Daffodils bloom with no sign of rescue

I JUST hope the Cornish daffodil growers aren’t looking to George Eustice to come to their rescue as the threat of a disastrous season looms ever larger on the horizon.

I just hope they aren’t holding their breath in anticipation of some miracle being pulled out of the bag by a man whose own family earns a living from the Cornish bloom.

Because they are wasting their time if they do. Whatever else the farming industry’s current mess has shown us, it is abundantly clear that the man supposedly in charge of Government agricultural policy is unfit for purpose.

Very long on promises, very short indeed on delivery, little George. He can stand up at a microphone with the best of them and deliver the words his speechwriters have written for him. But present him with a setback, confront him with a crisis in the industry and he does a complete rabbit-in-the-headlights act and freezes; incapable, apparently, of any kind of decisive action.

Now I am of a cynical turn of mind and I therefore have to weigh up the odds. Is this as a result of some fundamental, innate inability – or is George merely obeying orders from higher authority and tacitly overseeing the gradual destruction of large sections of British agriculture?

Two things would benefit the Government were this to happen. Firstly ministers would be able to justify tying up their shoddy little deals with other countries to send us their beef, chicken and other comestibles because we should obviously have a national shortage. Food prices would remain low as a consequence, consumers would still be relatively happy and the Government’s stock would remain buoyant.

And secondly, of course, the Government wouldn’t have to spend so much money supporting British farming because there would very soon be fewer farmers to support.

That situation – by no means impossible to visualise – would come as a shock to many, particularly those hundreds of faithful NFU members who went along with the leadership and declared five years ago they would be better off outside Europe, they wouldn’t need supporting any more because the world would not merely be beating a path to their door with wads of cash outstretched, it would be prepared to pay whatever price they demanded for the produce from British farms.

Precisely the same kind of deluded optimism as that displayed by NFU officials when the Single Payment first arrived and who advised farmers not to include the money in their trading figures but to salt it away in a rainy day account – because the supermarkets would never latch on to the fact that they were receiving it and never ever turn that against them as a pretext for cutting prices even more ruthlessly.

So the daffodil growers contemplate the emerging shoots and face the dispiriting prospect that an absence of Eastern European workers is going to leave millions of blooms unpicked and rotting and bank accounts veering into the deepest red. In the interests of getting a handle on the problem, I decided to investigate it when I was in Cornwall last week. And I asked my mother’s charming Polish carer why so many of her fellow countrymen had left.

That, she said, was a simple question to answer.

It was because they were being offered better money in Germany – and as anyone with even a vague sense of geography would be aware, travel between Germany and Poland is quicker, cheaper (and now simpler) than getting from Warsaw to Wadebridge.

So there’s the reality of the situation, George. What’s your answer to it?