Well it's the way the world works, isn't it. The Romanians are prepared to do it for that amount - see the quotes further up the thread where they say they can earn more in four months over here than they could in a year back home. Consumers want cheap food. Supermarkets want to sell cheap food. If one farm insisted on paying UK pickers a fair wage, the supermarkets would go instead to other farms that can sell them fruit for a lower price by using cheap immigrant labour.

I can't really see any way round it in a free market. If supermarkets offered two different displays of the same fruit and veg but one display was 50% more expensive but labelled "PICKED BY BRITISH WORKERS", do you think people would buy it? I don't...

Unless the world economy levels out to an extent that minimum wages are the same across the whole world, we will always see people from poorer countries being prepared to do work for lower wages, and putting up with poorer conditions. Sad but true. It's increasingly happening in creative industries too, with the rise of websites like Fiverr that flood the market with people prepared to write software or copy for websites etc, or design logos, for pennies.

Originally Posted by: Rob K 

A useful document from the Police. Unsurprisingly, going to a bridge to clap doesn't make the grade, but you are allowed to go to someone's house if you've had an argument at home!

What constitutes a reasonable excuse to leave the place where you live

https://www.college.police.uk/What-we-do/COVID-19/Documents/What-constitutes-a-reasonable-excuse.pdf

Originally Posted by: Retron 

Virgin radio have today announced The Big Thank You Tour 35,000 free tickets will be given to key workers for the 3 concerts later this year

• The SSE Arena, Wembley on Wednesday 28th October


• Manchester Arena on Thursday 29th October


• The SSE Hydro Arena Glasgow on Sunday 1st November

More details will be announced in the coming weeks

Originally Posted by: Gavin D 

A useful document from the Police. Unsurprisingly, going to a bridge to clap doesn't make the grade, but you are allowed to go to someone's house if you've had an argument at home!

What constitutes a reasonable excuse to leave the place where you live

https://www.college.police.uk/What-we-do/COVID-19/Documents/What-constitutes-a-reasonable-excuse.pdf

Originally Posted by: Retron 

There’s no way those concerts will be happening in October.  Unless it’s a ‘Let’s kick off wave 2’ party?

Originally Posted by: John p 

I know, it seems ridiculous. Hey, key workers, you've seen what this virus can do, have some free tickets to stand in the middle of a mass infection fest!

Originally Posted by: Rob K 

Religion guarantees a free pass to the virus - from the BBC Website:

"Islamic clerics in Pakistan have said they will hold Friday prayers across the country, despite a ban on big gatherings to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Earlier this week, a group of religious scholars said the lockdown was not applicable to mosques. They said elderly people had been advised to pray at home, and mosques would follow social distancing guidelines.

"In the present conditions, five daily prayers along with precautionary measures are essential," religious scholar Mufti Taqi Usmani said

on Tuesday."

I am sure the corona virus is scared witless by "five daily prayers".

Originally Posted by: Maunder Minimum 

I have picked crops and it is back breaking work, but I think the bigger question here is why farmers depend so highly on cheap labour in the first place? I'd say with enough digging we would find trails leading back to big supermarkets.

Originally Posted by: Chunky Pea 

 Thanks for bringing this to our attention on the forum. Several of us have mentioned the Dutch study and I have been keenly awaiting to see what it shows. Frankly I'm not surprised at all. Not one iota. I have long suspected that many people "who had corona in Jan or Feb" are guilty of wishful thinking, although needless to say a few of them will be correct. 

Edit: I'm going to stick my neck out here and say the idea that 50% of people with the corona virus remain asymptomatic will turn out to be complete bull. Gut feel only. No evidence to back it.  

Originally Posted by: Brian Gaze 

It's an interesting one how this affects people differently.

I live on my own, am an only child and am used to being by myself, my close family all having died. My plan, once the wolves die (the youngest at the moment being 9, so maybe another 5-7 years), is to leave my job at the school and, if I want to, work from home. I will get a dog for company and plan to take long walks with him along the footpaths, beaches and cliffs nearby. I'm not one of those who enjoys exercise, so the idea of going for a 4-mile walk alone doesn't appeal... it's fine with wolves though!

So far I'm really, really missing the wolves. It's 2½ months since I last saw them and although driving along a busy M25 to get to them isn't much fun, the change of scenery, the other volunteers and of course the wolves make it greatly worthwhile. I also miss meeting up with one of my friends and taking his dogs for a walk along the coast, or having my friends come round for a games morning (Mario Kart is much more fun when you've a few people in a room playing it).

I can kind of con myself into thinking it's just a weekend without the wolves, but of course I know it isn't. It's the same strategy I used when my dad died; I could imagine he'd just gone away for a week, then another week... I was and am used to being on my own, but it still felt odd. I guess, in a way, it's a kind of very mild bereavement - at least in this case, though, there'll be a semblance of normality eventually.

The other bits... the queues for Tesco, the lack of being able to pop out at 5:30AM on a Saturday to do the shopping when nobody's around, being able to get a haircut, the loss of just being able to take an Easter egg round to a friend as a surprise - it all feels like some sort of weird dream. It's not, of course, it's real life!

There are positives, of course. I'm not one for walks (at least on my own), but being in the garden and watching the wildlife of a lunchtime is relaxing. I'm lucky in that I have no worries about money and I'm also lucky in that I can do my job mostly from home, so I'm gaining over 10 hours a week of time saved from commuting and getting in early to beat traffic.

Originally Posted by: Retron 

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/01/europe/iceland-testing-coronavirus-intl/index.html

They’ve done more testing than anyone so no reason for it to be bull.

Originally Posted by: speckledjim 

Unless the world economy levels out to an extent that minimum wages are the same across the whole world, we will always see people from poorer countries being prepared to do work for lower wages, and putting up with poorer conditions. Sad but true. It's increasingly happening in creative industries too, with the rise of websites like Fiverr that flood the market with people prepared to write software or copy for websites etc, or design logos, for pennies.

Originally Posted by: Rob K 

From the Tele - bad news from the Netherlands (where they've been doing antibody testing). It would suggest the stark choice is either trash the economy, or take large numbers of deaths in order to build immunity.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/16/uk-faces-eight-ten-waves-coronavirus-population-achieves-herd/

There must be something wrong about special flights needed to bring Romanians to the UK to pick home-grown fruit and veg especially when the Romanians themselves are justifiably nervous about contracting Covid during the flight, despite all checks and masks worn

Originally Posted by: DEW 

Yet another thing that highlights the stupidity of Brexit - or at least the government's attitude to overseas workers. As well as these low level unskilled workers look at the front line NHS workers. All such people much vilified in the UK media during the Brexit campaign.

Originally Posted by: fairweather 

We hear a lot about 100,000 tests or whatever. Beyond those tests allowing key workers to get back to work, is there any point in mass testing until an efficient and comprehensive contact tracing process is in place? And that requires a large amount of labour even if the process doesn't start until the number of new daily cases has been brought down to, say, a hundred or so.

Originally Posted by: DEW