It’s eight weeks to Christmas, and in a perfect storm of Brexit, Covid, and supply chain problems, the shit is hitting the fan. Again.
It started with the HGV drivers. The pictures of empty shelves in supermarkets and queues around the filling stations have made the news everywhere. The UK is about 100,000 HGV drivers short; 40,000 of those were Europeans that didn’t come back after Brexit & Covid19, 30,000 were driving tests that didn’t get done last year due to Covid19. Then the meat industry warned that they are about 20% short of the usual staff, just in time for the Christmas business that starts around late summer. And to top it all off, 14 energy firms have gone under this year, leaving their customers guessing who will take them on.
The driver shortage made the biggest splash, but it is not just affecting supermarkets. Catering firms delivering to schools and nursing homes can’t deliver to them, IKEA and other homeware stores are running out of stock in every depot. Buses in public transport are cancelled, because drivers start working for hauliers instead. GPs in England were told to half the number of blood tests because not enough vials are available. And, of course, filling stations – which in turn means teachers, nurses, just abut everyone, can’t make it to work. The world-wide issue of empty shipping containers not being collected has finally reached these shores as well – Felixstowe, largest industrial port in the UK handling 36% of the country’s container traffic, has capacity for 145,000 containers. At the moment, 50,000 empty ones are lying about there waiting to be picked up.
It’s not like this happened out of the blue and totally unexpected. In June, the Road Haulage Association warned about the lack of drivers. In July, the Association of Independent Meat Suppliers said that a fifth of its workforce was gone, especially qualified vets for the now necessary health certificates, and butchers for the abattoirs. The combination of no HGV drivers and not enough fruit pickers & packers at this point created already 48 tonnes of food waste each week – the stuff was there, it just didn’t get off the fields and into the shops.
In August, the first pubs ran out of beer. No drivers, no deliveries, and the kegs ran dry. Both KFC and Nandos ran out of chicken and had to change the menu or close restaurants, McDonald’s didn’t have any milkshakes to sell. The poultry industry alone was 7,000 workers short at that point, out of usually 40,000 employed. In September, Coca-Cola and Diageo joined the chorus, and dairy farmers were told to throw away the milk because there were no tankers to pick it up.
And what do our glorious leaders in their Westminster bubble do about it?
First, blame the industries, of course.
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.
Fair enough, but that’s only half the story – the conditions on the road here are simply shit. Unlike any other European country, there are no proper rest stations for HGVs in the UK, and if you can find a service station that could accommodate HGVs, they charge £30 just to stand there. In Germany, rest stations for lorries are called “Autohof,” and are exclusively for HGVs. No matter which Autobahn you drive down or up, you will find one after every second or third junction. In the Netherlands, rest stops are the size of small towns, with a separate area reserved for lorries and their drivers, toilets & showers included. As far as I remember, the road network is still the responsibility of the Department for Transport, not the hauliers themselves. But it is of course easier to pass the buck.
Second step is to introduce longer lorries, so-called Longer-Semi Trailers, LSTs while relaxing the testing parameters for HGV licenses.
Normal artics are 13 metres long, the new ones have another 2 metres on them. The Department for Transport started a 15-year trial in 2012 with 2,600 of these but decided nine years later to scrap that because it had “enough data.” I am fairly certain that these LSTs never drove deliveries into town and city centres – they would have gotten stuck at just about every roundabout there is. How they gonna ease the current situation I don’t know, especially considering they are to be deployed only next year. In addition, the HGV driving test is to be relaxed. No more off-road manoeuvres, and in order to drive an articulated truck, you no longer need to know how to drive a rigid one. Refresher courses to keep your license are no longer necessary, either. That is on top of extending the driving time to 10 hours, before drivers have to take a rest. Not that this rule was thoroughly enforced before.
Desperate times, desperate measures
And finally, they’re getting desperate.
A month ago, the government announced it would issue 5,000 emergency visas for HGV drivers and 5,500 for poultry workers. But only until Christmas Eve, mind you; the English want to spend the holidays among themselves, thank you very much. The British Chamber of Commerce called it “throwing a thimble of water on a bonfire.” The EU union for drivers put it a tad more succinctly:
The EU workers we speak to will not go to the UK for a short-term visa to help the UK out of the shit they created themselves.
And why should they. It’s like a slap in the face after Brexit and the government-sanctioned xenophobia that came with it. The pay is still abysmal, the conditions as well. On top of that, they need find to accommodation somehow, and no landlord is letting for less than six months. And then they’d be kicked out of the country on Christmas Eve with no way of getting home in time.
The most bonkers idea so far was to ask the Germans living here to help out. Specifically the Germans, because driving licenses issued there before 1999 allow you to drive anything up to 7,5 tonnes. Not that you train on that, but that pink piece of paper in your wallet says you could.
I have that kind of license, but didn’t receive the letter. Honestly, I’m OK with that. And in true blunder mode, the exact same letter went out to so-called undocumented migrants who do not have the right to work in this country. And they’re not getting a visa in return, btw. Technically speaking, the DfT is asking these people to break the law. An “incitement to commit a criminal offence,” in Legalese. Any lawyer out there knows how to use that?
After the shitstorm that followed the shitty offer to foreign workers, they extended the visa: poultry workers can now stay until 31 December, HGV drivers until the end of February next year, those with a tanker license until March. So far, 300 lorry drivers have applied; 20 (no, really, twenty) visas have been issued. Plus, another 800 were made available for butchers. But only after it became clear that about 120,000 pigs and piglets would have to be culled by the farmers themselves. Since this would not have been done in an abattoir, the meat is by law considered unfit for human consumption and would have to be discarded. There are more foodbanks in this country than there are McDonald’s franchises, and they have to throw it away. Literally. You cannot make it up.
Plan B
Add to the shortage of food and other items like toys for Christmas that don’t reach the shops an explosion in energy costs. The wholesale price for natural gas rose 600% this year. So far, 14 suppliers calculated wrong, couldn’t pay the price, and went bust. Their customers are taken on by other, bigger suppliers, but will have to pay the difference in tariff. Some estimates claim that combined gas & electricity bills could reach £1,700 per household next year. That is more than £140 per month. To put that into context: The standard amount for Universal Credit without housing or childcare benefit for someone over 25 and living alone is £324.84 a month. This is no longer a case of turning down the heating when you leave the house, this is now a decision of “heating or eating” over the winter months.
Even my letting agent contacted me last week in an email and told me to be prepared. Due to shortages in material and workforce, they couldn’t guarantee essential repairs would be done over the winter months:
I have all these items, no problem, but I have never been asked before by a landlord to have all these items just in case in the first place. It makes you think, to say the least.
But the scariest part in all this is the rising Covid19 case number. We now have 45,000 new cases each day, with around 250 dead each day. It is not as bad as it was with the first wave 19 months ago, but it is bad enough to overload an over-worked and burnt-out NHS. The list of patients in England waiting for non-Covid19 related treatment is now 5.9 million strong. In sheer numbers, that’s more than the entire population of Scotland and just a bit less then 10% of the entire population of the entire UK. And the government tells us, there is no need for Plan B, because Plan A is working. Plan A, btw, consists of doing exactly – nothing. The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) said a week ago that actions have to be taken now to avoid another full-on catastrophe, measures like working from home again, wearing masks indoors, vaccine certificates. To which the shitgibbon-in-Chief replied:
We are continuing with the plan we set out in July. We are watching the numbers very carefully every day.
As if looking at a chart he doesn’t understand changes the outcome of what’s described in said chart. This is not a rendition of “Men Staring at Goats,” FFS, this is again life and death. Haven’t they learned anything?!?!
My suspicion is that they want to a) get COP26 over the line without having to comply with restrictions, and b) wait as long as inhumanly possible with introducing new measures in order to save some money: A scenario published in September by the Treasury but kept on the d/l suggests that 5 months of working from home again would cost the economy £18b. That’s not even a full-on lockdown, that’s just WFH. When they finally come around to doing something, anything, daily case and death rates will have doubled, vaccinated or not. And once again, instead of protecting people’s lives so they can get back to work again and keep the economy going, this government is rather risking a new death record in order to save a buck. Once again, money is more worth to these vultures than human life.
But regardless of Plan A or Plan B, it will most likely end in Plan F, where we are all fucked. There is already talk of having to restrict Christmas to your own household, if nothing changes – pretty much the same as when they locked us in last year at the last minute. And if you thought you could get away for a short break, think again – Morocco no longer accepts flights from the UK, Germany and Netherlands due to their Covid numbers. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg; judging by the numbers, it is only a matter of time before Europe tells the Brits where to stick it over Christmas and beyond in terms of setting down there.
Merry Christmas, everyone.