I know it's a complicated situation Dale, all I was saying is, in my view, we don't use our natural assets as much as we should. Just a small example, when I was a kid all the kids in rural villages used to go fruit picking in the evenings after school or the school holidays. At the moment, we have thousands of people not at work but there are plane loads of people being flown in from Romania to pick fruit, does that make sense ?
You sometimes hear "They are doing the jobs that the Brits won't do" but, surely, in these strange times we should have tried to get locals to do this job rather than flying people in ? Was any attempt made to recruit locals ? if it was I didn't see it.
I know we live in a "Global" world and things are never going to go back to what it was like in the 70's but one lesson we really should learn is to keep some of our own industries going, probably by nationalising them, so in emergencies, we can "ramp up" our own production, rather they finish up buying useless gowns from a bloke who makes tee shirts in Turkey !
Only one part of your piece: but of the 50,000 UK applicants to be fruit pickers, only 112 turned up, citing that it was too far away as they didn't want to commute, they didn't want to work for eight hours a day and that they would only work when the weather was good as reasons for not following through with their applications...