Probably only a Tory Minister like Therese Coffey could manage to turn the reasonable point that eating home grown seasonal food like turnips rather than relying on air miles imports from elsewhere into something that not only sounded like but was an attack on ordinary people trying to get by during a cost of living crisis.
Turnips are a feature of William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, a traditional crop, albeit he is keen on the Swedish variety (turnips allegedly originating from Sweden in that form).
E P Thompson in the Making of the English Working Class had the measure of Coffey’s predecessors when he noted that farm owners had so driven down the conditions of rural labourers that they had become ‘turnip pilferers, alehouse scroungers, poachers’.
Turnips are ok except when Coffey has poured the enormous condescension of posterity Tory sauce all over them.
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