Brexit, Outmigration & Rotting Cornwall Crops

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 11/12/2017 06:54:00 PM
"Erm, we didn't really mean it, mate."
Surely, this must be the dumbest Brexit headline yet. Cornwall in the United Kingdom is a rural community which has felt left out by the rest of her majesty's realms. Throw in a less-educated populace and you can pretty much guess how it voted during the Brexit referendum: they wanted out. British jobs for British workers and so on and so forth. They must've been in seventh heaven when the Brexiteers won and the UK won back its "independence," whatever that means.

Or maybe not. Recently, Cornwall has been petitioning the government to--get this--bring back the accursed furriners since there's nobody left to do the agricultural work. Having been told to leave the natives behind, it seems the locals aren't keen on, well, rural people engaging in rural livelihoods. In border American states, the saying is that there aren't enough gringos willing to do the backbreaking work. What do we have here? Not enough Anglo-Saxons to do the harvest?
Crops in Cornwall are said to be "rotting in the fields" due to a lack of migrant workers to harvest them in the wake of Britain's decision to leave the European Union. The county council has approached the Government to request it implement area-specific migration laws after Brexit, will help to deliver skills to the area.

Cornwall voted to leave the European Union in last year's referendum by more than 56 per cent, considerably above the national average. The area is home to 17,000 EU nationals, making up 3 per cent of the county's population. But research commissioned by the council found that, since the Brexit vote, staffing levels for farms had dropped to 65 per cent of what would normally be required.
What, now they want the accursed furriners back in? I don't want to say these Brexiteer ingrates had it coming, but this is the thanks the EU gets for trying to improve living conditions in one of Europe's (but for how much longer?) less well-off regions:
Let’s not forget that MPs assured Cornish voters that the levels of EU funding would remain the same if it voted for Brexit – which, just like the numbers on that infamous big red bus, is now known to be another lie. EU money has been crucial to the development of the region, assisting the introduction of renewable energy and new trains. EU funding also benefited our lifeblood, the tourism industry, with money helping build the Eden Project and cleaning up the sea on our beautiful beaches.

The £53m received that was spent on installing super-fast fibre broadband was not only important for business growth but also for connecting communities and individuals in very rural areas who were incredibly isolated (one of the reasons behind the county’s notoriously bad mental health figures.)
My view remains essentially the same: those who voted for Brexit were misled into believing that their interests--economic and otherwise--were better served by leaving the European Union. It appears that they're finding the opposite is true when the UK is still not even outside the EU tent. Although I remain convinced that it's more likely that the UK will not leave once the true costs become even more apparent, think of how much worse things will become outside. 

Fortunately, this whole Brexit idiocy becomes less likely with each passing day that the government does its comedy improvisation shtick with its EU counterparts.