We fecking told you so. Brexit making us suffer.

[flashbac]

Project Fear you said. Sunlit Uplands you said. Sovereignty you said. Can I buy food and heat my house with Sovereignty? Can I put sovereignty in my car's fuel tank? Can I?

It was common sense that this would happen. Common SENSE.

The entire thing is the making of the Tories, where they impoverished so many and made things so shit that it opened the door for spivs like Farage to exploit, and ultimately Johnson, King of Con-artists.

With energy we are no longer part of the internal energy market which affects the way we trade and buy it making it more expensive.

Also as a 'third' country , and thanks to Brexit , the deal agreed with the Norwegians to import more gas can be cancelled at any time and the supply reallocated to an EU state requesting gas. This is due to their ' softer ' deal with the EU which includes prioritisation of exports to any EU country over 'third' countries. The reality of 'taking back control' and global Britain.

With regard to the EU driver shortages can you point out the specific EU countries currently experiencing empty supermarket shelves, restaurants/pubs supply chain issues and petrol stations closing? (I am not seeing this in the EU countries I have been in recently at least.

If that 400k across the EU number is really correct then Brexit will mean the specific U.K. shortage will be the last to be rectified and we are going to be **ed for a long time to come. Also 400,000 divided by 27 countries is just under 15,000 each whereas the UK has a shortage of 100,000!

@EatSleepRantRepeat

If people had spent the last 5 years doing proper planning instead of batching and trying to overturn the result, recruiting and training British people in shortage jobs, and paying people decent wages in the first place we wouldn't be in such a mess. I'm not willing to live in a country which runs on exploiting poor Eastern Europeans and migrants because we won't pay the going rate for goods and services.

Exactly This

@AlexaShutUp

I agree that most people knew what they were voting for. We were warned about all of this in advance, it was discussed a lot. I hope that all of the leavers are enjoying it now.

Yes, so there was plenty of time to do something about it and change the outcome, but easier to just drift along not planning for change and then gleefully yell “we told you so”.

no we didn't pay the going rate for the job / hours and conditions at all in many if the cimpanies , speak to the drivers

Yes we did. And I have. Pay has never been the pressing concern. In every industry there are a few who will rip off employees, but largely, pay has not been a factor stopping people joining, or making people leave the profession. Working conditions are a problem and need to be resolved, but again, that has been true for decades, long before Eastern European drivers came on the scene.

The myth about Eastern European workers depressing wages is provably untrue and was a key argument from Farage et al. Repeating it now helps nobody. The only reason pay will go up is to react to a crisis. They will not remain high and indeed, most are trying to attract staff using one off bonuses, rather than long term wage hikes because there is no world where a truck driver should be paid the same as a senior manager.

"@walksen the companies can also make these changes , the ones who aren't short will have better conditions"

Companies do not pay reasonable wages if they can avoid it and if lax regulations allow them to get away with it. It's bad for shareholder value. Too many people in this country are exploited by the market, paying wages that have barely changed for years with the taxpayer subsidising the exploitative companies with the benefits system and it has got a lot worse since the financial crash. At the same time we now have the highest tax burden ever in this country.

Many people are looking at this from their own Brexit/Anti-Brexit viewpoint, let's have a little balance. Until earlier this year I used to work for a company that dealt with haulage, and there has been a shortage of drivers for some time now. There were campaigns and plans to try to recruit ex-service personel and various other plans but the big reason for a lack of drivers were poor wages over a span of time. The fact is only 20% of the current shortage of drivers is down to Brexit. We'd still have a massive problem anyway. Its also very likely that the stagnant wages of the last 20 years was enabled by Eastern European workers. We might not be having that much of a problem if after the massive EU expansion of 20 years ago there wasn't immediately freedom of movement for those people. Look, the EU does some good things but to conclude that everything on the lorry driver front would be OK if we were still in the EU is ignorant. Ignorant of the current situation, and ignorant of the historical situation.

Yes, so there was plenty of time to do something about it and change the outcome, but easier to just drift along not planning for change and then gleefully yell “we told you so”.

Actually, we did plan. We did extensive Brexit preparedness work in my part of the industry I work in. We did risk management, we assessed supply chains and put mitigation in place where it was identified as a problem. We increased project contingencies and wrote all the Brexit stuff in to contracts. But you know what? A huge part of the work we did was a complete waste of time, because right up until the very last minute, we didn’t actually know what Brexit would mean. The deal was signed days before we left and until then, a no deal Brexit was a real possibility. The difference between what we needed to plan for in both events was chalk and cheese.

We were still planning for Brexit even when the government scrapped their own preparations in 2019.

Anyone who says people did not plan for Brexit have not been at the sharp end of a business for the last 5 years.

Brexit-voters and BoJo and those on the right have made the UK the laughingstock of the world.

it truly is a shitshow.

Just a small summary of where are with Brexit currently:

*Raw sewage adorns our beaches after discharge into rivers...
*Border chaos...
*Customs meltdown.
*NI thrown under a bus..
*Empty shelves & shortages leads to..
*Price rises everywhere!
*Drug & bottle shortages...
*No HGV drivers...
*Subway, Mac D's & KFC caught short...
*Banks can't do business in Europe..
*Global businesses leave UK.
*Roaming charges are back..
*No freedom of movement..
*Crops rotting in fields..
*Seafood industry decimated..
*Fishing grounds out of bounds...
*Student & work visas almost impossible to get.
*Erasmus - gone.
*Pet passports dead...
*Roaming charges back .
*Exports to Europe (the world's largest trading bloc, and richest economy) dropping off a cliff.
*2.9% drop of GDP and £800m loss a week for the economy
*£170,000,000,000 Quantitive easing (impact of this on people the wrong side of the asset owning divide has been pretty devastating)
*Gov't position in NI unacceptable to Sinn Fein (the ira)

I have to ask those that voted Brexit, is this what you expected or voted for? Because what we have looks nothing like what anyone in their right mind would have been content with? I’m not expecting too much in the way of Bregret but perhaps an acknowledgment that we’ve **ed it up.

The fact is only 20% of the current shortage of drivers is down to Brexit.

Even if that is the case (and I believe that is a conservative number) the fact is, we were still able to operate effectively before we lost that 20%. It was tight, working right up to the margin, but it was manageable.

big reason for a lack of drivers were poor wages over a span of time

Several surveys carried out over the past decade have only about a third of drivers citing poor pay as a reason for job dissatisfaction.

I agree with all you say, OP, but we have to look at how we got to a place where people would follow Farage asif he were a kind of Pied Piper, regardless of expert opinion or even common sense.

Wealth inequality. People outside London/SE feeling marginalised and disenfranchised. The middle-class-liberal bubble of the media.

The Remain campaign failed to target the people it needed to - it was clear there was a general assumption by people living in the aforementioned bubble that Remain would prevail - the shock when Brexit prevailed was palpable.

I was a Remainer, I am now a Rejoiner, but I think it will be some time before that can even begin to happen.

Yawn, yawn, yawn, yawn, yawn

Yawn, yawn, yawn, yawn

Life’s hard and then you die

@EatSleepRantRepeat

If people had spent the last 5 years doing proper planning instead of batching and trying to overturn the result, recruiting and training British people in shortage jobs, and paying people decent wages in the first place we wouldn't be in such a mess. I'm not willing to live in a country which runs on exploiting poor Eastern Europeans and migrants because we won't pay the going rate for goods and services.

Couldn't we have just voted in a government that increased the minimum wage and looked after migrants better rather than trashing our entire economy, standard of living and essentially way of life for the next 15-20 years? We're all going to be much much poorer and have a lot less opportunity dues to this for a very long time. These past few months are just the beginning really, wait until the need for full customs declarations and controls gets introduced next year.

Not really sure why people blame the EU for richer countries exploiting cheap labour. Domestic governments have every power to increase minimum wages and legislate against exploitation of labour.

Brexit will probably actually make it worse, our electoral system is heavily biased towards right-wing Tory governments and their ideology towards workers isn't exactly progressive.

@Chloemol

Yawn, yawn, yawn, yawn, yawn

Yawn, yawn, yawn, yawn

Life’s hard and then you die

No one is forcing you to comment.

Disaster Capitalism is well underway…

Not really sure why people blame the EU for richer countries exploiting cheap labour. Domestic governments have every power to increase minimum wages and legislate against exploitation of labour.

Because that's what movement of labour is for. The fact that middle class people can travel and send their kids to universities abroad or work in a management position elsewhere is just the carrot to keep them contented.

Free movement of labour, the labour force that can be increased or discarded at will and moved where you want it when you need it, along with movement of capital - these things are the wet dreams of the capitalist class.

The EU is a trade organisation, it exists for the benefit, first and foremost, of those who own and run trade.

What is quite funny, and yet disheartening, is that they have now managed to convince so many that wanting to control that is somehow right wing, when the right wing have always been the people that promoted it, and the left have tended to resist it.

It's been quite the coup.

the people who say that we should train British people to take on jobs as HGV drivers and in the food industry are not being realistic.

Even if you look at Germany (where the pay and working conditions for HGV drivers are vastly superior to that in the UK), they are also facing a shortage- trans.info/en/germany-is-desperately-looking-for-drivers-due-to-staff-shortages-20-percent-of-trucks-are-at-a-standstill-97306 That is not to say we wouldn't face a problem even if we are in the EU, but not having that crucial population of Eastern European drivers means the supply chain problems are much much worse than in the UK.

Its also naive to think that Brits would automatically start training en masse to be HGV drivers/work in the hospitality industry/food industry if the pay is better. In most developed countries that i can think of, these jobs are staffed primarily by immigrants. Maybe this isn't a good thing, but in a developed economy like the UK, every child gets free education, loans to go to university etc. There is a big problem with educational inequality but it means sufficient numbers of children have aspirations to take on more 'middle class jobs' . My Dh grew up needing free school meals and raised by a mum who was the sole breadwinner but he got a Masters degree and was unemployed for some time after graduation. He didn't immediately sign up to work as a barista or for minimum wage to bridge the gap; he stayed with his mum, kept applying and eventually got that graduate job that paid £46k. Its similar for his sisters; when they found it difficult to get jobs after university, they went for overseas internship programmes/volunteer abroad programmes and the grant money (due to their low household income) covered their costs. As a result, none of them have ever worked in minimum wage jobs despite their mum's income being in the bottom 5% of the country according to IFS. I appreciate that a lot of posters would probably tell me that this is not their experience and of course it would not apply to everyone, but a local Brit has a lot more options with regards to jobs compared to an immigrant without family here and who would be homeless without a job. I know Italians with Masters Degrees who work at Caffe Nero because its much better than being in a country with a 50% unemployment rate. DH also has a younger sister who doesn't have any GCSEs, she doesn't need to get a job as she is able to support herself on UC as she can stay with parents.

So if Brits have more choice re jobs than an immigrant, you can bet most of them are going to settle for the easier jobs as opposed to HGV driver jobs (where you don't see your family for days) or minimum wage jobs in the hospitality industry. The feedback from employers was that the majority of applications for jobs in places like Pret were from Europeans, not local Brits. This is why most HGV drivers are in their 40s and 50s and few young people want to take it up even if the advertised pay is high. My friend who is a solicitor posted an article about it ( I know his pay is lower than what they are advertising for HGV drivers) with the comment ' who would want to be a lawyer!'. But his conclusion was still that- he preferred being a lawyer to being a HGV driver cos money wasn't everything!

You do realise you are all part of society and are equally responsible for making it successful or fail don't you? Moaning away and blaming politics is comfortable I'm sure, but it's hardly going to set the world on fire is it.

Btw I am not saying that we should remove the welfare safeguards that make it possible for Brits to have more options! I think its a great thing that we have a welfare system and its a sign we are an advanced economy.

We just need to be realistic about the number of immigrants that we need to do the jobs that British people are not willing to do.

There are generally huge pinch points/sticking points or whatever you want to call them during every leadership term.

Some of them we will look back on as history (as we didn’t experience them). Some we will look back on as “history’” as we were alive, but not old enough to experience how they felt. Some we will look back on with understanding as they did (or didn’t) impact us.

Every version of government, in “our times” has impacted us.

MSM doesn’t help matters - as highlighted by queue for petrol. And SM doesn’t help either. It’s a blessing and a curse. Easy to find info , advice, tips. But can fuel anxiety etc. It’s like a snowball of fear.

Brexit hasn’t helped, necessarily, but it’s not the sole reason for where we are now.

Brexit is an expensive, beauricratic nightmare. But worse than that, it has deprived us of useful people, divided us and weakened us as a country.

@onlychildhamster

Btw I am not saying that we should remove the welfare safeguards that make it possible for Brits to have more options! I think its a great thing that we have a welfare system and its a sign we are an advanced economy.

We just need to be realistic about the number of immigrants that we need to do the jobs that British people are not willing to do.

It's not really a solution though, is it? It depends on people coming from societies that are poor, it makes us dependent on those poor societies so we can harvest their workers in order to have people to do the shitty jobs.

It's just a class system that we don't have to take responsibility for. We need those poor places so we can have those workers, just like we need them to supply us cheap tvs and clothes.

Which is one of the reasons it really sticks in the craw of people when they are told they just hate immigrants if they supported Brexit, while out of the other side of their mouths the same people are complaining that we need access to a cheap, plentiful underclass of workers.

A society that can't fulfill it's own need for workers has a problem, it's an unsustainable situation.

@LobsterNapkin there would always be poorer countries. We should absolutely crack down on exploitative practices on immigrant workers but
it was their decision to come to the UK. It does benefit them and most of them had probably calculated that it was better than staying in their own countries.

We need workers due to the ageing population in the UK and rather than increase the UK birth rate, it's better to import immigrants who would have been born anyway.

I am an immigrant btw.

I suspect the lorry drivers applying for jobs paying £50k plus, with decent working conditions, are not complaining.

The EU allowed us to keep inflation down by underpaying huge swathes of semi skilled and unpaid workers, as we could import them from countries with GDP per capita a fraction of ours.

If you are a massive fan of the majority of the last 20+ years economic growth going to the top 10% (and none to the bottom quintile), you will detest Brexit.