Pigs culling - necessary part of transition

[LadyWithLapdog]

WTF Johnson and Brexit supporters. I’m not a raving vegan but this is nasty and indecent, this callous remark that killing animals for nothing is just to be expected. Shameful.

In pre brexit times workers from Eastern Europe may have returned home but it was a two way street…..new people came. Now it’s a one way street and leaving workers aren’t being replaced as nobody is coming.

True, but isn't that what many people voted for?
So no surprise there.

The closure of local abattoirs / kill on farm created this problem. Smaller abattoirs less distressing to work in. Who wants to work in a really large slaughterhouse? Grim either way but local towns always found people to work in them. It is only the few decades or so that the industry has become reliant on cheap foreign labour.
I think its also to do with availability of vets to certify the meat. Small abattoirs couldn't find the vets as there aren't enough who want to work in meat certification so the abattoirs got centralised. And I thought the problem now was linked to haulage again ie the pigs can't be moved to the large abattoirs so it's all getting backed up.

This whole "dependent on cheap foreign labour" is a myth designed to continue to put the blame for disruption on the EU. There are not enough people in the UK to do these jobs. All increasing pay is going to do is drive up prices for everyone so everyone else's pay will end up increasing too then noone will want those jobs again.

@PattiPritell

I think they have to kill them because they are the wrong size to process - if they don't fit into the existing packaging what do you do with them.

But I don't see it is the Gov's fault - I mean Brexit was 5 years ago. Many working here from E Europe etc went home farmer should have adapted for that .
The gas shortage - well we are trying to save the planet by closing coal power stations. Huge demand on gas all over, no CO2 for stunning animals.
So they're stuck wiht thousands of unwanted pigs. It's a nightmare but not particularly anyone's fault. It's due if anything to our methods of farming.

People will really do anything to justify Brexit and their absolute stupidity for voting for it.

This is all caused by Brexit, which wasn’t 5 years ago it’s right now. The vote wasn’t brexit that was a vote. Now everything is coming into force we are seeing what a ridiculous idea it was all along.

I hear dairy farmers are throwing milk away due to lack of hgv tanker drivers. So milk prices will probably go up. Oh my God. There's so much wrong with this statement.

derxa, would you like to tell us what is wrong with the statement?

@QuentinBunbury,

How is ‘cheap foreign labour’ a ‘myth’??

Some jobs were done for a pittance by predominantly foreign labour, from countries with GDP per capita a tiny fraction of ours.

[quote TheReluctantPhoenix]@QuentinBunbury,

How is ‘cheap foreign labour’ a ‘myth’??

Some jobs were done for a pittance by predominantly foreign labour, from countries with GDP per capita a tiny fraction of ours.[/quote]
And that could and should have been sorted out with proper enforcement of the NMW, and probably raising it to a proper living wage at well. Instead the British people and their government chose to flush their entire economy down the pan. Smart move.

The evidence is also clear that wage suppression due to the presence of EU workers was only a very minimal effect on the economy as a whole and only affected particular sectors - again, an issue that could and should have been addressed by sensible means, not economic suicide.

@pointythings,

It was not ‘shown’ that it was a minimal effect. It was assumed. There is a massive difference.
We had no data, until now, of what wages would have looked like without cheap European labour. We are now seeing that wages are indeed going up.

If you read economists on this, even very pro EU economists are now questioning the assumption that EU labour had minimal effects on wages.

The debate is still open but the evidence is moving towards the fact that wages will go up without the impact of a virtually infinite pool of cheap labour (which seems like common sense to me).

Yes, but wages going up is not helpful if prices also go up at the same rate or more

The myth is that cheap foreign labour is a cause of poverty for working class British people

@Peregrina

derxa, would you like to tell us what is wrong with the statement?

Dairy farmers are paid a pittance for their milk. Supermarkets sell it very cheap. And the pp is worried about the price of milk going up!!!!. It should cost twice the price in the shops. I could give you my own perspective of the dairy industry but it would just provoke anger in people who have no idea.

I and many others value your insight @derxa as a farmer talking to me (wouldn't know farming if it bit me on the arse).

If you can't bear it, fair enough. But it's always educational for me!

Phoenix, a few things:

• We could have had better wages without Brexit. It was government policy not to encourage this but to allow businesses to get away with paying poverty wages.
• Part of the issue is due to British people demanding rock bottom prices for everything. Food costs a great deal more in much of the EU - but wages are also higher.
• The same issue applies to taxes. British people want Scandinavian level services at rock bottom tax levels. Not possible.
• Lastly, people voted for the government that conspired to keep wages low. They can't then moan about wages being low.

Everything people complained about and which brought about Brexit could have been dealt with, without the need to have Brexit. So now here we are, with rising wages (for some) - but massively rising costs and inflation to gobble up that rise, and still nothing being done about the cost of housing. The poverty and inequality will continue - and Brexiteers will always spin the line that it's someone else's fault. It isn't. It stems from the choices British people have made.

Boris Johnson yet again mystified by something that was predicted five years ago.

Britain relied on cheap European temp workers for many industries. Like lorry driving for example.

It is literally Boris Johnson’s job to sort the mess out and make sure Britain has the workforce it needs. Instead he’s just shrugging.

I want to ask how these clowns are in power but then I look at the clowns in all of the other parties and realise that for the first time in my life there is no party I can in good conscience vote for.

🤦‍♀️

Stop being unpatriotic, OP.

Pigs would make a terrible mess of the Sunny Uplands. They’re just around the corner, apparently.

But I think you should tell us about the supermarket and price suppression derxa. Now with supply chains in crisis may be the opportunity to reset the position.

Although the Tory MP who was babbling on about buying from the local shop was talking rubbish - my nearest shop is the supermarket.

It is literally Boris Johnson’s job to sort the mess out and make sure Britain has the workforce it needs. Instead he’s just shrugging.

so you're happy with paying crap wages to lorry drivers, fruit pickers and care workers and bringing in workers from poorer countries to do the jobs.
Funny as MN is usually very left wing.

It was the Labour party who opened the door to eastern European workers when other EU countries put limits - there was 300,000 immigrants per annum arriving in the UK, T May promised to get it below 250,000 when she was Home Secretary but failed to do that. So that's a third of a million people a year for over 10 years - 3.3 million added to our 60 million population - an increase of 5%. What country in their right mind would do that, when there was no increase of funding to cater for them and they were concentrated in just a few areas??

Yes, and the labour party did that because we don't have the workforce to meet our own needs.
The only way we can raise the money needed to support our ageing population and associated health/pension costs is to have a larger younger workforce earning and paying tax.
So yeah, no immigrants=smaller population but also older, more expensive population. We don't have a replacement birth rate so will have more older than younger for the foreseeable.

Maybe wages will go up, but less than prices and our tax bills.

Labour/EU free market approach was attempting to be a win/win - we get more younger people in our workforce, the countries they are coming from get some of the benefits of the higher wages we can pay. I don't see the problem.

EU immigrants as net contributors.

www.oxfordeconomics.com/recent-releases/8747673d-3b26-439b-9693-0e250df6dbba

Housing, education and care issues - should have been tackled by government.

Not sure why we had to leave the EU to raise wages.

Supermarket supply contracts - suppliers have zero leverage. Years ago I tried negotiating one. It was an impossible task.

@Notonthestairs,

‘Not sure why we had to leave the uk to raise wages’

How will people have bargaining power when they are always undercut by people being prepared to work for peanuts?

It was never going to come via altruism.

Eu, not uk, obvs

[quote TheReluctantPhoenix]@Notonthestairs,

‘Not sure why we had to leave the uk to raise wages’

How will people have bargaining power when they are always undercut by people being prepared to work for peanuts?

It was never going to come via altruism.[/quote]
It's up to governments to see to it that this does not happen. You do it by making the NMW a wage you can actually live on. You do it by tackling the cost of housing. You do it by enforcing NMW legislation by making the sky fall on people who refuse to pay it.

But none of that is the Tory way, because it means actually putting some constraints on the free market, and that isn't their idology. We could have done it. Not doing it was an active choice. With hindsight, not putting a brake on the number allowed to come here from the EU accession countries was a mistake, but that was a long time ago. Done is done. Everything that has happened since has been a matter of wilful bad choices. Bad for ordinary people, not bad for Tory donor company owners and Tory landlords (who voted against legislation to enforce that rental homes should be fit for human habitation, let's not forget).

@pointythings,

So, the best thing to do when capitalism is working just fine is to expand the labour pool to include people from other countries with 1/3 GDP per capita.

Then, when you have destroyed the economic equilibrium, you introduce regulation to make sure the foreign labour earns even more in terms of their domestic labour rates.

And of course you enforce this with an infinite pool of police inspecting that no one is working ‘on the black’.

Genius!

If you're a 100% free marketeer you might think everything was going just fine and there was economic equilibrium. I don't think it looked like that for a lot of people, and hasn't done since 1979.

Meanwhile in other parts of the EU, people earn more, pay higher taxes and reap the benefits every day.