Forced labour

I have done fruit picking - I managed one day and then decided the dole was better. It seems most of the UK agrees with me, which is why we depend upon immigrant labour for harvesting.

With Brexit looming farmers are trying their best to lure the natives back onto the land. One wine estate is offering "luxurious, refitted barns" for a "working holiday" - pay £8 an hour. Another has gone for broke by offering a "harvest experience" at £45 a time - you pay them £45 to help harvest their crops.

Sorry guys, you can rebrand bottled tapwater - after all it is still water - but rebranding back-breaking low-paid work as a treat?

Other farmers are trying to make the job itself more attractive, with better pay and better conditions. The problem is that people want a 40-hour a week job, during reasonable hours, a job that lasts all year and has career prospects. They want to live at home and have a reasonable commute. Fruit picking can't offer any of those.

Even benefit claimants can't see an upside. The work is seasonal so they have to keep reapplying for benefits, and combining the short period of paid work with the low pay they don't even come out ahead over a whole year.

Ms Leadsom and Mr Nuttall - both with pretensions to be prime minister - have an even more disturbing idea: forced labour. They want to make students do the work.

This is an idea pioneered by totalitarian states such as the Stalin's Soviet Russia, Mao's China and Polpot's Cambodia. Assuming 'Nutt-som' stop short of collectivisation then it is clear how it could be organised in a free market economy. The higher education academic year would be adjusted to fit harvest times and students would have their debt paid down in proportion to their labour. Dedicated Stakhanovites might even pay it all off.

It seems like a good wheeze - the harvest comes in and student debt is vanquished.

Well, it might just work in a communist state, but the 'free' in free market leads to unavoidable consequences. Clearly it would be politically difficult to force students to do this, and even if it was made mandatory - just as with the military draft - the rich kids will escape it. So it will be the poor students who do the work while the rich kids get the summer jobs in industry or travel overseas.

It is worrying not just that these two 'free-marketeers' are advocating introducing core communist policies but also that they can't see the immediate and obvious consequences.

It is even more worrying if they do.