Quantum 91 – The one with Keir Starmer; Covid 19; Israel; Nigeria; Canada; Dutch Euthanasia; Fruit Pickers; Elevation; The Gettys and Joni; Frightened Rabbit; Life in Wartime; Duncan Chisholm

5 comments

1. Your comment about DNR in the elderly is interesting, but I have a slightly different view.
   Resuscitation is restarting the heart after it has stopped, so in essence the body has already died, albeit briefly. This is very different from euthanasia where an active choice is made to kill someone.
   We don’t talk about death well in the UK- we tend to avoid it and I don’t think that’s a good thing. It’s my understanding that resuscitations are brutal- often resulting in broken ribs, punctured lungs, risk of brain damage etc. If you imagine that in a frail person’s body, the risk of these is far higher. It’s good to have discussions about death before it happens because otherwise you can end up with situations, which do happen, where someone who is clearly at the end of their life in a nursing home, is not allowed to die in peace because the default is to preserve life at all costs.

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2. 35 shillings was a great days pay for picking tatti’s in the 60’s but you earn’t every penny. Plus you dreamed of tatti’s all night.

   Question: If the Chrsitians in Northern Nigeria where able to should they organize armed resisitance seeing they are not getting protection from their government?

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3. From the inside of his wrist to the inside of his elbow, there was a deep gouge white scar. From below his ear to the middle of his throat there was a deep gouge, white scar. Self inflicted, hastily repaired. A broken young man of intelligence, who had known the depths of despair a vapidity , a meaningless, to his life, few know.
   Now a gardener in Christian service and leading sung praise in the church for the broken, being made whole.
   It was a privilege and pleasure to meet him a few weeks ago , with his humble thankfulness – a life that had been draining away, pouring out, through gaping wounds, being raised, and made whole.
   From a bottomless hole, elevated to our Saviour’s top table.
   How unlike swathes of the church. How like Christ and his people.

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4. Hi David, I enjoy your podcasts and particularly now as I walk laps around the house during this shutdown. I thought you might be interested in another perspective about fruit pickers from this week’s podcast. A friend posted this on her FB page.

   I’ve seen loads of people this morning saying their going to boycott keeling’s fruit because they had to fly in workers to pick fruit for them this summer.

   Let me start by saying I spent 4years selling strawberries to supermarkets across Ireland for a company in Wexford so I have a small bit of experience in this area.

   First thing is strawberries take loads of work every one need to be hand picked because its a soft fruit and placed gently into a packet so it won’t bruise a bruised piece of fruit will ruin the whole punnet in about 48 hours.

   Secondly the fruit dosen’t ripen like apples where you have a week or 2 to pic the whole tree each plant may ripen 1 berry at a time

   From the moment they are ripened it’s normally about 24-36 hours later they are on a shelf in a supermarket and there isnt some magic clock that all the fruit ripens at the same time its nature it happens naturally so as soon as the fruit turns the correct colour it must be picked and packed and sent to a shop almost immediately to give the shop time to sell them before they rot.

   Then you have the supermarkets who have escaped this whole argument totally.

   Supermarkets every year have loads of fruit growers approach them to sell their products in the shops this is the likes of Aldi SuperValu Dunnes Tesco Lidl

   These supermarkets are so big that they have the power to dictate the price they are willing to pay for fruit or the buy the other growers fruit as they sell such a volume each week if they are selling your fruit then your are at their mercy if they decide to stop selling your fruit where will it go who will you sell it to. What grower has the infrastructure to sell this stock.

   at any point in time these supermarkets have the power to decide they don’t want your stock and they will just refuse your deliverys.

   So when we talk about volume on a particular weekend last year Tesco where selling 850g punnets of strawberries for €6 and they put 1 pallet of strawberries into each of there 152 stores in Ireland to sell over a weekend.

   If you are a grower of these strawberries and you have 152 pallets of strawberries to sell to Tesco and each pallet has 150 cases of strawberries your talking 22,000 punnets of strawberries and of Tesco are giving you €4 for the punnet and selling at €6 it means your crop is worth €88000.

   If the supermarket your supplying now decides it’s going to run a extra offer this week and is now gonna pay you only 3 for the same punnet the supplier has 2 choices
   1 comply and give the stock worth 88k to the supermarket for 66k

   Or

   2 tell the supermarket no and risk loosing the contract

   So if it’s option 1 you’ve literally overnight lost 25% of your income but you cannot affect the cost of production as that cost has already been spent so it’s basically on the grower to suck up the loss.

   Or 2 tell the supermarket to get lost and you take all your stock and try sell it somewhere else now let’s go back to the start because this fruit needs to be picked and packaged and delivered in 24-36 hours to have a long enough shelf life to satisfy the supermarkets.
   This is absolutely impossible to find a new customer for any large amount of fruit like That at short notice most fruit purchase is done by supermarkets over months previous and planned with growers to have shelf space etc ready for the arrivals of new season fruit.

   So why are we talking about this in the context of keeling’s and the Romanian workers

   Well keeling’s have a business they have invested massively in their fruit production so everyday that costs them money and for a few months every year they need loads of staff to pick fruit almost 24 hours a day as the fruit needs to be picked immediately and delivered or they face the prospect of fruit not being picked going off and loosing all the produce so they are forced to do whatever they can to get the fruit picked this involves getting Romanian and Irish workers ( young school kids or summers hols generally)

   So today everyone is saying why not just pay the staff more and just get Irish workers bit then we look at why they need to keep the cost down because they have a fixed cost of production with a customer who at any point can pull the plug on their entire business if the cost goes up (the supermarket)

   So when you stand back and look at this from a society perspective we have supermarkets who continue to force the prices down to please customers who want low price food.

   For the food to be low price the growers have to reduce costs

   To reduce costs growers pay less wages

   If we keep paying low wages less people will be willing to do these jobs

   If nobody will do this job we are forced to find people who will.

   Then you have a company forced to import labour at a low rate to satisfy the giant supermarkets insatiable appetite for driving down prices while maintaining their own massive profit margins.

   So if we are gonna boycott anyone it should be the big supermarkets.

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5. There is another very good reason why Eastern European workers are happy to pick fruit here and that is the cost of housing in the UK compared to, say, Romania.
   UK workers need at the very least a wage of £10/ hour in order to simply pay the rent to put a roof over their heads, by contrast E. Europeans are able to live in the temporary accommodation provided by the employer while they are here and still save enough money to be able to put down a good deposit for a house back in the home country where housing is so much more affordable.
   The dual pressures of the UK’s massively inflated housing costs combined with its persistent cheap food policy (implemented by the supermarkets) have led to a situation where we are unable to pay our own people enough money to produce the low cost food we are so addicted to.
   The bottom line is that it is getting more and more difficult to produce a global commodity (food) in a high wage economy such as the UK and in the end we will either have to accept that all our food, just like our steel and textiles, will need to be imported or we will have to start paying a realistic price for our current lifestyle.
   I also totally endorse William Anderson’s comment above; ASDA’s treatment of their clothing suppliers in the news this week, as well as New Look’s last week are both examples of behaviour that British producers have been on the receiving end of for decades.
   As a society we have been enjoying unsustainably low prices for our food and clothing for too long. These cost pressures are always pushed back to the producer who then has to find some way of getting affordable staff.
   I am a farmer (and a Christian) and I know whereof I speak.

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