Turkeys and Christmas

Farming Today on Radio 4 served up a small seasonal truth this morning. A turkey farm in Norfolk brings in Romanians every year to process the Christmas birds. They come for a couple of months, do the hard graft, go home, and the farm keeps going. Straightforward enough. Except it exposes the great absurdity at the heart of our asylum system, one that ministers refuse to fix because it suits their political theatre.

We have asylum seekers living in Britain for months on end, sometimes years, perfectly willing and able to work. Yet the government bars them from doing so. They are allowed to apply only for a handful of shortage roles, most of which require degrees, licences or specialist training. Turkey processing, funnily enough, is not on the list. So they sit idle in hotels while taxpayers pick up the bill and farms plead for labour. It is a system designed to solve nothing, a triumph of dogma over economics.

Farmers know it is madness. The National Farmers Union has said for years that seasonal labour is short and getting shorter. Since Brexit, the old flow of EU workers has become a bureaucratic trickle, so producers rely on short-term visas topped up with charm and hope. Yet all the while, down the road from many of these farms, hundreds of asylum seekers wait in enforced idleness because someone in Westminster thinks letting them earn a wage might look soft.

It is not soft to let people contribute. It is not soft to reduce the hotel bill. It is not soft to fill jobs that otherwise go begging. It is simply rational, which may explain why it has been quietly “under review” for a decade without progress. The cruelty is not the point. The symbolism is. This is a government and a political right that desperately needs the asylum system to be broken so they can keep railing against it.

The truth is that the so called labour shortage in agriculture is a political choice. A self inflicted wound dressed up as toughness. We could allow asylum seekers to work after three months, as many other European countries do. We could reduce the hotel costs, increase tax revenues, and fill the roles that need filling. Instead we have a performative blockade that satisfies nobody except the tabloids looking for their next outrage.

And so the Norfolk turkeys rely on Romanians, while the people already here are barred from lifting a finger. It is the perfect parable of modern Britain. We shout about sovereignty, then outsource the obvious solution. We complain about costs, then choose the most expensive option. We demand integration, then ban the very thing that enables it.

All that is missing is a minister insisting that this shambles is actually a plan. If it is, it is a plan only a turkey could love.