I think it was Dorries or that other lady who is now gone.

Show me a picture of this decades old strawberry picking machine. How did it know which ones to pick? 

www.wired.com/story/elusive-hunt-robot-pick-ripe-strawberry/
TEN YEARS AGO, a company called Agrobot demonstrated a strawberry-harvesting robot in a field in Davis, California. Today, Agrobot’s strawberry picker remains a prototype.
The long wait underscores the challenge for any berry-picking robot: Identify a berry that is ripe enough to pick, grasp it firmly but without damaging the fruit, and pull hard enough to separate it from the plant without harming the plant.

You can go back to the steam engine if you want, agriculture has been mechanised constantly since the invention of the wheel. That is why farms have a tenth the workforce of yesteryear. But the migrants picking fruit are doing one of the few jobs that machines cannot yet do.  

Falling productivity levels.

After following your recipe for 4 decades we now have the lowest productivity in Europe of the major economies. Which is hardly surprising as basing an economy on the importation of cheap labour and low wages is obviously never going to improve productivity.




What are you talking about? - the employment rate is almost at an all time high. The jobs are there, just at the low wages which you have been advocating.

Re mechanical harvesting. In France the grape harvest is almost entirely mechanised, except for a very few regions like Champagne that don't allow it and some of the snootier chateaux in Bordeaux and Burgundy.

This process has been aided and abetted by the dastardly unelected dictators in Brussels who have supported the acquisition of such machines by wine co-ops across the continent.

It's also had the beneficial side-effect of creating a new industry. The Braud company (now owned by Fiat) has been making self-propelled grape harvesting machines since the 1980s and is now the largest manufacturer.

Perhaps UK farmers ought to be lobbying the government to do what the EU has done and invest in manufacturing capacity for such machinery in the UK, rather than increasing the number of seasonal worker visas? That would have the double benefit of curtailing the growth of migrant labour while creating high-paying skilled jobs at home.

Actually we could include farm machinery in general in the very long list of things that the UK doesn't produce anymore.