Well, there's still more than four months to the end of the extension to the extended extension of the transition period, and already the Army are being brought in to keep the supermarkets from running out of food.
Anyone tired of all the winning yet?
View attachment 34797
Isn't it less supply and more
distribution? Regardless, it doesn't look good.
PM Johnson's "Let it (the Pandemic) go" plan has done marvelously at spreading the virus, which sidelined drivers for trucks (called lorry's by the Brits for some reason). Again, this is one of those, well if you are vax'd, why should you care issues. Well, we cared and now there are gaps on the grocery shelves, because the food that should be on them, hasn't been delivered. I'm noticing gaps growing again state side in Ohio. Frozen waffles and confectionaries apparently are stuck in customs or something.
But you know, freedom is awesome. The freedom to wait for food to be delivered is sweet!
Is there anything more absurd than a grocery shortage without a food supply shortage?!
The Covid "pingdemic" is a desperate propaganda tactic, designed to conceal the fact that the problem is Brexit.
And it's a supply problem - not of produce, but of labour. Specifically, blue-collar labour.
The EU depends on free movement of workers, with the middle class white-collar workforce in the UK, Germany and France being supported by a working class of tradesmen from Eastern and Southern Europe. Brexit sent away all those Eastern Europeans from the UK, and it turns out that having them 'over here stealing our jobs' was far better than having them over there not doing those jobs.
Almost nobody in England is ready, willing and able to pick fruit or harvest vegetables, but that's a minor issue as the UK largely depends on imports for her food supply anyway.
The big issues are in the skilled blue-collar sector. Tradesmen such as plumbers and electricians cannot be created overnight; And the UK hasn't had enough home grown skilled tradesmen for decades.
But where the shortage is most pressing and noticeable is haulage. The UK depended on European truck drivers, and Brexit made commercial driving to and from the UK undesirable on many levels, and commercial driving within the UK illegal for non UK residents.
The UK has an estimated shortage of 100,000 truck drivers, and this shortage cannot be explained by Covid - Germany, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, etc., all have Covid, but none have this problem.
The problem is that when you 'send them back where they came from', you can no longer depend on them to work for you.
And there are few people in the UK who want to do such a horrible job for anything close to the wages on offer, and even those who can be incentivised to do so by increasing wages and handing out bonuses are not able to start at once - it takes weeks or months to get a license, and at least a couple of years to get the experience and skills to do the job well enough to be useful and profitable to an employer.
The only viable solution is to import skilled drivers (and other trades - a shortage of plumbers and electricians isn't as visible or as urgent, but it's nevertheless a significant problem). They won't come from the EU, because they're not allowed to - the Home Office refuses to add truck drivers to the working visa categories that would allow it, and because even if they did, it's easier for EU citizens to get work in (for example) Germany, and the pay and conditions are the same or better there. So ultimately the UK has now got to choose between serious shortages of essential workers, or mass immigration mostly from non-EU countries - which is EXACTLY what the dumb shit Brexit voters and the dumb shit government they elected are most adamantly opposed to.
What a clusterfuck. If only someone had mentioned back in 2016 that it might not all be easy and glorious.
