Some Tory Brexiteers don’t seem to have the brains they were born with.
Answering a question on whether Brexit is responsible for the UK’s “salad shortage”, former Environment Secretary (I’m not making this up!) George Eustice tried to evade the question by saying the UK is not holding up imports because it isn’t checking incoming freight carrying a number of named goods.
Not only was he negating the very reason we were told Brexit should happen – the UK can’t be “taking back control” if it isn’t actually exercising that control – but he was also telling potential smugglers exactly what they need to say they’re carrying, in order not to be searched at this country’s borders.
Maximilien Robespierre makes the point clearly in this video clip:
The Tories seem to be trying to turn the UK into a smuggler’s paradise. I wonder why.
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Are the Northern Irish feeling lucky, right about now?
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We’ve had shortages of fruit and veg harvesters in farms, and are now seeing shortages of butchers and abattoir workers.
We’ve had shortages of nurses for years.
Our transport infrastructure is already suffering because of the shortage of hauliers, and now it is about to take a second hit because…
Local councils are saying they cannot pay drivers as much as haulage firms, meaning there won’t be any gritter lorries de-icing our highways during the winter:
Shortage of gritter drivers could leave motorists stuck on icy roads this winter, councils warn https://t.co/wo2BJppv6J
This could bring the UK to a total standstill – and in the depths of winter, when we’ll need food and supplies that allow us to heat our homes more than ever.
Of course, the reason councils can’t afford to pay gritter drivers is simply that the government doesn’t pay them enough grant money to be able to afford the new going rates. Any resulting tragedies must then be laid at Boris Johnson’s door.
According to Sky News:
Transport spokesman David Renard added: “While most councils have been able to keep services running, some may find that their gritting services are affected in the same way that some have seen waste collection services impacted.”
Although he stressed that councils will be trying to plan ahead to ensure their winter services are resilient, he warned additional training for this on-demand sector will “not alleviate the short-term pressure on frontline services”.
Given these courses take up to 16 weeks to complete, trained drivers won’t be hitting the roads before Christmas – fuelling fears that shortages could overshadow this year’s festivities.
Mr Renard said: “Fast-inflating HGV driver salaries in the private sector risks exacerbating issues in the public sector, with the rises potentially creating a retention as well as a recruitment problem for councils and their contractors.”
It should be remembered that the government has tried to lure drivers back from the EU with a temporary HGV visa scheme.
However – and possibly because they remember being stuck in a Kent car park over last Christmas, with no toilet or washing facilities – very few drivers have taken up the offer. Very few:
Last week @BorisJohnson told @mrdanwalker@BBCBreakfast that 127 EU workers had applied for temporary HGV visas in the UK. Yesterday Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said it was only 27. Why was this not raised with the Minister today? Surely BBC editorial guidelines require it? pic.twitter.com/wUzVNeuAVQ
This Writer saw a suggestion on the social media that even those 27 applications were not, in fact applicable.
The suggestion was that they were test applications relevant to each EU member state, made to ensure that the system was working properly!
And, of course, the Tories are also running into “sauce for the goose” arguments:
The @Conservatives are suddenly arguing that the shortage of HGV drivers is a consequence of poor pay and conditions. So presumably the same explanation applies re the shortage of nurses?
— Eva Feltham 💙 3.5% REJOINER FBPE FBPA #JohnsonOut (@MyGineration) October 10, 2021
Yes indeed – and we know that the government can’t blame poor pay and conditions for nurses on anybody else. It is therefore hypocritical of Johnson and his cronies to berate haulage firms over low pay when their derisory pay rise for NHS staff has now been translated into a pay cut by new conditions that their political choices have created.
All we can do now is hope for a mild winter.
If we get ice, there will be death on the roads – because of Boris Johnson and his godawful Brexit.
Worse still, the knock-on effect could bring death to our homes – and, depending on how often we all check on our neighbours, it could be weeks or months before we even know the total death toll.
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Lorries without drivers: news outlets are finally admitting the shortage is due to Brexit. Boris Johnson won’t like that!
This is an important admission from The Independent, although it lags a considerable time behind some of us in the social media.
The newspaper’s article Brexit food shortages could ‘cancel Christmas’ and last into 2022 acknowledges – in its headline – that Brexit is responsible for the emptying of your local supermarket’s shelves – not Covid-19.
It states:
Britain’s post-Brexit supply chain crisis could “cancel Christmas” and continue to cause food shortages well into 2022, industry leaders have warned.
Boris Johnson’s government has been urged to ease immigration rules so some EU citizens who left the UK during Brexit can return and help fill major gaps in the workforce.
The RHA [Road Haulage Association] estimates that up to 20,000 heavy goods vehicle (HGV) drivers from the EU left during Brexit.
Tom Southall, policy officer at the Cold Chain Federation, said Brexit was partly to blame for recruitment problems across the food sector – predicting that it would be 2022 before the nation begins to get to grips with the backlog of vacancies for drivers, pickers and processors.
Norfolk food firm Alfred G Pearce, which grows and processes vegetables, is also struggling with labour shortages, having seen its workforce reduced 20 per cent to 30 per cent down after EU employees returned home during the Brexit process.
Bryan Roberts, retail analyst at Shopfloor Insights, said it would take time to train new workers, even with a major recruitment drive. “Sadly I think things are only going to get worse in the run-up to Christmas and we’ve got a whole load more regulations coming in from Brexit in October,” he said.
Other news media have caught on and are starting to say the same:
ITV News at Ten very clear about cause of empty supermarket shelves. No walking on egg shells in by the reporter. Shortages caused by brexit.
— Simon Lewis🏴🇪🇺🔶#FBPA#FBPPR#FBPE (@simonapcliff) August 27, 2021
It seems people in the UK are finally turning the corner and realising that the way to conquer our differences with the EU was to remain a member state and argue for change (in a rational way, not a David Cameron do-as-I-say-or-I’ll-have-a-strop ultimatum) and not to walk out and end all the trade agreements and border deals we had in our favour.
Neighbour last night apologised for voting for brexit.
Brexit REALLY is as bad as billed – the emperor is wearing no clothes… time for the #Brexit perpetrators to admit it pic.twitter.com/SZQqGAMWvO
— Helen Bracken #FBPE 🇪🇺 #RejoinEU🕯#FBPA #FBPPR (@HelenTBracken) August 24, 2021
Of course, the shortage of lorry drivers would be over if Boris Johnson and his Tories would only make two decisions: first, they could swallow their misplaced pride and bring in drivers from the EU to cover the current shortfall; second, they should raise pay rates above subsistence level – otherwise there would be no reason for anybody to help out at all.
Looks like lorry drivers are yet another set of low-paid, "unskilled" workers that the country can't actually function without. It's almost like we should stop undervaluing workers and start paying people in accordance with their true contribution to society.
… but Johnson and his gang won’t impose these changes nationally because they themselves are not suffering. They don’t care about you and they never did.
So you see now that Brexit was created to engineer the very shortages you are experiencing today, deliberately, by Johnson and his Brexiteer Tories.
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It seems Boris Johnson’s government is thinking of letting convicted criminals – who are serving prison sentences – deliver lorry loads of goods to ease the driver shortage caused by Brexit (not Covid-19).
The option was tabled by the Association of Independent Meat Suppliers, which is apparently meeting with HM Prison Service this week (although I don’t know why. Most of the prisons are run by private companies these days, aren’t they?) to ask for lorry drivers to be prioritised on the Release on Temporary Licence (ROFL* ROTL) scheme.
The meeting comes after Nando’s had to close 45 fast food joints due to a shortage of chickens. In related news, McDonalds recently ran out of milkshakes.
And of course the nation is running out of patience.
But that didn’t stop ministers rejecting calls for temporary work visas to be handed to drivers from the European Union after overtures were made to Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng.
The response was clear – and clearly racist: “The British people repeatedly voted to end free movement and take back control of our immigration system and employers should invest in our domestic workforce instead of relying on labour from abroad.”
In other words: “We don’t want Johnny Foreigner coming over here and helping us out of a problem we created because of our racism against him! We’d rather cut off our noses to spite our faces!”
The statement continued: “We recently announced a package of measures to help tackle the HGV driver shortage, including plans to streamline the process for new drivers to gain their HGV licence and to increase the number of tests able to be conducted.”
In other words, new drivers will be trained to a lower standard, and tests will be of a lower quality, in order to put more drivers on our streets. And bring more death to our roads?
The alternative is the use of prisoners. You can read about it here and here.
Owain Gardner (below) makes some good points about it:
UK food firms beg ministers to let them use prisoners to ease labour shortages https://t.co/sga9fWDIhh WTF are we coming to when it reaches this point?
We’re coming to a point where we don’t mind who we trust to deliver our food – or what condition it may be in when it arrives. That’s why I don’t think such a scheme will work.
Which prisoners would the government allow to be used? What crimes would the government deem to be harmless enough to allow them to deliver food to us? How would they be supervised?
My guess is that the answers to these three questions are: any, all, and not at all.
And that creates a danger to us. It only takes one con with a chip on his shoulder to cause all kinds of problems. I’m sure I can leave the consequences to your imagination.
Oh, I’m exaggerating; overdramatising. Sure.
But we have prisons to stop dangerous people from doing dangerous things. This scheme will give them free rein to do it.
And I’m only wrong about this until something happens to prove me right.
*ROFL is of course an Internet acronym meaning “Rolling On the Floor Laughing”. I mention it because of its similarity to ROTL, and also to connect with Keir Starmer’s howler at his latest relaunch of his party leadership, in which he used the slogan “Winning The Future” (WTF). You’re probably aware that WTF is Internet-speak for “What The F***”.
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At least Metro couched its reporting of the government-sponsored lie by saying the crisis caused by the lack of lorry drivers “is thought to have been exacerbated by the so-called ‘pingdemic'”.
We know the shortage of lorry drivers has little to do with the government’s Covid-19 warning app on mobile phones, though, don’t we?
It happened because of Brexit; the drivers have all been sent back to the EU nations where they were born.
And now the army has been put on standby to deliver supplies to supermarkets.
That’s 2,000 qualified HGV drivers to make up an expected shortfall of 100,000. Does that seem realistic to you?
We all know the truth, and we’re all saying more or less the same thing:
A functioning country in peacetime DOES NOT NEED ITS ARMY TO DELIVER FOOD
— Eva Feltham 💙 3.5% REJOINER FBPE FBPA (@MyGineration) August 8, 2021
And they bloody love a flag! Who doesn’t want our food being delivered by people who put flags absolutely bloody everywhere?!
The country has been in disaster mode since Johnson was elected. Tragic decision by the electorate, most whom had already committed us to Brexit. Voted Leave + Voted Tory + would do both again – how many do we think quality? Ten million? More? Fewer?
Given the amount of HGV qualified drivers in the Army this is nothing but a sticking plaster. Same when they roll out the Green Goddesses. Desperate PR from a Govt trying to convince us it's in control.
— Manumission – Guitarist with Tout-á-Coup Jazz (@lockforward4) August 8, 2021
There is one conclusion to be drawn from this story.
It is that Metro is written by stenographers for government propagandists, rather than by proper reporters.
A lot of journalists — including one who had to post a “please retweet” apology yesterday — are jerking themselves silly over a piece that includes the following paragraph. I analyse reams of British journalism daily. The majority does not deliver on this hubristic ideal… pic.twitter.com/LSnyvmD1gV
“Journalists check our stories about what’s going on against the facts and give us different, more truthful angles.”
That certainly doesn’t seem to have happened here! A caveat that the problem “is thought to have been” due to the ‘pingdemic’ doesn’t cut any ice.
Aren’t we lucky to have journalism like that of Vox Political, here on the social media! And what a shame most people are too busy reading Metro to even give it a glance.
Here’s a thought:
Why not share this article with your friends, to show them what they’re missing?
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Empty shelves: in fact this shot is from the shortages when people were panic-buying before the first Covid lockdown. It should therefore be no surprise that Brandon Lewis is using Covid as an excuse for the consequences of Brexit.
How else are we to interpret Brandon Lewis’s admission that the European Union’s Single Market offers a “competitive advantages”?
Wasn’t the UK supposed to become more competitive by leaving the EU?
Lewis was responding to complaints that hundreds of products have disappeared from supermarket shelves in Northern Ireland after Brexit.
Hundreds of products have disappeared in shops, many online sellers have stopped supplying NI customers, and freight hauliers report bottlenecks caused by new EU paperwork needed before lorries can board ferries from Great Britain.
Lewis said the shortages were due to Covid-19, not Brexit. But we all expected that, didn’t we?
As soon as Covid arrived many of us said it was as plain as a pikestaff that the Government would use it as a cover for the consequences of Brexit and sure enough here is pathetic Tory pike-hand Brandon Lewis blaming Covid for problems with N.Ireland trade. #r4today
If that’s the case, then why this post-Brexit disruption when traders had been promised unfettered access between Great Britain and Northern Ireland?
He said – well, hear it for yourself. As an added bonus, you get Peter Stefanovic demonstrating that Lewis was lying:
As soon as Covid arrived many of us said it was as plain as a pikestaff that the Government would use it as a cover for the consequences of Brexit and sure enough here is pathetic Tory pike-hand Brandon Lewis blaming Covid for problems with N.Ireland trade. #r4today
In another interview, on Radio 4’s Today programme, he undermined the entire argument for leaving the European Union at all:
Brandon Lewis on R4 saying that because NI can trade as part of the single market it has a unique position in the world and – I’m quoting here – a “competitive advantage”
In other words, being in the SM is a good thing and mainland Britain is at a disadvantage because it’s not!
— Buck Frexit! 🇪🇺💜🐝💙🌍 #FBPE #ElectoralReform (@Beany_1) January 19, 2021
Wow.
Okay.
In that case, let’s challenge Lewis to put it to the test.
If he thinks Brexit has put Northern Ireland at a “competitive advantage”, let’s see him go there and stand in front of a supermarket explaining to disappointed shoppers why they are now better-off.
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