Coronavirus latest: a senior royal wants us to *checks notes* work harder
With Prince Charles urging the public to pick fruit for Blighty, the problem isn’t so much the message as the messenger
Now more than ever we could do with firm leadership, strong example-setting, and a nationwide feeling of unity that comes from knowing that We’re All In This Together. Good of Prince Charles to put on his best rumpled gardening jacket and stand port-faced in his own garden telling us all to pick some fruit, then. I was just thinking, “You know what would really get me through the endless doom of this pandemic? Inexpertly grabbing potatoes out of the ground for absolute minimum wage.” And just like that, Charlie came through.
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The solution to this mooted at the start of lockdown was the Pick For Britain campaign – a flimsily rebranded version of world war two’s Women’s Land Army – for which British workers at a loose end are recruited en masse to get the strawberries in. Or that’s the theory, anyway: even with long-term furloughs and job losses, the number of people signing up to spend two entire seasons living in farm-provided accommodation (with the rent often deducted from your minimum wage pay) and waking up at 5am for some reason just to go face-to-face with some asparagus has been low. It’s estimated we need 80,000 extra workers tilling the fields. As reported in the Times, the work placement charity Concordia said of 50,000 people initially interested, 6,000 made it to interview, 1,000 rejected jobs that they were offered, and only 150 took up offers of work. Farming is no longer the Enid Blyton-esque jolly-good-day’s-work-and-a-pint-of-ale-for-your-trouble! it used to be. It’s just hard graft for very little money, possibly Britain’s most sacred tradition.
That’s why Pick For Britain got the big guns involved: Waitrose’s very own in-house royal. “If we are to harvest British fruit and vegetables this year, we need an army of people to help,” the Prince said, one hand in his pocket. “In the coming months, many thousands of people will be needed to bring in the crops. It will be hard graft but it is hugely important … People are needed who are genuinely going to commit. The phrase I have often heard is, ‘pickers who are stickers’.”
There are some very loaded terms in there, aren’t there? Prince Charles saying “hard graft” alone should be enough to get the Robespierres among us fired up. The idea that he is parroting cool farming lingo that he has heard but never had to learn through work does rather put the (British-grown!) cherry on the sundae, too. Pick literally one brussels sprout out the ground, Prince Charles. Then I’ll join your little allotment army.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/19/coronavirus-royal-family-prince-charles-pick-fruit
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