person to be PM in my opinion is Farage. Fertile ground for the Greens, but WTF are the usual parties of opposition doing!?
I would just comment that there is agreement that we face an extraordinary cost of living crisis with worldwide energy prices rocketing, shortages across the planet with container ships held at anchor in many places, indeed 14 were held at anchor of Anglesey last week due to adverse weather conditions for docking in Liverpool
HMG is facing the bleakest outlook I can remember, not least as covid continues and the economic shocks are extreme.
Taxes are rising and it is fair enough to complain about the loss of the £20 UC uplift but that would add £6billion or 1% on income tax year year on year and Starmer has still not said how he would cover the deficit other than muttering 'tory donors'.
I would be very surprised to see the conservatives retain their poll lead but does anyone know how labour would fund their 170 billion of spending and address the present energy and shortages issues
HMG is having to make extraordinarily unpopular decisions, but in truth governments across Europe and elsewhere are facing the same tsunami of a crisis
We must also remember that on top of this, COP26 is going to involve very expensive commitments (Insulate Britain said they want a trillion to insulate UK homes) and sooner or later the costs are going to collide with policy makers and why has nobody had the courage to say we have to transition to carbon neutral in a manner that does not create massive poverty and societal disruption and if that includes in the UK case giving the go ahead to the Shetland oil fields then so be it
True, but just about all of the wounds you list are self-inflicted. Energy shortages, but shale gas just left in the ground. Public finances in crisis, but lots of hugely wasteful spending. House prices too high, but absurd planning laws. COP26 commitments because of green crap.
It's the consequence of the soft socialism and politically correct pandering we've subjected the economy to over the last 20 years.
(I could have added lockdown, which was designed to inflict maximum economic damage).
Shale gas has been left in the ground (globally), because we had a pandemic and prices crashed.
Remember that the production profile of a shale gas well is very different to that of a traditional oil or gas project. With shale, if you stop drilling, production drops very rapidly.
What we've seen is that demand fell during the pandemic, drilling stopped, and shale gas production dropped sharply. Rig counts are now rising (although they still need to increase further), and production will rapidly follow.
There are still essentially no spot exports of LNG from the US, but that will change in the next few months. By April/May next year, US natural gas production should have increased more than 10 billion cubic feet a day, and be hitting new highs. (For reference, UK natural gas demand is only 7 billion feet/day)
Shale gas was left in the ground in the UK because the government messed around for years about issuing then suspending licences, and had absurdly and unrealistically tight seismic requirements. That's one important reason why our wholesale gas prices are several times America's, and we're desperately dependent on Russia.
Yet another example of the government shooting the country in the foot.
Shale gas is not currently economic in the UK.
Even before the March 2000 moratorium (which, it should be noted was because the locals were not happy), the data on flow rates was not particularly encouraging. I mean if the land were empty, and if the UK had a large indigenous supply of land drilling rigs (and people to staff them), then it *might* work. But we don't.
So, an operator would be essentially taking a massive flyer on either future wells being very significantly more productive than the initial ones, or longer term gas prices being $12-14/mmbtu.
And I don't think any operator is going to do that.
(The only way I could see it working would be if the UK government guaranteed - say - $12/mmbtu for shale gas for the next five to seven years to encourage development.)
Not sure the electorate would particularly appreciate a GE in 2022 when there is no obvious need for it.
I think it will be 2023 probably Q2 which is when elections normally are, but even that represents only a 3.5 year gap.
I can't see how he can go in 2022. It would have to be a winter election now, given the number of weeks involved.
An unnecessary GE in what may be a winter surge in covid and will almost certainly be crisis in NHS over flu and a looming lockdown would go down very badly I think.
it's 2021
i think
You don’t remember the November 2021 COVID Protection Suspended Animation Act?
Yours truly recently preformed a citizen's arrest, enforcing the Seattle Anti-Ukulele Ordinance of 1926.
Wasn’t that repealed as part of the Oboe Act of 1963?
No. As this ugly example of anti-(H)oboe legislation was overturned by the Supreme Court of the Panama Canal Zone the following year.
In this context, note that Seattle enacted its Anti-Ukulele ordinance at the behest of Native Hawaiians appalled at the expropriation of their rich cultural heritage by tone-deaf Scandinavians.
Has SeanLeon noticed today’s German case numbers yet, and spotted that yesterday’s published number of deaths has been reduced dramatically downwards?
You'd think by this point people would have learnt about
1) reporting delays 2) weekly cyclic effects created by the. 3) Reported on vs day of
Even Pesto is catching up with this, I believe.
If you go back to the actual comment I made, yesterday, on the odd German numbers, I explicitly asked ‘is this a statistical glitch?’ - because the figures were so out of whack
Before you Scott&Paste things, trying doing a little bit of research.
What do you make of this one test says yeah, second says no I first mentioned yesterday, Mal, a bad batch of testing, or new variant or an known unknown?
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
I don't know where you are speaking from. But agribusiness votes Tory. Meanwhile, the vast majority of jobs round here are in, or dependent on, agriculture. Nary an imported worker, nor much of a subsidy to be seen. Nor much of a profit. Take away UC and the whole place would go tits up. You're talking early 80's industrial North. Votes Tory too.
You are HYUFD and I claim my £5
The right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it affects Tory voters.
Been accused of many things in my time.... Meanwhile. Quite apart from owt else. You think this PM will do what's right above Tory voters? Bless.
Yes I do actually.
It depends which Tory voters you're talking about afterall. "Business" tends to be pro-Tory traditionally but when it came push to shove this PM had the cojones to say "fuck business" when some chose to stand in the way of what needed to be done.
So that's business. And agriculture. And with it the rural communities. Any other Tory voters who actually do a day's work to be sacrificed for the pensioners?
I doubt many rural communities would be overly bothered to see the back of intensively reared pig farming and the imported workforce which goes with it.
As long as the grain fields and meadows with sheep baaing / cattle mooing remain people will be happy with what the British countryside looks like.
Precisely as I explained. Remove UC and you won't have much upland farming. It's aĺl agriculture round here. None of it intensive, barely any subsidised, barely any profitable. And not a foreign worker to be seen. Nor anyone above minimum wage.
Re header and @MikeSmithson. Endless header posts will not assuage your conscience. The Tories are currently the best placed to be in government. The other parties are simply hopeless, and that's especially the LDs.
Beyond the Tory party the next best placed person to be PM in my opinion is Farage. Fertile ground for the Greens, but WTF are the usual parties of opposition doing!?
I would just comment that there is agreement that we face an extraordinary cost of living crisis with worldwide energy prices rocketing, shortages across the planet with container ships held at anchor in many places, indeed 14 were held at anchor of Anglesey last week due to adverse weather conditions for docking in Liverpool
HMG is facing the bleakest outlook I can remember, not least as covid continues and the economic shocks are extreme.
Taxes are rising and it is fair enough to complain about the loss of the £20 UC uplift but that would add £6billion or 1% on income tax year year on year and Starmer has still not said how he would cover the deficit other than muttering 'tory donors'.
I would be very surprised to see the conservatives retain their poll lead but does anyone know how labour would fund their 170 billion of spending and address the present energy and shortages issues
HMG is having to make extraordinarily unpopular decisions, but in truth governments across Europe and elsewhere are facing the same tsunami of a crisis
We must also remember that on top of this, COP26 is going to involve very expensive commitments (Insulate Britain said they want a trillion to insulate UK homes) and sooner or later the costs are going to collide with policy makers and why has nobody had the courage to say we have to transition to carbon neutral in a manner that does not create massive poverty and societal disruption and if that includes in the UK case giving the go ahead to the Shetland oil fields then so be it
True, but just about all of the wounds you list are self-inflicted. Energy shortages, but shale gas just left in the ground. Public finances in crisis, but lots of hugely wasteful spending. House prices too high, but absurd planning laws. COP26 commitments because of green crap.
It's the consequence of the soft socialism and politically correct pandering we've subjected the economy to over the last 20 years.
(I could have added lockdown, which was designed to inflict maximum economic damage).
Shale gas has been left in the ground (globally), because we had a pandemic and prices crashed.
Remember that the production profile of a shale gas well is very different to that of a traditional oil or gas project. With shale, if you stop drilling, production drops very rapidly.
What we've seen is that demand fell during the pandemic, drilling stopped, and shale gas production dropped sharply. Rig counts are now rising (although they still need to increase further), and production will rapidly follow.
There are still essentially no spot exports of LNG from the US, but that will change in the next few months. By April/May next year, US natural gas production should have increased more than 10 billion cubic feet a day, and be hitting new highs. (For reference, UK natural gas demand is only 7 billion feet/day)
Shale gas was left in the ground in the UK because the government messed around for years about issuing then suspending licences, and had absurdly and unrealistically tight seismic requirements. That's one important reason why our wholesale gas prices are several times America's, and we're desperately dependent on Russia.
Yet another example of the government shooting the country in the foot.
Shale gas is not currently economic in the UK.
Even before the March 2000 moratorium (which, it should be noted was because the locals were not happy), the data on flow rates was not particularly encouraging. I mean if the land were empty, and if the UK had a large indigenous supply of land drilling rigs (and people to staff them), then it *might* work. But we don't.
So, an operator would be essentially taking a massive flyer on either future wells being very significantly more productive than the initial ones, or longer term gas prices being $12-14/mmbtu.
And I don't think any operator is going to do that.
(The only way I could see it working would be if the UK government guaranteed - say - $12/mmbtu for shale gas for the next five to seven years to encourage development.)
Shale gas may not be economic but there are other hydrocarbon reserves which are being prevented from being developed because of the Government at both a local and national level. The Government is making it increasingly difficult to exploit gas reserves in the Southern North sea and as a result many companies are abandoning any plans for further exploration and are concentrating on the limited gains from near field development.
The UK attitude to hydrocarbons is inconsistent, incoherent and will result in more environmental damage rather than less whilst seriously damaging our economy at the same time.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
I don't know where you are speaking from. But agribusiness votes Tory. Meanwhile, the vast majority of jobs round here are in, or dependent on, agriculture. Nary an imported worker, nor much of a subsidy to be seen. Nor much of a profit. Take away UC and the whole place would go tits up. You're talking early 80's industrial North. Votes Tory too.
You are HYUFD and I claim my £5
The right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it affects Tory voters.
Been accused of many things in my time.... Meanwhile. Quite apart from owt else. You think this PM will do what's right above Tory voters? Bless.
Yes I do actually.
It depends which Tory voters you're talking about afterall. "Business" tends to be pro-Tory traditionally but when it came push to shove this PM had the cojones to say "fuck business" when some chose to stand in the way of what needed to be done.
So that's business. And agriculture. And with it the rural communities. Any other Tory voters who actually do a day's work to be sacrificed for the pensioners?
I doubt many rural communities would be overly bothered to see the back of intensively reared pig farming and the imported workforce which goes with it.
As long as the grain fields and meadows with sheep baaing / cattle mooing remain people will be happy with what the British countryside looks like.
Precisely as I explained. Remove UC and you won't have much upland farming. It's aĺl agriculture round here. None of it intensive, barely any subsidised, barely any profitable. And not a foreign worker to be seen. Nor anyone above minimum wage.
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
Remind me what Finlandization means again…? I guess she doesn’t understand the value of freedom
Classic Brexsplaining.
Of course the Finns are too daft to do democracy!
I don't know about daft in general, but the idea that a lack of HGV drivers is a permanent reality that won't be adapted to is ridiculous. As is the idea that a similar constitutional situation to Japan, Canada and Australia is a "myth".
Non sequitur alert, plus two straw men.
Well these vague pompous statements are rather hard to pin down in the precise effects they are describing. Perhaps deliberately.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
I don't know where you are speaking from. But agribusiness votes Tory. Meanwhile, the vast majority of jobs round here are in, or dependent on, agriculture. Nary an imported worker, nor much of a subsidy to be seen. Nor much of a profit. Take away UC and the whole place would go tits up. You're talking early 80's industrial North. Votes Tory too.
You are HYUFD and I claim my £5
The right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it affects Tory voters.
Been accused of many things in my time.... Meanwhile. Quite apart from owt else. You think this PM will do what's right above Tory voters? Bless.
Yes I do actually.
It depends which Tory voters you're talking about afterall. "Business" tends to be pro-Tory traditionally but when it came push to shove this PM had the cojones to say "fuck business" when some chose to stand in the way of what needed to be done.
So that's business. And agriculture. And with it the rural communities. Any other Tory voters who actually do a day's work to be sacrificed for the pensioners?
Not for pensioners.
Businesses that are addicted to the crack cocaine of shipping in people to work for minimum wage while the taxpayer sponsors those people with housing credit, tax credits, universal credit etc to supplement their below living wages . . . they need to be told to fuck right off and pay a market rate.
Agriculture - same thing.
Let companies compete in a free market. Bizarre that free marketeers might still believe in a free market, rather than pander to client businesses and agriculture isn't it?
Bizarre that you cling to the belief that Boris Johnson and his crew have any interest in the free market.
Re header and @MikeSmithson. Endless header posts will not assuage your conscience. The Tories are currently the best placed to be in government. The other parties are simply hopeless, and that's especially the LDs.
Beyond the Tory party the next best placed person to be PM in my opinion is Farage. Fertile ground for the Greens, but WTF are the usual parties of opposition doing!?
I would just comment that there is agreement that we face an extraordinary cost of living crisis with worldwide energy prices rocketing, shortages across the planet with container ships held at anchor in many places, indeed 14 were held at anchor of Anglesey last week due to adverse weather conditions for docking in Liverpool
HMG is facing the bleakest outlook I can remember, not least as covid continues and the economic shocks are extreme.
Taxes are rising and it is fair enough to complain about the loss of the £20 UC uplift but that would add £6billion or 1% on income tax year year on year and Starmer has still not said how he would cover the deficit other than muttering 'tory donors'.
I would be very surprised to see the conservatives retain their poll lead but does anyone know how labour would fund their 170 billion of spending and address the present energy and shortages issues
HMG is having to make extraordinarily unpopular decisions, but in truth governments across Europe and elsewhere are facing the same tsunami of a crisis
We must also remember that on top of this, COP26 is going to involve very expensive commitments (Insulate Britain said they want a trillion to insulate UK homes) and sooner or later the costs are going to collide with policy makers and why has nobody had the courage to say we have to transition to carbon neutral in a manner that does not create massive poverty and societal disruption and if that includes in the UK case giving the go ahead to the Shetland oil fields then so be it
True, but just about all of the wounds you list are self-inflicted. Energy shortages, but shale gas just left in the ground. Public finances in crisis, but lots of hugely wasteful spending. House prices too high, but absurd planning laws. COP26 commitments because of green crap.
It's the consequence of the soft socialism and politically correct pandering we've subjected the economy to over the last 20 years.
(I could have added lockdown, which was designed to inflict maximum economic damage).
Shale gas has been left in the ground (globally), because we had a pandemic and prices crashed.
Remember that the production profile of a shale gas well is very different to that of a traditional oil or gas project. With shale, if you stop drilling, production drops very rapidly.
What we've seen is that demand fell during the pandemic, drilling stopped, and shale gas production dropped sharply. Rig counts are now rising (although they still need to increase further), and production will rapidly follow.
There are still essentially no spot exports of LNG from the US, but that will change in the next few months. By April/May next year, US natural gas production should have increased more than 10 billion cubic feet a day, and be hitting new highs. (For reference, UK natural gas demand is only 7 billion feet/day)
Shale gas was left in the ground in the UK because the government messed around for years about issuing then suspending licences, and had absurdly and unrealistically tight seismic requirements. That's one important reason why our wholesale gas prices are several times America's, and we're desperately dependent on Russia.
Yet another example of the government shooting the country in the foot.
Shale gas is not currently economic in the UK.
Even before the March 2000 moratorium (which, it should be noted was because the locals were not happy), the data on flow rates was not particularly encouraging. I mean if the land were empty, and if the UK had a large indigenous supply of land drilling rigs (and people to staff them), then it *might* work. But we don't.
So, an operator would be essentially taking a massive flyer on either future wells being very significantly more productive than the initial ones, or longer term gas prices being $12-14/mmbtu.
And I don't think any operator is going to do that.
(The only way I could see it working would be if the UK government guaranteed - say - $12/mmbtu for shale gas for the next five to seven years to encourage development.)
Shale gas may not be economic but there are other hydrocarbon reserves which are being prevented from being developed because of the Government at both a local and national level. The Government is making it increasingly difficult to exploit gas reserves in the Southern North sea and as a result many companies are abandoning any plans for further exploration and are concentrating on the limited gains from near field development.
The UK attitude to hydrocarbons is inconsistent, incoherent and will result in more environmental damage rather than less whilst seriously damaging our economy at the same time.
I wouldn't disagree with that at all. Indeed, I would suggest that UK governments (of all hues) have massively hampered North Sea development by regularly pulling the rug out under operators.
My point was solely that people think that shale gas in the UK is some kind of panacea, where if the UK government was a little bit more relaxed about licenses, we'd have loads of production. And that's simply not true.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
I don't know where you are speaking from. But agribusiness votes Tory. Meanwhile, the vast majority of jobs round here are in, or dependent on, agriculture. Nary an imported worker, nor much of a subsidy to be seen. Nor much of a profit. Take away UC and the whole place would go tits up. You're talking early 80's industrial North. Votes Tory too.
You are HYUFD and I claim my £5
The right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it affects Tory voters.
Been accused of many things in my time.... Meanwhile. Quite apart from owt else. You think this PM will do what's right above Tory voters? Bless.
Yes I do actually.
It depends which Tory voters you're talking about afterall. "Business" tends to be pro-Tory traditionally but when it came push to shove this PM had the cojones to say "fuck business" when some chose to stand in the way of what needed to be done.
So that's business. And agriculture. And with it the rural communities. Any other Tory voters who actually do a day's work to be sacrificed for the pensioners?
I doubt many rural communities would be overly bothered to see the back of intensively reared pig farming and the imported workforce which goes with it.
As long as the grain fields and meadows with sheep baaing / cattle mooing remain people will be happy with what the British countryside looks like.
Precisely as I explained. Remove UC and you won't have much upland farming. It's aĺl agriculture round here. None of it intensive, barely any subsidised, barely any profitable. And not a foreign worker to be seen. Nor anyone above minimum wage.
Then if they can't cope without taxpayer subsidies, what are they doing still trading?
UC is supposed to be a safety net, not a way of life.
And that’s fine. Someone the other day was musing about what Labour would need to do to win back Workington, Copeland and Barrow? We now know. Absolutely bugger all. The complete destruction of upland agriculture will do it.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
I don't know where you are speaking from. But agribusiness votes Tory. Meanwhile, the vast majority of jobs round here are in, or dependent on, agriculture. Nary an imported worker, nor much of a subsidy to be seen. Nor much of a profit. Take away UC and the whole place would go tits up. You're talking early 80's industrial North. Votes Tory too.
You are HYUFD and I claim my £5
The right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it affects Tory voters.
Been accused of many things in my time.... Meanwhile. Quite apart from owt else. You think this PM will do what's right above Tory voters? Bless.
Yes I do actually.
It depends which Tory voters you're talking about afterall. "Business" tends to be pro-Tory traditionally but when it came push to shove this PM had the cojones to say "fuck business" when some chose to stand in the way of what needed to be done.
So that's business. And agriculture. And with it the rural communities. Any other Tory voters who actually do a day's work to be sacrificed for the pensioners?
I doubt many rural communities would be overly bothered to see the back of intensively reared pig farming and the imported workforce which goes with it.
As long as the grain fields and meadows with sheep baaing / cattle mooing remain people will be happy with what the British countryside looks like.
Precisely as I explained. Remove UC and you won't have much upland farming. It's aĺl agriculture round here. None of it intensive, barely any subsidised, barely any profitable. And not a foreign worker to be seen. Nor anyone above minimum wage.
Then if they can't cope without taxpayer subsidies, what are they doing still trading?
UC is supposed to be a safety net, not a way of life.
And that’s fine. Someone the other day was musing about what Labour would need to do to win back Workington, Copeland and Barrow? We now know. Absolutely bugger all. The complete destruction of upland agriculture will do it.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
I don't know where you are speaking from. But agribusiness votes Tory. Meanwhile, the vast majority of jobs round here are in, or dependent on, agriculture. Nary an imported worker, nor much of a subsidy to be seen. Nor much of a profit. Take away UC and the whole place would go tits up. You're talking early 80's industrial North. Votes Tory too.
You are HYUFD and I claim my £5
The right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it affects Tory voters.
Been accused of many things in my time.... Meanwhile. Quite apart from owt else. You think this PM will do what's right above Tory voters? Bless.
Yes I do actually.
It depends which Tory voters you're talking about afterall. "Business" tends to be pro-Tory traditionally but when it came push to shove this PM had the cojones to say "fuck business" when some chose to stand in the way of what needed to be done.
So that's business. And agriculture. And with it the rural communities. Any other Tory voters who actually do a day's work to be sacrificed for the pensioners?
Not for pensioners.
Businesses that are addicted to the crack cocaine of shipping in people to work for minimum wage while the taxpayer sponsors those people with housing credit, tax credits, universal credit etc to supplement their below living wages . . . they need to be told to fuck right off and pay a market rate.
Agriculture - same thing.
Let companies compete in a free market. Bizarre that free marketeers might still believe in a free market, rather than pander to client businesses and agriculture isn't it?
Bizarre that you cling to the belief that Boris Johnson and his crew have any interest in the free market.
Can I let you into a little secret?
I couldn't care less what 'Boris Johnson and his crew' have an interest in.
What I care about is what I have an interest in - and whether 'Boris Johnson and his crew' live up to my desires or not.
If they do they can have my vote. If they don't, they can't. And the NI tax rise meant that they lost it already, that mattered far more to me than what happens to agriculture.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
I don't know where you are speaking from. But agribusiness votes Tory. Meanwhile, the vast majority of jobs round here are in, or dependent on, agriculture. Nary an imported worker, nor much of a subsidy to be seen. Nor much of a profit. Take away UC and the whole place would go tits up. You're talking early 80's industrial North. Votes Tory too.
You are HYUFD and I claim my £5
The right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it affects Tory voters.
Been accused of many things in my time.... Meanwhile. Quite apart from owt else. You think this PM will do what's right above Tory voters? Bless.
Yes I do actually.
It depends which Tory voters you're talking about afterall. "Business" tends to be pro-Tory traditionally but when it came push to shove this PM had the cojones to say "fuck business" when some chose to stand in the way of what needed to be done.
So that's business. And agriculture. And with it the rural communities. Any other Tory voters who actually do a day's work to be sacrificed for the pensioners?
I doubt many rural communities would be overly bothered to see the back of intensively reared pig farming and the imported workforce which goes with it.
As long as the grain fields and meadows with sheep baaing / cattle mooing remain people will be happy with what the British countryside looks like.
Precisely as I explained. Remove UC and you won't have much upland farming. It's aĺl agriculture round here. None of it intensive, barely any subsidised, barely any profitable. And not a foreign worker to be seen. Nor anyone above minimum wage.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
I don't know where you are speaking from. But agribusiness votes Tory. Meanwhile, the vast majority of jobs round here are in, or dependent on, agriculture. Nary an imported worker, nor much of a subsidy to be seen. Nor much of a profit. Take away UC and the whole place would go tits up. You're talking early 80's industrial North. Votes Tory too.
You are HYUFD and I claim my £5
The right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it affects Tory voters.
Been accused of many things in my time.... Meanwhile. Quite apart from owt else. You think this PM will do what's right above Tory voters? Bless.
Yes I do actually.
It depends which Tory voters you're talking about afterall. "Business" tends to be pro-Tory traditionally but when it came push to shove this PM had the cojones to say "fuck business" when some chose to stand in the way of what needed to be done.
So that's business. And agriculture. And with it the rural communities. Any other Tory voters who actually do a day's work to be sacrificed for the pensioners?
I doubt many rural communities would be overly bothered to see the back of intensively reared pig farming and the imported workforce which goes with it.
As long as the grain fields and meadows with sheep baaing / cattle mooing remain people will be happy with what the British countryside looks like.
Precisely as I explained. Remove UC and you won't have much upland farming. It's aĺl agriculture round here. None of it intensive, barely any subsidised, barely any profitable. And not a foreign worker to be seen. Nor anyone above minimum wage.
Then if they can't cope without taxpayer subsidies, what are they doing still trading?
UC is supposed to be a safety net, not a way of life.
And that’s fine. Someone the other day was musing about what Labour would need to do to win back Workington, Copeland and Barrow? We now know. Absolutely bugger all. The complete destruction of upland agriculture will do it.
If that happens, it happens. Swings happen.
If the government isn't going to do the right thing, it doesn't deserve to be re-elected anyway.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
I don't know where you are speaking from. But agribusiness votes Tory. Meanwhile, the vast majority of jobs round here are in, or dependent on, agriculture. Nary an imported worker, nor much of a subsidy to be seen. Nor much of a profit. Take away UC and the whole place would go tits up. You're talking early 80's industrial North. Votes Tory too.
You are HYUFD and I claim my £5
The right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it affects Tory voters.
Been accused of many things in my time.... Meanwhile. Quite apart from owt else. You think this PM will do what's right above Tory voters? Bless.
Yes I do actually.
It depends which Tory voters you're talking about afterall. "Business" tends to be pro-Tory traditionally but when it came push to shove this PM had the cojones to say "fuck business" when some chose to stand in the way of what needed to be done.
So that's business. And agriculture. And with it the rural communities. Any other Tory voters who actually do a day's work to be sacrificed for the pensioners?
I doubt many rural communities would be overly bothered to see the back of intensively reared pig farming and the imported workforce which goes with it.
As long as the grain fields and meadows with sheep baaing / cattle mooing remain people will be happy with what the British countryside looks like.
Precisely as I explained. Remove UC and you won't have much upland farming. It's aĺl agriculture round here. None of it intensive, barely any subsidised, barely any profitable. And not a foreign worker to be seen. Nor anyone above minimum wage.
Now you could subsidise it as part of rural tourism / environment management - pretty baa lambs and dry stone walls etc.
With a charge on all the second home owners / holiday lets in the area to fund it.
Indeed. But I'd prefer to live in an area with jobs.
We have jobs. We have full employment and a million job vacancies, haven't you seen the news?
What we don't need are jobs that are minimum wage and only viable due to taxpayer subsidies and importing people to be subsidised to do those jobs. Those jobs are redundant and redundancies should be cut out.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
Why not have NTBs protecting high wage sectors too?
Because high wage sectors are good for the country. We need more high wage sectors, the more the merrier.
Everyone imported with high skills is improving our productivity and growing the pie, not deflating it.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
That entire thread is hilariously insane. People from across the EU - and a couple of Americans - who honestly believe Britain is close to collapse. And famine.
Are they all reading the New York Times, and nothing else?!
It’s genuinely hard to fathom. One element must be Strasbourg Syndrome. Brexit is evil therefore it can only cause evil things to the evildoers responsible. It is a religious reflex at work
Yes, it sort of goes back to what I was talking about earlier today. The EU projects this image of perfection which causes people idealise it. We see it on here all the time. They have an almost religious zeal about the EU because in the back of their minds they know the EU is imperfect, the image it projects is false and they are overcompensating because they realise the moment they admit it isn't perfect those flaws and those minor imperfections add up, the doubt grows and suddenly the institution they place above all others a mess of undemocratic contradictions and the UK was right to leave.
Lots of people really believe the EU is the only game in town, their world is being shattered right now as the UK prospers completely outside of its structures. This is their worst nightmare come true.
A French minister has accused the British, today, of being ‘obsessed with France’, even as several other French ministers publicly announce plans to blockade Britain, ‘cut off all ties with Britain’, deprive Britain of electricity, ‘punish the British for Brexit’, ‘stop British exports’ - and this is just one day
Imagine if several British Cabinet ministers were making daily threats against France. That *would* be obsessive
You can watch French TV for days and the UK never features. Too much Telegraph can be misleading.
Mwanwhile I give you a rare Englishman who is actually admired.....Dr Rashford
But it’s the same on British TV. It looks much more to America (too much, for me) - but also increasingly to Asia, and China
Meanwhile a comparison between the home pages, right now, of Le Monde and the Guardian is quite instructive.
Both have about 50 stories. Just two of the stories in Le Monde are definitely about Britain: one is about Covid in the UK, the other about the Saudi-Newcastle takeover. Meanwhile in the Guardian there’s just one story ‘about France’ - but it is expressly about deteriorating Franco-Brit relations. So, about the same?
The UK-French-EU ‘obsession’ is mutual, but it is only happening in social media and only amongst politicians, Eurocrats, and geeks like us. It is a real thing, however. This is the pinned tweet of Finland’s ex prime minister, also mentioned below
‘Reading news about petrol shortages and other supply problems in the UK. Really sad to see what #Brexit is doing to a country that used to be great. Brexit is the biggest mistake a modern nation state has inflicted on itself in recent history. Hope to see an end to this mess.’
That’s his pinned tweet. That’s the opinion he has which he thinks is most important right now. Wtf. He’s Finnish. Lol
Hopefully in a few years when Brexit is accepted we can all go back to courteously ignoring each other, like normal neighbours
Finland's ex PM is on the money. There is a change in mood and it's not for the better. The Cote d'Azur doesn't feel part English anymore which is rather sad.
You can no longer saunter down the Promenade des Anglais and pretend you belong. Quelle dommage!
Some people are depressingly soulless but I suppose they have the advantage of being oblivious to what's going on around them
Jaywick is lovely this time of year, Rog. You should give it a go.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
Why not have NTBs protecting high wage sectors too?
Worth point out, again, that there is a world wide shortage of the high skilled, credential workers required for such jobs.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
I don't know where you are speaking from. But agribusiness votes Tory. Meanwhile, the vast majority of jobs round here are in, or dependent on, agriculture. Nary an imported worker, nor much of a subsidy to be seen. Nor much of a profit. Take away UC and the whole place would go tits up. You're talking early 80's industrial North. Votes Tory too.
You are HYUFD and I claim my £5
The right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it affects Tory voters.
Been accused of many things in my time.... Meanwhile. Quite apart from owt else. You think this PM will do what's right above Tory voters? Bless.
Yes I do actually.
It depends which Tory voters you're talking about afterall. "Business" tends to be pro-Tory traditionally but when it came push to shove this PM had the cojones to say "fuck business" when some chose to stand in the way of what needed to be done.
So that's business. And agriculture. And with it the rural communities. Any other Tory voters who actually do a day's work to be sacrificed for the pensioners?
I doubt many rural communities would be overly bothered to see the back of intensively reared pig farming and the imported workforce which goes with it.
As long as the grain fields and meadows with sheep baaing / cattle mooing remain people will be happy with what the British countryside looks like.
Precisely as I explained. Remove UC and you won't have much upland farming. It's aĺl agriculture round here. None of it intensive, barely any subsidised, barely any profitable. And not a foreign worker to be seen. Nor anyone above minimum wage.
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
Remind me what Finlandization means again…? I guess she doesn’t understand the value of freedom
Classic Brexsplaining.
Of course the Finns are too daft to do democracy!
They vie with NZ for the first democratic franchise.
Really? They were part of czarist Russia until 1918.
1917
In fact they were never part of Czarist Russia. They were a separate Grand Duchy in a personal union with Russia and Poland. Poland also had a separate parliament and legal system, although there was heavy pressure under Alexander III and Nicholas II to Russify it and bring it under direct imperial control.
“Congress Poland”, as it was called, because the Kingdom of Poland in personal union with the Czar was created at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, had its autonomy curtailed after the Poles rebelled in 1830, and was effectively integrated into the Russian Empire proper after a further rebellion in 1863. The Finns never rebelled and more or less maintained their autonomy throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, but at times the Czarist regime really put the screws on them. They adopted a fully democratic franchise, including for women, in the wake of the abortive 1905 Russian revolution.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
I'm not quite following how this butter superpower thing will work? Won't the rebalancing mean that all the cows will be long dead because farmers didn't pay £60 an hour?
Re header and @MikeSmithson. Endless header posts will not assuage your conscience. The Tories are currently the best placed to be in government. The other parties are simply hopeless, and that's especially the LDs.
Beyond the Tory party the next best placed person to be PM in my opinion is Farage. Fertile ground for the Greens, but WTF are the usual parties of opposition doing!?
I would just comment that there is agreement that we face an extraordinary cost of living crisis with worldwide energy prices rocketing, shortages across the planet with container ships held at anchor in many places, indeed 14 were held at anchor of Anglesey last week due to adverse weather conditions for docking in Liverpool
HMG is facing the bleakest outlook I can remember, not least as covid continues and the economic shocks are extreme.
Taxes are rising and it is fair enough to complain about the loss of the £20 UC uplift but that would add £6billion or 1% on income tax year year on year and Starmer has still not said how he would cover the deficit other than muttering 'tory donors'.
I would be very surprised to see the conservatives retain their poll lead but does anyone know how labour would fund their 170 billion of spending and address the present energy and shortages issues
HMG is having to make extraordinarily unpopular decisions, but in truth governments across Europe and elsewhere are facing the same tsunami of a crisis
We must also remember that on top of this, COP26 is going to involve very expensive commitments (Insulate Britain said they want a trillion to insulate UK homes) and sooner or later the costs are going to collide with policy makers and why has nobody had the courage to say we have to transition to carbon neutral in a manner that does not create massive poverty and societal disruption and if that includes in the UK case giving the go ahead to the Shetland oil fields then so be it
True, but just about all of the wounds you list are self-inflicted. Energy shortages, but shale gas just left in the ground. Public finances in crisis, but lots of hugely wasteful spending. House prices too high, but absurd planning laws. COP26 commitments because of green crap.
It's the consequence of the soft socialism and politically correct pandering we've subjected the economy to over the last 20 years.
(I could have added lockdown, which was designed to inflict maximum economic damage).
Shale gas has been left in the ground (globally), because we had a pandemic and prices crashed.
Remember that the production profile of a shale gas well is very different to that of a traditional oil or gas project. With shale, if you stop drilling, production drops very rapidly.
What we've seen is that demand fell during the pandemic, drilling stopped, and shale gas production dropped sharply. Rig counts are now rising (although they still need to increase further), and production will rapidly follow.
There are still essentially no spot exports of LNG from the US, but that will change in the next few months. By April/May next year, US natural gas production should have increased more than 10 billion cubic feet a day, and be hitting new highs. (For reference, UK natural gas demand is only 7 billion feet/day)
Shale gas was left in the ground in the UK because the government messed around for years about issuing then suspending licences, and had absurdly and unrealistically tight seismic requirements. That's one important reason why our wholesale gas prices are several times America's, and we're desperately dependent on Russia.
Yet another example of the government shooting the country in the foot.
Shale gas is not currently economic in the UK.
Even before the March 2000 moratorium (which, it should be noted was because the locals were not happy), the data on flow rates was not particularly encouraging. I mean if the land were empty, and if the UK had a large indigenous supply of land drilling rigs (and people to staff them), then it *might* work. But we don't.
So, an operator would be essentially taking a massive flyer on either future wells being very significantly more productive than the initial ones, or longer term gas prices being $12-14/mmbtu.
And I don't think any operator is going to do that.
(The only way I could see it working would be if the UK government guaranteed - say - $12/mmbtu for shale gas for the next five to seven years to encourage development.)
Shale gas may not be economic but there are other hydrocarbon reserves which are being prevented from being developed because of the Government at both a local and national level. The Government is making it increasingly difficult to exploit gas reserves in the Southern North sea and as a result many companies are abandoning any plans for further exploration and are concentrating on the limited gains from near field development.
The UK attitude to hydrocarbons is inconsistent, incoherent and will result in more environmental damage rather than less whilst seriously damaging our economy at the same time.
I wouldn't disagree with that at all. Indeed, I would suggest that UK governments (of all hues) have massively hampered North Sea development by regularly pulling the rug out under operators.
My point was solely that people think that shale gas in the UK is some kind of panacea, where if the UK government was a little bit more relaxed about licenses, we'd have loads of production. And that's simply not true.
As I heard stated at a conference a number of years ago:
The cheapest shale gas in the UK will be LNG from the US.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anchor butter is no longer from NZ. The Kiwis sell dairy mostly to the Chinese now, and mutton to the middle East. Hence their foreign policy.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
My brother's a plumber. Sure, to a small degree we can train more plumbers but to be a good, competent, safe plumber you actually need to be quite bright and have reasonably good customer skills.
Where are all those trainees coming from? What jobs are they doing now and who's going to backfill them?
Let's not pretend that the sort of people capable of training as a plumber are sat on the dole in their 1000s waiting for a training opportunity.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
Has SeanLeon noticed today’s German case numbers yet, and spotted that yesterday’s published number of deaths has been reduced dramatically downwards?
You'd think by this point people would have learnt about
1) reporting delays 2) weekly cyclic effects created by the. 3) Reported on vs day of
Even Pesto is catching up with this, I believe.
If you go back to the actual comment I made, yesterday, on the odd German numbers, I explicitly asked ‘is this a statistical glitch?’ - because the figures were so out of whack
Before you Scott&Paste things, trying doing a little bit of research.
What do you make of this one test says yeah, second says no I first mentioned yesterday, Mal, a bad batch of testing, or new variant or an known unknown?
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
Here you go:
"Hard Work Pays Off In Time. But Laziness Pays Off Now."
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
I find it amazing, indeed depressing, that increasing numbers submit to the financial abuse of university.
Even with the university experience being negatively affected by covid and increased opportunities in the employment market.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
My brother's a plumber. Sure, to a small degree we can train more plumbers but to be a good, competent, safe plumber you actually need to be quite bright and have reasonably good customer skills.
Where are all those trainees coming from? What jobs are they doing now and who's going to backfill them?
Let's not pretend that the sort of people capapable of trainign to be a plumber are sat on the dole in their 1000s waiting for a training opportunity.
There is a lump of labour fallacy going on with people who think we need to keep importing people to fill jobs in every sector though.
Our population after being stable for most of the post-war era has since the turn of the century grown by over ten million people. We've been consistently "short of workers" since the introduction of the minimum wage (which also acted as a maximum wage), Brown massively expanding in-work benefits, and the expansion of the European Union.
Ten million extra people later and we're still "short of workers". After our population has expanded by hundreds of thousands net every single year, after our population has grown by ten million people, why are we still "short of plumbers, and farm help, and wait staff, and drivers, and baristas, and abattoir workers, and ..."?
The answer of course is because the idea we're short of workers is a lump of labour fallacy. There is no labour shortage - you bring in more people and the labour market will respond because all of those new people will need their own plumber, their own restaurants to go to, their own goods that need drivers, their own coffee etc too
Labour shortages can not be filled by immigration. That's a lump of labour fallacy.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
Particularly amusing is the aside about Francis Bacon and his chilly poultry, which also fits with your cold turkey analogy. On a freezing day in 1626, Francis Bacon ran outside and stuffed a chicken with snow to see if this action would preserve it. His exposure to cold on this day possibly caused him to develop the pneumonia from which he died.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
I find it amazing, indeed depressing, that increasing numbers submit to the financial abuse of university.
Even with the university experience being negatively affected by covid and increased opportunities in the employment market.
Maybe they don't want to pluck turkeys or harvest cabbages for the rest of their days?
Has SeanLeon noticed today’s German case numbers yet, and spotted that yesterday’s published number of deaths has been reduced dramatically downwards?
You'd think by this point people would have learnt about
1) reporting delays 2) weekly cyclic effects created by the. 3) Reported on vs day of
Even Pesto is catching up with this, I believe.
If you go back to the actual comment I made, yesterday, on the odd German numbers, I explicitly asked ‘is this a statistical glitch?’ - because the figures were so out of whack
Before you Scott&Paste things, trying doing a little bit of research.
What do you make of this one test says yeah, second says no I first mentioned yesterday, Mal, a bad batch of testing, or new variant or an known unknown?
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
I don't know where you are speaking from. But agribusiness votes Tory. Meanwhile, the vast majority of jobs round here are in, or dependent on, agriculture. Nary an imported worker, nor much of a subsidy to be seen. Nor much of a profit. Take away UC and the whole place would go tits up. You're talking early 80's industrial North. Votes Tory too.
You are HYUFD and I claim my £5
The right thing to do is still the right thing to do, even if it affects Tory voters.
Been accused of many things in my time.... Meanwhile. Quite apart from owt else. You think this PM will do what's right above Tory voters? Bless.
Yes I do actually.
It depends which Tory voters you're talking about afterall. "Business" tends to be pro-Tory traditionally but when it came push to shove this PM had the cojones to say "fuck business" when some chose to stand in the way of what needed to be done.
So that's business. And agriculture. And with it the rural communities. Any other Tory voters who actually do a day's work to be sacrificed for the pensioners?
I doubt many rural communities would be overly bothered to see the back of intensively reared pig farming and the imported workforce which goes with it.
As long as the grain fields and meadows with sheep baaing / cattle mooing remain people will be happy with what the British countryside looks like.
Precisely as I explained. Remove UC and you won't have much upland farming. It's aĺl agriculture round here. None of it intensive, barely any subsidised, barely any profitable. And not a foreign worker to be seen. Nor anyone above minimum wage.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
As a general principle, you may be right, but embarking on this experiment when the supply chains are already under unprecedented strain strikes me as “courageous”, in the Yes Minister sense, at best. Security of the food supply chain is something that just isn’t being taken seriously enough, not just in the UK.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
It's in the Elysees. Have you not heard the demented wheezing of Macron?
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
I find it amazing, indeed depressing, that increasing numbers submit to the financial abuse of university.
Even with the university experience being negatively affected by covid and increased opportunities in the employment market.
Maybe they don't want to pluck turkeys or harvest cabbages for the rest of their days?
I didn't know Leicestershire was still in the middle ages.
Elsewhere we now have a wide range of jobs between university educated and agricultural worker.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
My brother's a plumber. Sure, to a small degree we can train more plumbers but to be a good, competent, safe plumber you actually need to be quite bright and have reasonably good customer skills.
Where are all those trainees coming from? What jobs are they doing now and who's going to backfill them?
Let's not pretend that the sort of people capable of training as a plumber are sat on the dole in their 1000s waiting for a training opportunity.
There really needs to be a phrase, similar to "Oriental lassitude" which can be used to be derogatory about British workers in a similar, saloon-bar-racist way. Would save a lot of typing.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
'Anything worth doing is difficult' is patent bollocks. Writing a will is worth doing; it's not difficult. Breathing is worth doing; it's not difficult.
I certainly agree that 'some things worth doing are difficult'. But I sure as hell know there are plenty of very difficult things were never worth doing and shouldn't have been attempted in the first place.
There is no reliable correlation between 'worth doing' and 'difficult'.
The point is: you're saying Brexit is worth doing and difficult; I'm saying it was never worth doing and difficult. We're agreed it's difficult. I'd say it wouldn't be worth doing, even if it were easy (which it could have been tbh, if we'd chosen EEA or single market.
We were of course told it would be 'the easiest thing in the world'.
If the EU would play its cards right, it would offer assistance to the UK now or later when the supply of basic goods and services takes a turn for the worse. This is what friends do, even if the pain has been self-inflicted, stupid an unnecessary.
Sorry, but the situation in the UK is going to go from bad to worse with no respit in sight. This is not a period of adaptation, it is a rather permanent reality and fact linked to voluntary isolation and myths of sovereignty in an interdependent world.
That entire thread is hilariously insane. People from across the EU - and a couple of Americans - who honestly believe Britain is close to collapse. And famine.
Are they all reading the New York Times, and nothing else?!
It’s genuinely hard to fathom. One element must be Strasbourg Syndrome. Brexit is evil therefore it can only cause evil things to the evildoers responsible. It is a religious reflex at work
Yes, it sort of goes back to what I was talking about earlier today. The EU projects this image of perfection which causes people idealise it. We see it on here all the time. They have an almost religious zeal about the EU because in the back of their minds they know the EU is imperfect, the image it projects is false and they are overcompensating because they realise the moment they admit it isn't perfect those flaws and those minor imperfections add up, the doubt grows and suddenly the institution they place above all others a mess of undemocratic contradictions and the UK was right to leave.
Lots of people really believe the EU is the only game in town, their world is being shattered right now as the UK prospers completely outside of its structures. This is their worst nightmare come true.
A French minister has accused the British, today, of being ‘obsessed with France’, even as several other French ministers publicly announce plans to blockade Britain, ‘cut off all ties with Britain’, deprive Britain of electricity, ‘punish the British for Brexit’, ‘stop British exports’ - and this is just one day
Imagine if several British Cabinet ministers were making daily threats against France. That *would* be obsessive
You can watch French TV for days and the UK never features. Too much Telegraph can be misleading.
Mwanwhile I give you a rare Englishman who is actually admired.....Dr Rashford
But it’s the same on British TV. It looks much more to America (too much, for me) - but also increasingly to Asia, and China
Meanwhile a comparison between the home pages, right now, of Le Monde and the Guardian is quite instructive.
Both have about 50 stories. Just two of the stories in Le Monde are definitely about Britain: one is about Covid in the UK, the other about the Saudi-Newcastle takeover. Meanwhile in the Guardian there’s just one story ‘about France’ - but it is expressly about deteriorating Franco-Brit relations. So, about the same?
The UK-French-EU ‘obsession’ is mutual, but it is only happening in social media and only amongst politicians, Eurocrats, and geeks like us. It is a real thing, however. This is the pinned tweet of Finland’s ex prime minister, also mentioned below
‘Reading news about petrol shortages and other supply problems in the UK. Really sad to see what #Brexit is doing to a country that used to be great. Brexit is the biggest mistake a modern nation state has inflicted on itself in recent history. Hope to see an end to this mess.’
That’s his pinned tweet. That’s the opinion he has which he thinks is most important right now. Wtf. He’s Finnish. Lol
Hopefully in a few years when Brexit is accepted we can all go back to courteously ignoring each other, like normal neighbours
Finland's ex PM is on the money. There is a change in mood and it's not for the better. The Cote d'Azur doesn't feel part English anymore which is rather sad.
There IS a sadness to Brexit, which I share. The EU has noble origins - the quest for peaceful harmony in Europe. Freedom of Movement was the best thing about it, and I regret the loss. I hope one day a compromise can be found that satisfies all sides and restores it, at least in part
The great tragedy is that Brexit didn’t have to happen. If only a UK government had offered a referendum much earlier, maybe after Maastricht or Lisbon, we’d have said No to further integration, and that compromise would have been found. And we’d probably be a happy but semi-detached country, still associated with the EU and enjoying some of those benefits. And Nice would still feel a little bit English
But no, the British europhiles, in their arrogance, kept forcing more and more integration on us, without seeking our explicit democratic consent, stoking greater and greater anger over decades. Until eventually the final total rupture became inevitable
It is a melancholy story. And the authors are Major, Blair, Heseltine, Brown, Clarke, Cameron, et al. It is the europhiles who created Brexit. Indeed, with their push for a ‘2nd referendum’, they made sure we got the hardest Brexit of all, right at the end. The cherry on their ridiculous cake. It is magnificent irony, fit for the ages
Exactly right. The roots of Brexit are decades old in the policy disaster of believing that gradual integration without the people being explicitly asked would work always. Once FOM and the Euro were in place there was no chance that could work for ever with the UK population. Even if 2016 had been lost the actual issues would never have gone away.
And it was extraordinary that every major UK politician and party fell for this mixture of self delusion, denial, and attempt to delude the public for decades when referenda as done in other countries would have sorted it without all this difficulty.
Only marginal figures of left and right seemed to comprehend any of this, even though it is essentially a centrist issue.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
My brother's a plumber. Sure, to a small degree we can train more plumbers but to be a good, competent, safe plumber you actually need to be quite bright and have reasonably good customer skills.
Where are all those trainees coming from? What jobs are they doing now and who's going to backfill them?
Let's not pretend that the sort of people capable of training as a plumber are sat on the dole in their 1000s waiting for a training opportunity.
There really needs to be a phrase, similar to "Oriental lassitude" which can be used to be derogatory about British workers in a similar, saloon-bar-racist way. Would save a lot of typing.
You're accusing me of being derogatory about British workers??
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
'Anything worth doing is difficult' is patent bollocks. Writing a will is worth doing; it's not difficult. Breathing is worth doing; it's not difficult.
I certainly agree that 'some things worth doing are difficult'. But I sure as hell know there are plenty of very difficult things were never worth doing and shouldn't have been attempted in the first place.
There is no reliable correlation between 'worth doing' and 'difficult'.
The point is: you're saying Brexit is worth doing and difficult; I'm saying it was never worth doing and difficult. We're agreed it's difficult. I'd say it wouldn't be worth doing, even if it were easy (which it could have been tbh, if we'd chosen EEA or single market.
We were of course told it would be 'the easiest thing in the world'.
Learning to write is bloody difficult. Lots of people never master it!
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
Particularly amusing is the aside about Francis Bacon and his chilly poultry, which also fits with your cold turkey analogy. On a freezing day in 1626, Francis Bacon ran outside and stuffed a chicken with snow to see if this action would preserve it. His exposure to cold on this day possibly caused him to develop the pneumonia from which he died.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
My brother's a plumber. Sure, to a small degree we can train more plumbers but to be a good, competent, safe plumber you actually need to be quite bright and have reasonably good customer skills.
Where are all those trainees coming from? What jobs are they doing now and who's going to backfill them?
Let's not pretend that the sort of people capable of training as a plumber are sat on the dole in their 1000s waiting for a training opportunity.
There really needs to be a phrase, similar to "Oriental lassitude" which can be used to be derogatory about British workers in a similar, saloon-bar-racist way. Would save a lot of typing.
You're accusing me of being derogatory about British workers??
Well none of them actually work, do they? I understand that all the jobs are actually done by foreigners.
Time for a proper government to put a maximum wage in place, as in 1515.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
Particularly amusing is the aside about Francis Bacon and his chilly poultry, which also fits with your cold turkey analogy. On a freezing day in 1626, Francis Bacon ran outside and stuffed a chicken with snow to see if this action would preserve it. His exposure to cold on this day possibly caused him to develop the pneumonia from which he died.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
As a general principle, you may be right, but embarking on this experiment when the supply chains are already under unprecedented strain strikes me as “courageous”, in the Yes Minister sense, at best. Security of the food supply chain is something that just isn’t being taken seriously enough, not just in the UK.
If Margaret Thatcher was never "courageous" in the Yes Minister sense then would we still talk about her? To be truly great, you need to be courageous.
There's a great quote I remember from The West Wing that goes with that thought.
Bartlet: Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
Toby: That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
I find it amazing, indeed depressing, that increasing numbers submit to the financial abuse of university.
Even with the university experience being negatively affected by covid and increased opportunities in the employment market.
Maybe they don't want to pluck turkeys or harvest cabbages for the rest of their days?
I didn't know Leicestershire was still in the middle ages.
Elsewhere we now have a wide range of jobs between university educated and agricultural worker.
Yes, but the key thing is that University offers the opportunity (not certainty) of more interesting work, and work with prospect of advancement. I don't blame people for looking for it.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
Particularly amusing is the aside about Francis Bacon and his chilly poultry, which also fits with your cold turkey analogy. On a freezing day in 1626, Francis Bacon ran outside and stuffed a chicken with snow to see if this action would preserve it. His exposure to cold on this day possibly caused him to develop the pneumonia from which he died.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
My brother's a plumber. Sure, to a small degree we can train more plumbers but to be a good, competent, safe plumber you actually need to be quite bright and have reasonably good customer skills.
Where are all those trainees coming from? What jobs are they doing now and who's going to backfill them?
Let's not pretend that the sort of people capable of training as a plumber are sat on the dole in their 1000s waiting for a training opportunity.
There really needs to be a phrase, similar to "Oriental lassitude" which can be used to be derogatory about British workers in a similar, saloon-bar-racist way. Would save a lot of typing.
You're accusing me of being derogatory about British workers??
Well none of them actually work, do they? I understand that all the jobs are actually done by foreigners.
Time for a proper government to put a maximum wage in place, as in 1515.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
As a general principle, you may be right, but embarking on this experiment when the supply chains are already under unprecedented strain strikes me as “courageous”, in the Yes Minister sense, at best. Security of the food supply chain is something that just isn’t being taken seriously enough, not just in the UK.
If Margaret Thatcher was never "courageous" in the Yes Minister sense then would we still talk about her? To be truly great, you need to be courageous.
There's a great quote I remember from The West Wing that goes with that thought.
Bartlet: Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
Toby: That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
Not everybody who talks about Margaret Thatcher remembers her for "greatness".
Even people who loathe her will recognise she was a transformative PM, even if they think its for the wrong reasons. Even people who loathe her will recognise that she was courageous in the Yes Minister sense.
You can fail to be courageous and muddle along and keep getting elected, but never actually do anything, and just let Sir Humphrey run the show. That's what Tony Blair did - and how fondly is he remembered now?
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
My brother's a plumber. Sure, to a small degree we can train more plumbers but to be a good, competent, safe plumber you actually need to be quite bright and have reasonably good customer skills.
Where are all those trainees coming from? What jobs are they doing now and who's going to backfill them?
Let's not pretend that the sort of people capapable of trainign to be a plumber are sat on the dole in their 1000s waiting for a training opportunity.
There is a lump of labour fallacy going on with people who think we need to keep importing people to fill jobs in every sector though.
Our population after being stable for most of the post-war era has since the turn of the century grown by over ten million people. We've been consistently "short of workers" since the introduction of the minimum wage (which also acted as a maximum wage), Brown massively expanding in-work benefits, and the expansion of the European Union.
Ten million extra people later and we're still "short of workers". After our population has expanded by hundreds of thousands net every single year, after our population has grown by ten million people, why are we still "short of plumbers, and farm help, and wait staff, and drivers, and baristas, and abattoir workers, and ..."?
The answer of course is because the idea we're short of workers is a lump of labour fallacy. There is no labour shortage - you bring in more people and the labour market will respond because all of those new people will need their own plumber, their own restaurants to go to, their own goods that need drivers, their own coffee etc too
Labour shortages can not be filled by immigration. That's a lump of labour fallacy.
One thought worth exploring is that 'Work expands (or contracts) to provide for the people available.' Just as there is exactly enough news every day to fill exactly a 30 minute bulletin. Essentially the planet earth is, and had to be, a giant job creation scheme.
IMHO what has happened, partly through FOM, partly through over educating some quite dim people, is the creation of some millions of non-jobs, many of which should in a sane world vanish, being replaced by sensible ones, like designing and making machinery for picking strawberries and blackcurrants.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
As a general principle, you may be right, but embarking on this experiment when the supply chains are already under unprecedented strain strikes me as “courageous”, in the Yes Minister sense, at best. Security of the food supply chain is something that just isn’t being taken seriously enough, not just in the UK.
If Margaret Thatcher was never "courageous" in the Yes Minister sense then would we still talk about her? To be truly great, you need to be courageous.
There's a great quote I remember from The West Wing that goes with that thought.
Bartlet: Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
Toby: That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
Not everybody who talks about Margaret Thatcher remembers her for "greatness".
I actually think Maggie is becoming more of a footnote as time goes on. Boris clearly thought so in his conference speech - he more or less lumped Thatcherism in as just another piece of historical failure for his greatness to rectify.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
'Anything worth doing is difficult' is patent bollocks. Writing a will is worth doing; it's not difficult. Breathing is worth doing; it's not difficult.
I certainly agree that 'some things worth doing are difficult'. But I sure as hell know there are plenty of very difficult things were never worth doing and shouldn't have been attempted in the first place.
There is no reliable correlation between 'worth doing' and 'difficult'.
The point is: you're saying Brexit is worth doing and difficult; I'm saying it was never worth doing and difficult. We're agreed it's difficult. I'd say it wouldn't be worth doing, even if it were easy (which it could have been tbh, if we'd chosen EEA or single market.
We were of course told it would be 'the easiest thing in the world'.
Learning to write is bloody difficult. Lots of people never master it!
I'm sure many people would be pushed to write an actual letter now without a screen.
I was in a bookshop the other day and, staring at the shelves, found myself longing for a Ctrl F function.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
My brother's a plumber. Sure, to a small degree we can train more plumbers but to be a good, competent, safe plumber you actually need to be quite bright and have reasonably good customer skills.
Where are all those trainees coming from? What jobs are they doing now and who's going to backfill them?
Let's not pretend that the sort of people capapable of trainign to be a plumber are sat on the dole in their 1000s waiting for a training opportunity.
There is a lump of labour fallacy going on with people who think we need to keep importing people to fill jobs in every sector though.
Our population after being stable for most of the post-war era has since the turn of the century grown by over ten million people. We've been consistently "short of workers" since the introduction of the minimum wage (which also acted as a maximum wage), Brown massively expanding in-work benefits, and the expansion of the European Union.
Ten million extra people later and we're still "short of workers". After our population has expanded by hundreds of thousands net every single year, after our population has grown by ten million people, why are we still "short of plumbers, and farm help, and wait staff, and drivers, and baristas, and abattoir workers, and ..."?
The answer of course is because the idea we're short of workers is a lump of labour fallacy. There is no labour shortage - you bring in more people and the labour market will respond because all of those new people will need their own plumber, their own restaurants to go to, their own goods that need drivers, their own coffee etc too
Labour shortages can not be filled by immigration. That's a lump of labour fallacy.
One thought worth exploring is that 'Work expands (or contracts) to provide for the people available.' Just as there is exactly enough news every day to fill exactly a 30 minute bulletin.
IMHO what has happened, partly through FOM, partly through over educating some quite dim people, is the creation of some millions of non-jobs, many of which should in a sane world vanish, being replaced by sensible ones, like designing and making machinery for picking strawberries and blackcurrants.
That anthropologist David Gaebner wrote a book called "Bullshit Jobs" brought a wry smile to my lips.
But of course he may be right. In which case you think a period of labour shortages would begin to eliminate such jobs, as well as causing supply-line issues, empty-shelves and accelerating inflation.
Maybe this is all part of Johnson's master plan... but somehow I think it just one huge f*ck-up.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
The UK is prospering hadn't you heard.
Yes it is. The "crisis" is that we have "too many jobs" supposedly.
Even if that wasn't a lump of labour fallacy, that's like the late, great @SeanT coming on here and saying he has a crisis of too many hot, nubile, young women throwing themselves at him.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
The UK is prospering hadn't you heard.
Yes it is. The "crisis" is that we have "too many jobs" supposedly.
Even if that wasn't a lump of labour fallacy, that's like the late, great @SeanT coming on here and saying he has a crisis of too many hot, nubile, young women throwing themselves at him.
So the gas prices, pigs, petrol, inflation expectations...
Oh and did you miss my comment earlier. Was your Embolden yesterday a clue as to how you can manage to be on here all the time?
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Anything worth doing is difficult. Doesn't mean its not worth doing.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
'Anything worth doing is difficult' is patent bollocks. Writing a will is worth doing; it's not difficult. Breathing is worth doing; it's not difficult.
I certainly agree that 'some things worth doing are difficult'. But I sure as hell know there are plenty of very difficult things were never worth doing and shouldn't have been attempted in the first place.
There is no reliable correlation between 'worth doing' and 'difficult'.
The point is: you're saying Brexit is worth doing and difficult; I'm saying it was never worth doing and difficult. We're agreed it's difficult. I'd say it wouldn't be worth doing, even if it were easy (which it could have been tbh, if we'd chosen EEA or single market.
We were of course told it would be 'the easiest thing in the world'.
Learning to write is bloody difficult. Lots of people never master it!
Sorry if my post was a little bit to complicated for you to understand.
So in short we now, finally, have our PB Brexiters agreeing that those who said Brexit would be a disaster were right. But that it will only be for twenty years.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
No I'm saying there will be some upheaval for about ten to twenty years, I never said disaster.
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
My brother's a plumber. Sure, to a small degree we can train more plumbers but to be a good, competent, safe plumber you actually need to be quite bright and have reasonably good customer skills.
Where are all those trainees coming from? What jobs are they doing now and who's going to backfill them?
Let's not pretend that the sort of people capable of training as a plumber are sat on the dole in their 1000s waiting for a training opportunity.
There really needs to be a phrase, similar to "Oriental lassitude" which can be used to be derogatory about British workers in a similar, saloon-bar-racist way. Would save a lot of typing.
You're accusing me of being derogatory about British workers??
Well none of them actually work, do they? I understand that all the jobs are actually done by foreigners.
Time for a proper government to put a maximum wage in place, as in 1515.
Wtaf are you on about?
The solution to the various problems with workers is simple to fix
1) A fixed maximum wage of 4d a day in Summer, 5d in Winter. 2) Anyone without a job gets branded with V for Vagabond on the face.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
It's not like the UK is stopping high immigration.
No, it's people like me who will have the competition in high wage sectors. People in lower wage sectors will now have very large NTBs protecting their pay rates. Our economy is going to look much closer to Switzerland in 4-7 years.
I think you also should note that both Switzerland (and Germany) have very good vocational employment systems, that really help ensure that those young people who won't end up in financial services have the skills needed to thrive.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
I find it amazing, indeed depressing, that increasing numbers submit to the financial abuse of university.
Even with the university experience being negatively affected by covid and increased opportunities in the employment market.
Maybe they don't want to pluck turkeys or harvest cabbages for the rest of their days?
I didn't know Leicestershire was still in the middle ages.
Elsewhere we now have a wide range of jobs between university educated and agricultural worker.
Yes, but the key thing is that University offers the opportunity (not certainty) of more interesting work, and work with prospect of advancement. I don't blame people for looking for it.
So you think you need to go to university to get 'interesting work' and 'prospects of advancement' ?
I'll assume there's no casual snobbery but have you considered what might apply for yourself might not apply for some other people ?
Now I don't criticize anyone for looking into university but what I don't like is that the £10k debt per year is something which will not go away and that's a big risk any teenager is accepting when their experience of the wider world is limited.
If going to university turns out to be the wrong decision they still have the debt and years have been used (with lost earning potential) on something which might be of no use.
If getting a job turns out to be the wrong decision then they've still had experience in the workplace, earned some money and perhaps learned that a certain career is not for them but with no debt and still have the opportunity to go to university a year or two afterwards.
The question you should be asking is whether the UK should even be doing low margin, low grade agriculture work that requires scores of minimum wage imported labour. ...
Hmm.
The promise:
When Greenland left the EU in 1985, it secured a free trade deal with the EU that allowed it to sell its fish to the EU tariff-free. Britain is a much larger economy and far more important to the EU - we are certain to secure an even better deal. Last year, we exported £7.5 billion worth of food to the EU but we imported food worth £18 billion. We have an annual trade deficit with the EU in food alone of £10 billion.
The reality:
Dominic Goudie, head of international trade at the FDF, said: “The return to growth in exports to non-EU markets is welcome news, but it doesn’t make up for the disastrous loss of £2bn in sales to the EU. It clearly demonstrates the serious difficulties manufacturers in our industry continue to face and the urgent need for additional specialist support.”
He said the difficulties now facing British food and drinks manufacturers and farmers were compounded by the lorry driver and warehouse workers shortages, which were choking the supply chain.
“At the same time, we are seeing labour shortages across the UK’s farm-to-fork food and drink supply chain, resulting in empty spaces on UK shop shelves, disruptions to deliveries and decreased production,” Goudie said. “Unless steps are taken to address these issues, the ability of businesses to fulfil vital export orders will be impacted.”
As for the specific point about whether we should be using imported labour for agriculture, yes of course we should. Those jobs are never going to be high skilled, and high paying. That's partly why the Brits won't do them (not the only reason, of course). There's lots of reasons why we want agriculture to continue, and without imported labour we'll simply be exporting those jobs (even more of them) to continental Europe, and importing food which will be of lower quality because of the food miles, at higher prices.
Even in the new Brexit orthodoxy that has suddenly decided to fuck both business and agriculture, it makes no sense to try to push Brits into what will always be low-paying jobs.
I've got the research coming on Monday and I'm open to the idea that the UK should continue to subsidise low margin agriculture on the basis of needing a strategic reserve of agricultural capacity for situations such as a pandemic or another black swan event that causes global shipping to seize. However, other nations have shown a path that walks the line of having that reserve capacity and also not needing heavily subsidised agriculture either with direct cash grants like the CAP or indirect grants like tax credits to make up for low wages. The state's job is to find where that line is, clearly we shouldn't be a nation that farms battery chickens, other countries do it better and imports are all of similar enough quality. The whole industry relies on imported low wage labour and the end product has got razor thin margins and is constantly undercut by imports from Eastern Europe.
It's possible that by shutting down that industry the UK will see a net gain in GDP per capita and a net gain in the government's fiscal position, at least that's what the initial research showed which is why I asked the team to look at the whole sector.
Shut an entire industry down in areas which elect government MP's? To transfer employment from rural to urban? Levelling up? You do see the issue here?
Shut down entire industries that have no voters. The whole labour force is imported from end to end, the whining is only ever going to be from agribusiness.
It's also not state mandated shutting down, it's just inevitably going to become unviable vs imports of battery chickens without cheap immigrant labour or absolutely huge investment in automation. The latter strikes me as unlikely, instead the business owners will whine about lack of cheap labour and continue to do so until the companies fail and then whine about the companies failing but completely ignore that they just sat there and took profits in the good times and didn't put any investment in.
Farming-wise we could do whatever New Zealand does. They have lots of fertile land, yet hardly any workers, they can’t import cheap labour because they are a billion miles from anywhere, yet they manage to be an agricultural superpower - eg one of the top 2 or 3 dairy exporters in the whole world.
Surely number 1 dairy exporter. But it worked because we have a comparative advantage in dairy, and we made the most of it.
Britain doesn’t really have that option.
For sure. But NZ is still an example of an agricultural sector that lost a huge market (in their case the UK, as we joined the EEC), which then had to go through a painful transition, but has now adapted, and is now thriving.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
This is true.
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
The entire UK economy is about to go through what NZ went through with agriculture in the 70s and 80s.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
The entire UK economy is about to go through a bumpy ride that will be 'largely over in 10 years'... so that we can thrive like Kiwi butter exporters?
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
Did you expect Hard Brexit to be easy? Anyone that said it would be easy - and I’m looking at idiot Brexiteers here - was either stupid or lying or both
I expected Brexit to be an unmitigated disaster. So far, so right.
Its this sort of comment which baffles me.
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
So you don't get TV news on your unicorn grazed sunny uplands?
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
The UK is prospering hadn't you heard.
Yes it is. The "crisis" is that we have "too many jobs" supposedly.
Even if that wasn't a lump of labour fallacy, that's like the late, great @SeanT coming on here and saying he has a crisis of too many hot, nubile, young women throwing themselves at him.
So the gas prices, pigs, petrol, inflation expectations...
Oh and did you miss my comment earlier. Was your Embolden yesterday a clue as to how you can manage to be on here all the time?
I will wet myself laughing if I eventually find out that I've been arguing on here all these years with a bunch of Russian trollbots, rather than with otherwise intelligent people with unfathomably rightish views. 😂
Comments
Course these things are related. Brexit makes it hard to GTTO. That 40% base.
You should give it a go.
And I’m guessing they did it without 100,000s of cheap foreign workers
Businesses that are addicted to the crack cocaine of shipping in people to work for minimum wage while the taxpayer sponsors those people with housing credit, tax credits, universal credit etc to supplement their below living wages . . . they need to be told to fuck right off and pay a market rate.
Agriculture - same thing.
Let companies compete in a free market. Bizarre that free marketeers might still believe in a free market, rather than pander to client businesses and agriculture isn't it?
Well, we’ve had high immigration, but not to the agricultural sector.
The transition took around 20 years and was rather bumpy at times.
In some ways people talk past each other as they can't wrap the head around that other people simply don't prioritise the things that they do.
It will definitely be ‘bumpy’ tho I think it will be largely over in 10 years, not 20. And at the end I believe we will thrive, as Kiwi butter exporters do today
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/oct/08/omni-energy-switched-unprofitable-customers-without-express-consent
This kind of behaviour should result in them immediately losing their license. Oh and bar the directors. Seriously scummy business practices.
Cracking game
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-news-live-uk-latest-coronavirus-daily-cases-rules-travel-updates-12425651?postid=2818806#liveblog-body
The much vaunted lab for spotting variants have been up to six weeks behind haven’t they?
UC is supposed to be a safety net, not a way of life.
One data point doesn't mean anything. You have to look at all it's friends and relations. Are they close by or do they live a long long way away?
Even before the March 2000 moratorium (which, it should be noted was because the locals were not happy), the data on flow rates was not particularly encouraging. I mean if the land were empty, and if the UK had a large indigenous supply of land drilling rigs (and people to staff them), then it *might* work. But we don't.
So, an operator would be essentially taking a massive flyer on either future wells being very significantly more productive than the initial ones, or longer term gas prices being $12-14/mmbtu.
And I don't think any operator is going to do that.
(The only way I could see it working would be if the UK government guaranteed - say - $12/mmbtu for shale gas for the next five to seven years to encourage development.)
In this context, note that Seattle enacted its Anti-Ukulele ordinance at the behest of Native Hawaiians appalled at the expropriation of their rich cultural heritage by tone-deaf Scandinavians.
So they are very very likely to be right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC5WeuLHUdU
Now you could subsidise it as part of rural tourism / environment management - pretty baa lambs and dry stone walls etc.
With a charge on all the second home owners / holiday lets in the area to fund it.
The UK attitude to hydrocarbons is inconsistent, incoherent and will result in more environmental damage rather than less whilst seriously damaging our economy at the same time.
My point was solely that people think that shale gas in the UK is some kind of panacea, where if the UK government was a little bit more relaxed about licenses, we'd have loads of production. And that's simply not true.
Someone the other day was musing about what Labour would need to do to win back Workington, Copeland and Barrow?
We now know. Absolutely bugger all. The complete destruction of upland agriculture will do it.
Fucking hell - no wonder the Finns are feeling sorry for us!
I couldn't care less what 'Boris Johnson and his crew' have an interest in.
What I care about is what I have an interest in - and whether 'Boris Johnson and his crew' live up to my desires or not.
If they do they can have my vote. If they don't, they can't. And the NI tax rise meant that they lost it already, that mattered far more to me than what happens to agriculture.
But I'd prefer to live in an area with jobs.
If the government isn't going to do the right thing, it doesn't deserve to be re-elected anyway.
We need to make sure that we're not dealing with the symptoms (immigration of people with plumbing skills), rather than the cause (lack of Brits with plumbing skills).
What we don't need are jobs that are minimum wage and only viable due to taxpayer subsidies and importing people to be subsidised to do those jobs. Those jobs are redundant and redundancies should be cut out.
Everyone imported with high skills is improving our productivity and growing the pie, not deflating it.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7507575/Essex-seaside-village-Jaywick-named-Englands-deprived-neighbourhood.html
And there will be for the foreseeable future.
Do you think an elite athlete spending ten years of rigorous training, diet and exercise before they're finally able to shine regrets afterwards undergoing all that effort?
Why should we not be the same? We've become fat and lazy as a nation relying upon minimum wage people imported to do jobs people here didn't want to do at the wages offered. We're going cold turkey with diet and exercise now which is as much of a shock as an ice bath . . . but the right thing to do.
The cheapest shale gas in the UK will be LNG from the US.
Is that the future for our agriculture?
We were continually told that there would be an enormous recession, mass unemployment, the City relocating to Frankfurt.
All slaveringly pasted onto PB.
Yet here we are with full employment and rising pay.
Now its possible to make sensible critiques and point out potential problems.
But where's the unmitigated disaster ?
My brother's a plumber. Sure, to a small degree we can train more plumbers but to be a good, competent, safe plumber you actually need to be quite bright and have reasonably good customer skills.
Where are all those trainees coming from? What jobs are they doing now and who's going to backfill them?
Let's not pretend that the sort of people capable of training as a plumber are sat on the dole in their 1000s waiting for a training opportunity.
"Hard Work Pays Off In Time. But Laziness Pays Off Now."
Even with the university experience being negatively affected by covid and increased opportunities in the employment market.
Though perhaps the relative changes have been greater in London than average.
Our population after being stable for most of the post-war era has since the turn of the century grown by over ten million people. We've been consistently "short of workers" since the introduction of the minimum wage (which also acted as a maximum wage), Brown massively expanding in-work benefits, and the expansion of the European Union.
Ten million extra people later and we're still "short of workers". After our population has expanded by hundreds of thousands net every single year, after our population has grown by ten million people, why are we still "short of plumbers, and farm help, and wait staff, and drivers, and baristas, and abattoir workers, and ..."?
The answer of course is because the idea we're short of workers is a lump of labour fallacy. There is no labour shortage - you bring in more people and the labour market will respond because all of those new people will need their own plumber, their own restaurants to go to, their own goods that need drivers, their own coffee etc too
Labour shortages can not be filled by immigration. That's a lump of labour fallacy.
In this case, by using lateral tests as a funnel to PCR tests, it has been demonstrated to find more cases, and give warning to potential spreaders.
To be fair, there is a chunk of the medical establishment, here, that has kittens about false positives, and "screening programs".
Elsewhere we now have a wide range of jobs between university educated and agricultural worker.
I certainly agree that 'some things worth doing are difficult'. But I sure as hell know there are plenty of very difficult things were never worth doing and shouldn't have been attempted in the first place.
There is no reliable correlation between 'worth doing' and 'difficult'.
The point is: you're saying Brexit is worth doing and difficult; I'm saying it was never worth doing and difficult. We're agreed it's difficult. I'd say it wouldn't be worth doing, even if it were easy (which it could have been tbh, if we'd chosen EEA or single market.
We were of course told it would be 'the easiest thing in the world'.
And it was extraordinary that every major UK politician and party fell for this mixture of self delusion, denial, and attempt to delude the public for decades when referenda as done in other countries would have sorted it without all this difficulty.
Only marginal figures of left and right seemed to comprehend any of this, even though it is essentially a centrist issue.
Time for a proper government to put a maximum wage in place, as in 1515.
There's a great quote I remember from The West Wing that goes with that thought.
Bartlet: Social Security is the third rail of American politics. Touch it, and you die.
Toby: That's 'cause the third rail's where all the power is.
You can fail to be courageous and muddle along and keep getting elected, but never actually do anything, and just let Sir Humphrey run the show. That's what Tony Blair did - and how fondly is he remembered now?
IMHO what has happened, partly through FOM, partly through over educating some quite dim people, is the creation of some millions of non-jobs, many of which should in a sane world vanish, being replaced by sensible ones, like designing and making machinery for picking strawberries and blackcurrants.
David Graeber is the man for this. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
While the sensible individual needs to pick their way through the minefield ignoring all the time wasters.
The normally antiseptic BBC News at Ten was brutal. Steel crisis, energy crisis, livestock crisis, driver crisis, supply crisis...
Crisis, what crisis?
Oh and Brexit, as well as Covid was mentioned in dispatches.
And some of those saying this should have a better understanding of discounting and NPV than they are putting on display.
I was in a bookshop the other day and, staring at the shelves, found myself longing for a Ctrl F function.
But of course he may be right. In which case you think a period of labour shortages would begin to eliminate such jobs, as well as causing supply-line issues, empty-shelves and accelerating inflation.
Maybe this is all part of Johnson's master plan... but somehow I think it just one huge f*ck-up.
Even if that wasn't a lump of labour fallacy, that's like the late, great @SeanT coming on here and saying he has a crisis of too many hot, nubile, young women throwing themselves at him.
Oh and did you miss my comment earlier. Was your Embolden yesterday a clue as to how you can manage to be on here all the time?
But you know what: there is always upheaval anyway. Covid brought upheaval. The GFC brought upheaval. The dotcom bubble brought upheaval. Online shopping brought upheaval.
Brexit is just one more thing on a very, very long list of reasons that there will be disruption. But such disruption is a good thing. That's what Brown failed to understand - it is boom and bust that leads to improved development and living standards. He managed to abolish boom but not bust, its time to reverse that mistake.
1) A fixed maximum wage of 4d a day in Summer, 5d in Winter.
2) Anyone without a job gets branded with V for Vagabond on the face.
I'll assume there's no casual snobbery but have you considered what might apply for yourself might not apply for some other people ?
Now I don't criticize anyone for looking into university but what I don't like is that the £10k debt per year is something which will not go away and that's a big risk any teenager is accepting when their experience of the wider world is limited.
If going to university turns out to be the wrong decision they still have the debt and years have been used (with lost earning potential) on something which might be of no use.
If getting a job turns out to be the wrong decision then they've still had experience in the workplace, earned some money and perhaps learned that a certain career is not for them but with no debt and still have the opportunity to go to university a year or two afterwards.
I for one believe @Philip_Thompson is a real person!