A very British famine
It's worse than you think
Chris Johns
Shortages of everything? The widely publicised gas shortage is one thing but the supply squeeze is hitting in lots of hidden areas. A painter & decorator acquaintance of mine turned up this morning to reclaim some filler he had left behind a couple of months ago after a decorating job chez moi. Luckily for him I hadn’t chucked it out.
It’s the stuff house painters use to fill in and smooth dents in walls prior to redecoration: standard ‘polyfilla’ material normally easily obtained from any DIY store or builders’ merchant. Except that the pro stuff this guy uses is now on a 3 month delivery time - he normally buys the stuff as and when he needs it.
Britain’s largest Turkey producer has warned of Christmas shortages of the unfortunate birds. The supply of Christmas trees is similarly threatened. Poultry and pork suppliers mutter darkly about the CO2 shortage needed in the slaughtering process (who knew?). One (natural) gas price leads to a shortage of another. Anything that needs CO2 (beer - Wetherspoons has reported some of its pubs running out!) is threatened. Only a recent bung of government (taxpayer) cash to one CO2 manufacturer has averted an immediate crisis.
A visitor to any British supermarket immediately notices empty shelves and small quantities of a whole range of goods. Is it Brexit? HGV drivers gone missing? The world economy suddenly restarting after the pandemic? ‘All of the above’ is the correct answer.
In Britain, as with all things these days, your preferred answer depends on where you sit in the Brexit culture forever war. The government - and Leave voters - blame the pandemic and anything other than Brexit. Empty petrol stations have nothing to do with Brexit, apparently, with the finger of blame firmly pointed elsewhere, most often at the haulage industry for ‘stoking unnecessary fear’.
You wouldn’t expect anything else from the rabid British media or from its vassal politicians. Iain Duncan Smith, ex leader of the Tory party (how unkind of social media to rename him Iain Dunkin Donut) echoed the Express:
Trade expert David Henig (@DavidHenigUK) responded in the only way an expert can (and will receive the usual treatment meted out these days to anyone who has deep domain knowledge consistent with expertise)
This is the key point: all that is happening because of Brexit was widely predicted by trade experts. And denounced as ‘project fear’.
Expertise is hard won and deeply out of fashion. Truth is often prosaic, complex and utterly beyond the comprehension of headline writers - let alone the people who pen the ‘articles’ underneath those shouty headlines. A dive into the mystery of HGV shortages reveals, for example, the impact of the exchange rate in particular and Brexit in general. That’s the opinion of one expert who points out that the HGV driver shortage predates Brexit but was shrinking rapidly until the referendum came along:
Why is there a driver shortage? ‘All of the above’ is the right answer. Here is what the BBC has come up with:
The haulage industry, at least, thinks that Brexit has got a lot to do with it. While lack of drivers is a pan-European issue, the key point is that it so much worse in Britain than elsewhere because the UK is the only country that has left the EU. Another key point is that this fact is utterly denied by the Government and their camp followers. Just in case you are not convinced, this is taken from the official statistics:
Because Covid is part of the answer, Brexit can be denied entirely. All great lies come wrapped around a kernel of truth.
The list of things being caused by Brexit is long and denied. @rdanielkeleman has documented most of them. Here are some that he has identified:
According to the FT it now takes 59 steps to import a petunia from the Netherlands. Britain’s gardeners are faced with shortages and rising prices. From the same source: hundreds of tons of crops are being left to rot in the fields and farmers plans for 2022 are for a much reduced planting season. All thanks to widespread, post-Brexit, labour shortages. Estimates vary (they didn’t know how many were here in the first place) but it has been reported that 200,000 EU citizens have left the UK.
School trips to the Continent are being scaled back because children now need passports rather than ID cards. The trials and tribulations of many exporters, notably for food products like cheese have been widely reported. France has claimed 2000 finance jobs since Brexit. Marks & Spencer has closed its French stores, citing Brexit.
Since Brexit, EU exports to the UK are up, a lot, trade going the other way is down. A container of fish cost £3000 pre-Brexit and costs £14000 now. JD Sports, the retailer, has leased a lot of space in Lille to get around ‘the adverse consequences of Brexit’.
The British government has had to delay, again, setting up checks on imports from the EU. Exports from the UK to the EU now have multiple, costly, checks. Boris Johnson claimed BMW would force Germany to go easy on the UK. Britain is no longer in the league table of top 10 most important trade partners for the Germans.
Remember, not all barriers to trade come in the form of tariffs. Indeed, in the 21st century, relatively few barriers to trade are tariff-based. Only in the 19th century minds of Britains mercantilists are tariffs that significant. “Take Back Control’ was the slogan wot won it for Leave. Many an EU official is laughing: ‘they have ceded complete control of the border to Brussels’.
Fireworks stocks for Britain’s traditional 5th November Guy Fawkes ‘celebrations’ are said to be as much as 70% below where they should be. Credit-card and payment firms like PayPal are increasing cross-border transaction fees, now that they are free of pesky EU regulations. Mobile phone roaming charges are back for Britons in the EU.
The UK environment agency is preparing to allow water companies to dump raw sewage because of post-Brexit water-treatment chemicals.
I could go on. Anyone not yet convinced is directed to Mr Keleman’s twitter feed. But not the British press or the BBC where all of this goes under reported.
The government’s response? Johnson: “it’s like during an ad break, when everyone switches on the kettle all at once’. One presumes that calling in the army to drive petrol tankers and issuing 5000 temporary visas for foreign HGV drivers is a recognition of sorts that it is a wee bit more serious than this.
How much does all of this matter? As ITV’s Robert Peston argues, if this persists for much longer without seriously denting Johnson’s poll ratings, the normal rules of politics will have been suspended. The only time Blair’s ‘New Labour’ government got into serious trouble was during a previous fuel shortage. Presumably, one or two people will, eventually, notice the outcome versus what was promised:
The broken promises of Brexit, incompetence and sleaze may, or may not, prove to be Johnson’s undoing:
That last Tweet, from an ex-Treasury mandarin, speaks to the Tories latest wheeze: increase the costs on young people to pay for whatever Johnson fantasises about next for his great ‘Levelling up’ project. Similar arguments apply to the increase in National Insurance contributions. And the cuts to Universal Credit, Britain’s way of helping poor people.
Will any of this cut across the tribalism that defines modern Britain? Watch this space.
Excellent article!
Thanks!