The ugliest secret of Brexit is that the government is working with businesses dependent on immigration to keep your salary low

When you’ve got a government desperately writing PR for a £1.2 billion industry rather than expecting them to stump up, we really are in trouble

Do you fancy working as a fruit-picker to make up for our disappearing population of seasonal EU workers? (Reuters)

If you’re grasping for a metaphor for Brexit as national decay, you couldn't do much better than an English strawberry, slowly turning to mulch in a field.

Seasonal migrant workers from the EU are giving Britain a miss this summer, leaving summer fruit unpicked. Unemployed Britons aren’t filling the gap, and in an industry that employs 85,000 seasonal workers, with 95 per cent coming from other EU countries, Brexit looks like a disaster waiting to happen.

Farmers met Theresa May on Tuesday to pressure her to relax rules on visas with the introduction of a seasonal agriculture workers’ scheme, claiming that there simply aren’t enough unemployed people in Britain to fill the gap. Michael Gove is behind the scheme, presumably pivoting towards embracing the benefits of immigration so soon after helping to run the Vote Leave campaign because he’s realised the economic armageddon ahead.

If you think that’s rich, it’s nothing compared to the bombshell hiding in plain sight on the front page of The Times a few days ago. It was reported that ministers will produce “myth busting” guidance to help jobcentre advisers explain the benefits of fruit picking to unemployed Britain.

“Forget long hours, hard toil and low pay,” it was suggested, even though the hours are indeed long, the toil is hard, and the pay is low – tending to hover just slightly above the obligatory legal minimum wage.

While social media indulged in catastrophism about Brexit in general, the real significance of this story was missed: the government is actively finding creative new ways to help employers to keep wages low.

It’s all the more bitter that ministers are willing to pursue dog-whistle racism one moment and make special measures to please their big business chums the next.

For all the guff about migrant workers stealing your job and doing it for less money, this tawdry collusion between business and government shows who really keeps wages low.

You might think that the Tories would trust in the invisible hand of the market to sort this one out – if only there was some way to incentivise people to accept gruelling, temporary work. But when you’ve got a government desperately writing PR for a £1.2bn industry rather than expecting them to stump up, we really are in trouble.

Brexit was born from a campaign of anti-migrant sentiment, but now European workers are staying away, business and government seems to want to fill the gap by any means possible other than actually paying people more.

Perhaps it’s not such a surprise. It wasn’t so long ago that the government was getting people to work in Poundland so that they could claim their JSA. The Conservative Party is dovetailing its free market purity and its Victorian moralism about work as an improving endeavour, in order to justify Brexit’s contradictions with a sort of Very British Stakhanovite jingoism.

State propaganda telling us that bad jobs are good while refusing to admit the reality staring us in the face summarises our current Brexit situation perfectly. Lord knows where this could take us next. Maybe they’ll make a big fuss about changing the colour of our passports while travel becomes more difficult, or sell us some old rope about Britain becoming more “open” and “global” while we shut ourselves off from the world. The mind boggles.