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A quite bonkers situation is highlighted today:

Migrant cap 'will hit fruit crop':

Thousands of pounds worth of strawberries could be lost

Much of this year's strawberry crop will not be harvested because of a cap on seasonal workers entering the UK, the National Farmers' Union has warned.
The NFU says the cap, which limits the number of non-EU citizens entering the country, is causing a shortage of fruit-pickers.

Farmers are calling for the government to raise the cap from its current limit of just over 16,000.

The Home Office says farms should recruit from closer to home.

Farmers say they have found it increasingly difficult to recruit seasonal workers since the expansion of the EU in 2004, which gave membership to countries including Poland.

So, by preventing the free movement of people, we increase the need to move goods around the world that could be just as well produced at home. We'll presumably have to see more Spanish strawberries in the shops because we won't allow people to come and pick English ones. And yet as I write here from my hall of residence flat, I hear our domestic staff bustling about getting ready to welcome hundreds of youngsters from overseas to learn a bit of English for a few weeks, which will no doubt be replicated at universities up and down the country.

Bonkers.

Technorati Tags: freedom of movement, SAWS, fruit pickers, food miles

The chap who drew me to joining the Institute of Economic Affairs (yes, me!) Fred Harrison, publicising his new book "Ricardo's Law: House Prices and the Great Tax Clawback Scam", has a piece in the Yorkshire Post today detailing how it ain't so:

LONDON Mayor Ken Livingstone claims that the capital subsidises the rest of the country.

Taxpayers in London and the South-East, we are told, pay such heavy taxes that the Treasury transfers about £13bn to regions like Yorkshire.

This is one of the appalling myths that cripples public policy and prevents people in the regions from enjoying a square deal from the public purse.

In reality, people in the South-East are subsidised by the regions. And the housing market is the vehicle for delivering this shameful result. For the tax policies of the Treasury, which are supposed to transfer income from the rich to help the poor, are biased to achieve the opposite effect.

I thought I would write about something quite close to me tonight because it has angered me. Rather than the ethereal world of politics which can sometimes feel quite abstract.

I have a friend currently buying a house, with several acres of field adjacent, in a village in the Green Belt just outside Oxford. The vendors are the Church Commissioners. Apparently hurt after being stung over several years or decades by having sold off properties on which the buyers have then got planning consent and made a fortune they are trying their best to tie down buyers.

This is nothing new. The landed have often put restrictive covenants on land that say that if the buyer subsequently gets permission to do some profitable development they will get some profit. I personally think this is an outrage in itself - since I don't really believe in the right to trade in land, our only real common wealth, for profit.

But get this - the Commissioners think they have it all sewn up. They would like to sell my friend only the freehold of the surface of the land itself. A 'flying freehold" where they retain the freehold of the airspace - yes, the air - above three meters above the ground, and the subsoil more than a meter below the surface.

My friend is not buying an option, he's buying a home. If circumstances change twenty years down the line and this piece of green belt becomes developable, yes, he might make a killing, but that's not why he's buying it. If the Church Commissioners want to retain this, they should not be selling the property at all. If they were to sell a bunch of shares they hold to someone, would they expect to be able to keep the dividend, or to stipulate that if the company is taken over after twenty years and the buyer rakes in a small fortune they should have some of it? No, that's what's called investment risk - the risk that they sell something that's still got further to go upwards for whatever reason.

All this just goes to show that what people generally think of as "theirs" - the land on which their homes stands and so on - is frequently not. It's bonkers. Large areas of North Oxford still have restrictive covenants granting some nobleman not so far away the right to prevent development on land long ago sold by his forebears.

Why on earth do people therefore complain about the idea of a Land Value Tax. At least that tax is going to the common treasury to be spent on others usually less fortunate...rather than to vast institutions and ancient landlords wanting to maintain a finger in a pie they disposed of, presumably for good investment decision reasons, ages ago.