For the Labour voting contractor

[OwlHoot]

Hi CM, how are you this goodly afternoon?

Who says "goodly" these days? Or have you been reading Chaucer again?

[Smartie]

They used to have visas for foreign farm workers.

Prior to that women and kids use to do the harvest in summer.

I got £5 a day for picking potatoes around 1980. The adults got £10...

[SueEllen]

I got £5 a day for picking potatoes around 1980. The adults got £10...

A couple of my uni friends' mums did it.

My uni friends' were too young and when they got old enough as children - child being anyone under 18 - the work didn't exist anymore.

Though PIP doesn't count housewives as "home grown manual labour".

[Pip in a Poke]

Who says "goodly" these days? Or have you been reading Chaucer again?

Not muchly but I did have my Palgraves Golden Treasury out the other night before I went to sleep

[Pip in a Poke]

I got £5 a day for picking potatoes around 1980. The adults got £10...

More than I got for my paper round per week.

And I delivered both morning and evening - everybody took the Evening Chronicle back then; most local rags these days are weekly.

[Gibbon]

A vote for Labour is simply a reduction of May's National Socialist majority.

And also for the SNP to wade into English politics if the numbers stack up, which will mean even more chaos with the brexit/Indy2ref tensions coming to the fore. We will make Greece look sane.

[BlasterBates]

The latest Tory election poster is a good one, gives good reasons for voting Conservative. I'll post it here to help the cause.

[TestMangler]

The Tories have done more damage to contracting and the contracting model than Labour ever did, and there is plenty more in the post.

[Hobosapien]

...he won't be able to get the operatives to harvest his crops so all his produce will be left to rot in the fields. He said he would have to think about growing something else that didn't need manual labour...

You should have offered to buy his stock in bulk, buyer collects (from field), and put a sign up saying 'pick your own fruit/veg'. Works for strawberries and other popular fruits, so why not potatoes, carrots, cabbages, swede, ...?


Lay on some cider, some local bands and have a harvest festival. I suppose that's how Glastonbury started at Worthy Farm before it got all commercialised and only about the music.

You can use my idea in return for free tickets (and cider) for life when you become the new Michael Eavis.

[OwlHoot]

Works for strawberries and other popular fruits, so why not potatoes, carrots, cabbages, swede, ...? ...

Mainly because strawberries cost a couple of quid per small punnet, whereas with spuds it's little more than a couple of quid for a hundredweight sack, and the other veg are much the same (although not quite as cheap as chips).

Also, harvesting spuds and carrots etc involves bending double and digging in the mud, whereas strawberry and other fruit picking doesn't.

If that's not enough (not wanting to sound like an old fuddy duddy, but ..) the younger generation have pretty much gone off traditional meat and two veg meals - Too much effort to cook, and too sloppy. They'd rather eat pre-packed synthetic crunchy muck.