Now prisoners called on to fix food shortages and make Brexit great again!

Imagine ‘prisoners will be needed to ease labour shortages in food industry’ on a Brexit bus. But it’s happening as the UK’s chronic labour shortages start to bite, forcing restaurants to close and threatening the economic recovery, writes James Moore

Feel like chicken tonight? Supply shortages have forced restaurants to close and led to empty supermarket shelves (PA)

EU workers are processing and delivering all our food. Let’s put Britain first and have Norman Stanley Fletcher, Lennie Godber and their HM Prison Slade pals doing the jobs instead!

It’s a bit long for a slogan, I know. But there ought to be just about enough room to fit it on a big red bus. How d’you think that would go down?

Of course, there’s a difference between the one I’m proposing and the one Boris Johnson actually put out on the roads during the Brexit campaign. I am, of course, talking about the one which juiced Britain’s net budget payments to the EU, ignoring the rebate and suchlike. And which promised an NHS dividend. Wait, whatever happened to that? If you’ll forgive the use of the fictional characters from the BBC’s classic comedy series Porridge, mine is more honest. I’m unlikely to end up getting told off by the Office for National Statistics.

Devastated by labour shortages, parts of the British economy are actually suggesting prison labour as a means of papering over the cracks created by labour shortages you can be file under the heading “severe”.

Had some young economist suggested this might be the case at a Remain strategy meeting they’d have been sent back to the City of London with a flea in their ear, and told to come back with something about the public sector borrowing requirement that wouldn’t get laughed out of court.

Yes, the deed is done and the war is over, but it bears repeating that promises were made and reassurances were given and this is where we now are and no, it isn’t all just down to the pandemic and the pingdemic and yes, this was entirely avoidable had the government not decided to build walls around fortress Britain.

That Brexit means Fletch delivering your Sainsbury’s order, or Godber making sure there’s enough chicken being produced for Nando’s to slather in peri-peri sauce, might seem incredible but this isn’t quite the terrible idea it might look like at first blush.

If handled correctly – and I realise that’s no gimme, given the quality of the government we have – there’s actually something to recommend giving prisoners the chance to earn money by working at a real job.

One reason so many of today’s criminals end up back behind bars after serving their sentences is that they find it very hard to secure employment when they get out.

If the idea gets adopted (the meat processing industry is getting the ball rolling) and it’s managed well, and it runs smoothly, it could even deliver a societal dividend.

Take it from someone who has spent many hours reporting from a magistrates’ court: most of the people who end up getting banged up are more sad than bad. A large proportion of them are the victims of some sort of addiction for which treatment can be hard to find.

We jail too many non-violent offenders, and we suffer the consequences because we end up jailing them again and again and it costs us a fortune. Perhaps this could help with that.

Trouble is, even we probably don’t jail enough people to fully fix the UK’s shortages in certain sectors, shortages which have led to the scarcity of certain goods, some empty supermarket shelves, restaurants closing branches, reduced ranges at those still open and signs that the much needed economic recovery is running out of puff.

The latest of those came courtesy of the composite Purchasing Managers Index complied by IHS Markit/Cips, which rolled in at 55.3 compared with 59.2 in July. Anything above 50 indicates growth but the number, now at its lowest since February, was way below expectations. (The figure from the eurozone came in at 59.5, only a slight slowdown from the 60.2 recorded for the previous month.)

A more liberal immigration policy would solve the problem but, of course, Priti Patel and her right-wing mates... so over to you, Fletch.

The Covid crisis has papered over this crack, and others, for quite a while now. It has helped keep a criminally incompetent government out of prison by creating a get out of jail free card for it.

But those cards have a shelf life, just like all those strawberries that rotted through a lack of pickers.

There are certainly signs that the recently improved relations between government and business are starting to fray, and no wonder given that ministers’ stock response to the problem they have created has been to engage in hectoring and finger-wagging.

What should be of concern to them is it moving into the general public, which doesn’t tend to take kindly to that sort of treatment.