“Pick for Britain” - Grapes of Wrath revisited?
Sunday 31st May 2020

5am starts, 10 hour days, poverty wages and no running water—the grim reality of “picking for Britain”
Our chair Adrian Alker has started a discussion on the future shape of the society we want to see. It is an urgent discussion the necessity and urgency of which was brought home to me by an article in Prospect Magazine written by Herbie Russell ( May 30, 2020) To me it seems the scenario revealed in the 1930’s work by Steinbeck “Grapes of Wrath” was being lived out in 21st century England. Herbie records how Environment Secretary George Eustice launched the official “Pick for Britain” campaign, encouraging the population to take up work on farms across the country. The media had made bleak premonitions of “a disastrous situation” in which “mountains of food are left to rot”. These warnings could find themselves realised if the call failed and, Herbie says, signalling an intensification of the recruitment drive last week the government wheeled out Prince Charles donning his humblest, most rumpled coat,