Globophobia
A weekly survey of world restrictions on freedom and free trade The television gardener Monty Don and his neighbours in the Herefordshire village of Brierley are upset by the presence of a strawberry farm, or what Mr Don calls a junk fruit factory'. They claim that the plastic sheets or `polytunnels' under which the fruit is grown for nine weeks of the year are ruining the landscape and that the village is threatened by the presence of a caravan site, complete with disco, built to house 1,000 Eastern European students who come to pick the fruit each summer under the government's Seasonal Agricultural Workers' Scheme.
'The vast scale of the site is unprecedented and transcends any concept of acceptable agricultural development,' complains Mr Don. 'Will the whole county be a polythene-wrapped "berry zone" dependent upon thousands of migrant-worker gangs penned in labour camps? The berry barons claim they are merely meeting the demand for cheap British fruit. But the price local taxpayers pay is the rape of our landscape, the slashing of our house prices, the ruination of a thriving tourist business and the lowering of the quality of life for the majority of the local community.'
What a dastardly infringement of Mr Don's human rights that his house might possibly fall in value! While the UN's officers set to work on this injustice, Mr Don's attack on the fruit farm, which is run by S&A Produce, must not go unremarked. It is bizarre to claim that local taxpayers have paid for the strawberry farm: unlike the subsidy junkies who grow our wheat and tend the nation's sheep, our admirable fruit farmers do not receive a penny of public money. As for calling the farm a labour camp, the students are paid in accordance with the national minimum wage. The reason most of them come from Eastern Europe is because few British students want to do the work any more. What taxpayers do get stung for, through the BBC licence fee, is Mr Don's wages. Surely there must be a good Polish gardener who could do his programme for a fraction of the cost.
Ross Clark
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