It’s hard to fathom the motive behind a recent edition of BBC Radio 4’s early morning ‘outdoors’ programme, Open Country. Richard Uridge’s (usually competent and engaging, if cliché-spattered) commentary on the strawberry factories of Herefordshire sounded like a big puff for the socio-economic virtues of strawberry-growing vandals, S & A Davies Ltd.
The programme focused on the value to the local economy of the large influx of eastern European migrant workers (some of whom have become permanent residents).
I have no objection to this influx. On the one hand it has swelled congregations among the local Catholic churches; on the other it has provided the delights of seeing in the area a plethora of slender, beautiful young eastern European women who have grown up on food-balanced diets without the excesses of fat and stodge, unlike the generally overweight, flabby indigenous ladettes that roam the streets of Hereford Leominster and Ludlow.

But this does not justify covering hundreds of thousands of acres of Herefordshire with hideous, landscape destroying white plastic tunnels, which cost millions in lost tourist business and produce in the end a fruit that is a strawberry shaped ball of cotton wool. It has marginalised most of the surrounding traditional, seasonal (and far more delicious) strawberry growers.
I refuse, for reasons of taste and principle, to buy or eat a plastic nurtured strawberry and those who love the traditional British landscape of Herefordshire should do the same. There’ll always be other jobs for hard-working Poles, Lithuanians or Bulgarians, if that’s what they want. The local under-achieving youth aren’t going to bother with tough physical work when they can draw the dole, draw disability benefits for being too fat, drink cheap Tesco Alcohol and play video games all day, are they?

I expect Richard Uridge will soon be putting the other side of the story – what the tunnels are costing the county to achieve the benefits he was promoting.

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Proposals for a revised, 80% elected House of Lords will be debated at the Labour policy forum in Warwick University next week. Since 1999, when Tony Blair’s government removed the majority of hereditary peers from the House, in line with his 1997 manifesto commitment, it has remained in a state of compromise and constitutional instability that might have been cooked up at Dayton, Ohio. Nevertheless, there’s no chance that any conclusions – good or bad – will come of next week’s gathering, in which the governing party is itself divided over which way to go.

Quite apart from widely held reservations (even among politicians) about law-making powers being bounced between two elected chambers, both claiming democratic legitimacy (the more so by a House of Lords elected by PR), how wise can it be to attempt to sell the public an upper chamber filled by elected politicians, at a time when elected politicians are about as low as they’ve ever been in the public’s trustworthiness scale. Not that this perception is justified; politicians are no more or less trustworthy than they were 20, 50 or 100 years ago, given the characteristics required of those prepared to put themselves through the essentially duplicitous process of trying to appeal to as many people as possible at (and between) election times.

Popularity: 1% [?]