Grumpy has never been a fan of The Guardian newspaper, but columnist Polly Toynbee encapsulates everything that is bad about its editorial content. In  her column of 12.02.2018, she offer a litany of ills which will befall the country in the event of a ‘hard’ (or even ‘mild’) Brexit, and  in doing so displays an astounding level of disingenuous  illogicality.

Citing a news piece on which Grumpy has already commented (see ‘Out of work ? Ask a farmer for a job’),  she notes  “we have learned of fruit and vegetables being left to rot in the fields for lack of foreign EU labour”. Conflating the reason for rotting foodstuffs  and EU  labour is both illogical and disingenuous.

The carrots are rotting because of insufficient manpower to pick them. There is absolutely nothing intrinsic in the harvesting of carrots (or whatever) which mandates that it can only be done by Bulgarians, or that Romanians are exclusively genetically gifted with the capability to pluck apples. It’s a shortage of manpower with the ability to perform the task, regardless of the origin of same.

Indeed, Toynbee’s analysis (if one can call it such) taken as written, implies that either (a) the Eastern Europeans are indeed generically gifted with  such skills, or alternatively (b) that  the 1.4 million unemployed Britons are too stupid or lazy to be able to do this. She is deliberately (or ignorantly, take your pick) seeking to establish cause (lack of EU labour) with effect (rotting vegetables) in a manner which lacks any logical credibility.

Instead, Toynbee should be focusing on how it is that of those 1.4 million people getting tax payers funds to sit and watch daytime TV, not even a mere 2.5%  of them  (to make up the stated 4,000 shortfall of foreign workers) can be persuaded to perform these tasks. The question she should be addressing is the reason for the  imbalances in a system which makes it attractive for a Romanian to up sticks and travel from Bucharest for a job, but not for an out of work person from Chatham.