Southerners reluctant to eat fruit picked by northerners
FRUIT picked by northern people would have to be washed at least three times, southern people said last night.
Teeming
As a senior Conservative councillor was lambasted for suggesting northerners work for a living, everyone south of Birmingham said that was fine, but they would prefer it not to involve food.
David Shakespeare, Tory group leader on the Local Government Association, said northern types could ‘replace Romanians in the cherry orchards’ painting a glorious picture of happy, smelly, tattooed workers frolicking in the berry farms of rural Hampshire.
But senior Labour figures said fruit picking was demeaning to hundreds of thousands of people who had the skills to withstand a series of crackdowns on incapacity benefit fraud.
Tom Logan, an architect from Stevenage, said: “If you think I’m eating fruit that’s been handled by a northerner, you must be out of your tiny mind.
“I thought we had all agreed they would be used for picking up litter. Can we please just make a decision and stick to it?”
Helen Archer, an accountant from Hatfield, added: “Not lovely cherries, please. I don’t want to have to boil them in salt water and Dettol.
“I suppose it could possibly work with apples, but they would have to be clearly labelled as ‘picked by northerners’ and have some government-backed guarantee that they were not carrying lice or rickets.”
A spokesman for work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan-Smith stressed that Mr Shakespeare was not speaking for the government as there was no way he could possibly have seen the original email.
Margaret Gerving, a retired headmistress from Guildford, added: “You do know that they spend all day with their hands up their own anuses.
“And they think that toilet paper is filled with invisible witches.”
