Those of us who are in touch with the rhythm of the seasons, courtesy of our weekly foray to the farmers’ market, will know that the English apple season is under way. Alas, the harvest is great but the labourers are few. The National Farmers’ Union on behalf of the fruit farmers is complaining that there aren’t enough Eastern Europeans to pick them. The problem is Home Office restrictions on the number of East Europeans, chiefly Romanians and Bulgarians, who are allowed into Britain under the seasonal agricultural workers’ scheme: the NFU wants it increased from 16,000 to 24,000. Meanwhile, there aren’t enough Poles to go round.

Which brings me to David Cameron’s new take on immigration. Under a Tory government there would be a yearly quota on the numbers of people allowed into Britain from outside the European Union, based on employers’ estimates of skills shortages. Mr Cameron also wants a “transitional period” before people from future EU entrant nations are allowed here. Actually, there is already one –– seven years –– but the Government simply chose not to invoke it when Poland joined the EU.

But when we talk about a “skills shortage” we are deluding ourselves. There are any number of highly trained specialists among the 700,000 Eastern Europeans who have come here since the EU expansion, but the number includes rather more fruit pickers, factory workers, meat canners, hotel cleaners and street cleaners (one poor Pole in Kensington High Street has to hoover up all those bits of gum discarded on the pavement).

In short, we’re not talking about skills so much as a willingness to engage in hard, low-paid, seasonal and unglamorous work. The real question is: why are British people, out of the eight million classed as economically inactive, not lining up as apple pickers? There have always been foreign agricultural labourers (like Irish potato pickers) but why do farmers need Bulgars for jobs that are accessible to anyone who can ascend a ladder?

I asked the apple seller at the Notting Hill farmers’ market where his pickers came from, He had Ukrainians, Romanians, you name ’em, he said, and very good they were. And what about Brits? His face darkened. “They just don’t want the work,” he said.

Similarly, when I was staying with a friend who farms in Suffolk, she too said that the only labour she could get round about was retired people. An NFU spokesman confirmed that farmers would love to have locals but they don’t seem keen.

In short, when ministers tell us that we are in a new era of highly skilled, high-tech employment to see off the Chinese, they’re not telling the whole truth. We still need people to do manual labour. Trouble is, the Brits can’t and won’t do it.

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