Cameron Continues Policy of Belittling my Profession.

Alan Titchmarsh has hit out at Prime Minister David Cameron at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show for describing gardening as a form of ‘litter picking’ and said the Government is failing to take horticulture seriously. So this government is carrying on the anti-horticultural industry policies of the last four previous governments of Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown.
Story here.

“In a recent speech relating to the Coalition Government’s plans to allocate community work to the long-term unemployed, the Prime Minister grouped gardening as an unskilled activity along with litter picking,”

So what the prime minister is saying is that after four years learning the profession at college, I am unskilled. I would also like to know what sort of qualifications someone would need to pick up litter.

Titchmarsh also said

“The Prime Minister and others should step back and consider just what part gardening – growing things – can play in society. It impacts on those big three electioneering issues – law and order, education and health. People who cultivate the soil, who spend time in outdoor activities on the land, occupying themselves and diverting their energies into productive pursuits are, it’s proven, much less likely to offend.”

Titchmarsh also rightly said that “We have a long way to go,” and compared a gardener’s £15 an hour rate (But you try getting it around here) with a lawyer’s £650 an hour.

But such is the attitude towards this profession. This showed by the public outcry at Alan Duncan claiming £4000 on gardening. when if he’d claimed that for the hire of a plumber everyone would have thought he’d got a bargain.

Titchmarsh also said

“I can’t help but hope that the raising of university tuition fees might have a beneficial side effect. We will realise that a university education is not the be-all and end-all in life. We need skilled craftsmen as well as academic brilliance and we need to value those skills. Apprenticeships should be more readily offered and we should pay a decent wage to the skilled trades, including gardeners.

But the trade is looked down upon to the point where it is believed there is no skill involved at all. Mr Cameron and co should ask some of the clients I’ve had who have called me in to sort out someone else’s mess, proving that not everyone knows how to do it.

Alan Titchmarsh continued

We need to encourage more young people to make horticulture their career. How do we do that? By actually considering that it is a career. Perhaps you can offer an apprenticeship to a young and aspiring gardener.

But let’s face it, as the government just like previous governments continue to belittle us, who is going to want to be a gardener? It has been belittled to the point where gardeners are ashamed to call themselves gardeners and resort to calling themselves Horticulturalists.

The ironic thing is that English gardeners are respected around the world everywhere but England. We’re royalty abroad and worthless rustics at home. The fact that Tuscany would still be an arid wasteland without us and the head gardeners of virtually every major botanical gardens in the world are all English, demonstrates the respect we have. But at home this profession is not something to be proud of. Qualified English gardeners are so belittled that English people would rather have unskilled Eastern Europeans do it for them. This shall be made worse if Turkey joins the EU. Putting English gardeners out of business to do what they are qualified to do for nothing on some workfare scheme. The more ‘horticulture’ on workfare the more gardeners are out of business.

Of course the horticultural industry had the last government blatantly at war with it along with allied rural sector industries. Just over a decade ago, virtually every glasshouse in Newbourne was full of plants. Now most of them stand empty. Why buy anything grown here when you can buy it from abroad?
Just let the rose gardens of Guernsey be dug up and buy fair trade roses from Kenya. Who cares about the air miles?

When it comes to my profession, this government is carrying on the same lousy policies as previous governments.