Many British petrol stations are still dry after a chaotic week that saw panic-buying, fights at the pumps and drivers hoarding fuel in water bottles after an acute shortage of truck drivers strained supply chains to breaking point.

Shortages of workers in the wake of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic have sown disarray through some sectors of the economy, disrupting deliveries of fuel and medicines and leaving up to 150,000 pigs backed up on farms.

British ministers have for days insisted the crisis is abating or even over, though retailers said more than 2000 petrol stations were dry and Reuters reporters across London and southern England said dozens of pumps were still closed.

Queues of often irate drivers snaked back from those petrol stations that were still open in London on Friday.

“I am completely, completely fed up. Why is the country not ready for anything?” said Ata Uriakhil, a 47-year-old taxi driver from Afghanistan who was first in a line of more than 40 cars outside a closed Sainsbury’s petrol station in Richmond.

“When is it going to end?” Uriakhil said.

“The politicians are not capable of doing their jobs properly. The government should have been prepared for this crisis. It is just incompetence.”

Read more: https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/uk-news/2021/10/01/uk-petrol-shortage-continues/

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LONDON — Long lines outside gas stations. Panicked drivers fighting one another as the pumps run dry. Soldiers deployed to distribute fuel across the country. And in the background, the pandemic stretching on, food rotting in fields and families sinking into poverty. This is Britain in 2021.

Not long ago, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson lifted all pandemic restrictions in July, the mood across the country was cautiously optimistic. A successful vaccine rollout had finally restored cherished freedoms to daily life: visiting friends and family in their homes, socializing with strangers, eating in restaurants. Cases of the virus continued to multiply, but the number of hospitalizations and deaths fell markedly. The nightmare, it seemed, was over.

But any sense of normality has been banished in the past few weeks. A dramatic fuel crisis, caused in large part by a lack of truck drivers and which at its peak forced around a third of all gas stations to close, is only the most glaring concern.

A convergence of problems — a global gas shortage, rising energy and food prices, supply-chain issues and the Conservatives’ decision to slash welfare — has cast the country’s future in darkness. Even Mr. Johnson, known for his boosterish optimism and bonhomie, has struggled to make light of the situation.

The panic of the past week, which recalled old memories (and myths) about the tumultuous late 1970s, was a long time coming. For many months, industry leaders across the economy have warned about chronic labor shortages — of truck drivers, yes, but also fruit pickers, meat processors, waiters and health care workers — disrupting supply chains and impeding businesses.

The signs of breakdown are everywhere: empty shelves in supermarkets, food going to waste in fields, more and more vacancy posters tacked to the windows of shops and restaurants. Meat producers have even called on the government to let them hire prisoners to plug the gap.

One of the main causes of this predicament is Brexit, or at least the government’s handling of Brexit. Britain’s protracted departure from the bloc, undertaken without any real effort by Mr. Johnson to ensure a smooth transition, led to an exodus of European workers — a process then compounded by the pandemic. As many as 1.3 million overseas nationals left Britain between July 2019 and September 2020.

Yet as it became clear that Britain faced substantial shortages in labor, the Conservatives refused to respond. They bloviated, calling it a “manufactured situation.” They prevaricated, assuring the public there was nothing to worry about. And, seeing the chance to recast their negligence as benevolence, they claimed their failure to act was because they wanted companies to pay British workers more, instead of relying on cheap foreign labor.

This alibi for inaction is unconvincing. In the Netherlands, for example, new legislation has improved the pay and working conditions for truck drivers. In Britain, conditions remain among the worst in Europe. The government’s belated response — offering 5,000 temporary visas for drivers from E.U. nations — is too little, too late.

Instead of higher wages, the British public have so far encountered only higher prices. Inflation has risen faster than at any point since 1997 and the climbing price of gas globally is placing further strain on people’s lives, making energy more expensive than anywhere in Europe.

Whereas other governments, in Spain and Italy, have ensured that struggling families are protected from rising costs, the Conservatives have offered no such clemency. Three million households in Britain already live in “fuel poverty,” made to choose between heating and eating in the winter. After the Conservatives raise a cap on energy prices in October, that number is expected to increase by a further half million.

Mr. Johnson nonetheless claims to have given British Conservatism a kinder face. He speaks rousingly of “leveling up” and “turbocharging” left-behind communities. But the behavior of his government suggests otherwise.

On Sept. 30, it ended a program that compensated people for up to 80 percent of lost income during the pandemic. And on Oct. 6, the Conservatives will cut Universal Credit, Britain’s all-encompassing welfare program, by 20 pounds, or $27, a week — just when more people than ever rely on it. The largest single reduction to the welfare state in British history, it’s forecast to push half a million more people below the poverty line, including 200,000 children. (A newly announced winter hardship fund worth £500 million, or $673 million, will do little to soften a cut 12 times its size.)

This grim confluence, from fuel shortages to spiraling poverty, has been described by many as a “perfect storm.” Yet the metaphor erases the active role the Conservatives — and in particular, the prime minister — have played in orchestrating these foreboding conditions. The bleak winter ahead is of their making.

But Mr. Johnson is unlikely to bear the consequences of his actions. His government, resting on a large majority, remains secure. And for him, crises are always opportunities. A master shape-shifter, unburdened by any sense of accountability or honesty, he thrives in conditions of adversity. The rest of the country won’t be so lucky.

Samuel Earle (@swajcmanearle) is a British journalist whose writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic and The New Republic, among other publications.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/britain-fuel-crisis-johnson.html

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By Seth Ferris

The only way people like Boris Johnson can communicate with others is to laugh and joke and mess around all the time, no matter what else they may have to offer. This affliction does come with some advantages – people like him can be popular, until their jokes offend the wrong people, and seen as clever. Johnson is also not short of girlfriends.

But eventually others say the dreaded word “and?” They want to know what comes next. When there isn’t anything, approval gives way to disappointment and then to open hostility. No one wants to be associated with someone they think has less substance than they.

That is why the rest of the world is watching with dismay as BoJo the Clown goes on and on without anyone being able to stop him. Everyone has friends and enemies both domestically and internationally, and the louder you are, the more you have of each. But BoJo, unique amongst British Prime Ministers, doesn’t make sense.

There are other entertainers in world politics, such as Beppe Grillo in Italy and Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine. They should see the populist anti-politician Johnson as a kindred spirit, but they want nothing to do with him. Other leaders considered unpopular or beyond the pale, such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, develop cult followings amongst the disaffected in other countries, but BoJo hasn’t done that either, even in places where they might laugh at his jokes.

So with him in charge, and rapidly turning the UK into the untouchable vacuum he himself will become, you would expect a lot of people to already be saying “and?” They are. But not enough people are listening, because they don’t know how to make people think there should be an “and?”, just like drug addicts can’t understand what life free from their addiction can be.

Everything BoJo is fighting against is still showing itself worth fighting against. His jokes only stops being funny when people start respecting the victims more than they respect the mocker. In principle, people do, but as yet there is no sign of what comes next, and how the UK can recover from where electing Johnson would always inevitably have led it.

Stating the Too Obvious

The quickest way to recover UK’s standing, and moves beyond electing the likes of BoJo, is to rejoin the EU. It would put food back on the shelves, and petrol in the pumps, and make the UK an attractive destination for those who want to invest and create jobs.

Those who disagree can claim that the UK’s problems are the result of other factors, such as a global supply chain crisis, the pandemic and even bad weather. These factors are not affecting other countries, either in the same way or to the same degree. Brexit is ultimately responsible for UK’s current problems, as the government has tacitly admitted by trying to give special visas to EU national lorry drivers and poultry workers.

When even the Daily Express, a staunchly pro-Brexit newspaper, calls its own Brexit predictions lies the cat is out of the bag. The Brexit outcomes are not what they were supposed to be, and if other countries aren’t experiencing them, Brexit is to blame.

But how is the UK going to rejoin the EU? The EU will have to approve any application, and that is not a foregone conclusion. No one will want the UK, large as it is, upping and leaving at the slightest provocation, as it threatened to do many times before it actually did.

Nor has anyone addressed the fact that the lies at the heart of the anti-EU campaign have become part of the British culture. It is accepted routinely, even by Europhiles, that immigration is making people homeless and unemployed, and the UK was having laws imposed on it by the EU.

People can see the practical consequences of leaving the EU, but the political objections to being part of it remain. It will take a lot longer for the UK to return to its post-World War Two spirit of welcoming everyone who wants to contribute, no matter where they are from, and treating them as partners in that process.

At present, getting rid of the shortages isn’t a good enough reason to return to the EU, if these other problems will allegedly return. Only a concerted effort to change the culture will enable the UK to stomach the EU, and vice versa. But this will require leadership, not waiting for the wind to change, and there isn’t any.

The Labour Party is always saying “and?” to Boris Johnson. But it would, wouldn’t it? We’ve seen and heard it before, its time has gone.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has repeatedly said that he won’t try and get the UK back into the EU. He is only offering refining the deals which the UK government negotiated and signed, and has then complained about ever since.

He is behaving like a sensible politician, leading a party whose natural supporters are often Brexiteers. But that makes him anachronism in the post-Johnson world, and explains why, after an encouragingly strong start, he has disappeared from view.

Starmer is offering a return to a past which has led us to the present. Whatever its virtues, it can’t be repeated. We are in the Portugal of 1926 – welcoming a military coup which brings back the values of the monarchy, but with no intention of bringing back the monarchy which led people to that place.

The EU is part of that discredited past. It can also be part of a new future, but needs to be sold as such by someone the public feels is equally new. BoJo the Clown is still the new broom, however, for all the wrong reasons. Until someone else comes along to sweep him away, people will still take the new broom over the wrong reasons, however obvious those may be.

They All Look Alike

Who else is there to stand up to BoJo, and put themselves on the side of the people? There used to be the Liberal Party, then the SDP, then the alliance of the two, then the merged Liberal Democrats.

But you hear even less from this party now, because it also became respectable. Its MPs were no longer exotic figures, largely reliant on personal votes rather than political position.

Success at local government level, and small but significant inroads at national level, meant the LibDems were no longer a party of protest, and were obliged to do things themselves instead of just complain about what the others were doing. They then found out the hard way that they had got to this position because they were still the “Stuff the lot of them” party at national level.

The LibDems went into coalition with the Conservatives after the inconclusive 2010 election, supported the worst excesses of the politics they were elected to replace and were almost wiped out in 2015. Now they are only relevant in areas where they might still hold or regain seats, but these are a diminishing number, and MPs from the coalition generation won’t be able to regain them, tainted forever.

The LibDems openly call for a return to the EU, but who cares? Everything else they want is tired old sensible politics, which they themselves made mainstream by getting it voted for and then adopted by other parties. The future world of mass Liberal support and radical change, always a possibility in the days of their pomp, is as dead as a dodo, and because that was once so attractive to so many it is nigh on impossible for the party to create a new and more attractive image to give it any influence.

The Scottish Nationalists are in many ways leading the charge against BoJo. They became the new “alternative” party in Scotland itself, and now hold almost all its parliamentary seats.

But like the LibDems, they are victims of their own relative success. As the Scottish Establishment, they are in danger of going down as the Conservatives and Labour once did there, swept away as if they had never been simply because they are the expected rulers. They do not stand for elections outside Scotland, so can never form a UK government, and would not want to, as they exist to achieve Scottish independence, leaving old England behind.

So it’s BoJo or nothing, unless the Conservatives themselves get rid of him, as they have long been rumoured to want to do. But as John Major found when he succeeded Margaret Thatcher, your only option in those circumstances is to stick by what your predecessor did, and eventually go down with the same ship.

It was the Conservatives who gave us BoJo, despite many attempts to get rid of him. But they can’t disown him and his legacy any more than US Republicans can move beyond Donald Trump. It will take a new dynamic and new thinking, and with every day the world observes that the once mighty UK doesn’t have it, the harder it will be for it to emerge.

The Pontypridd Effect

There is however one way the UK can reinvent itself, and consign BoJo and his wilfully chosen band of crooks and incompetents to history. Its salvation does lie within its own borders, but not where it is presently being looked for.

All European countries have the sort of programmes which in the UK are called “regeneration”. These involve taking deprived areas and reinventing them as desirable locations, by improving the built environment, job opportunities and social amenities, with a mixture of public money and private investment.

Sometimes these projects improve things, sometimes they don’t. But in all cases they make some sort of change to the character of the area, and the nature of this change, and how it meets the expectations of the people already there, largely determines their success or failure

The South Wales Valleys have long been a source of despair for progressives. Their towns, each proudly independent, grew up with the coal and steel industries in the nineteenth century. But they also reflected the boom and bust cycles of those industries, creating mass poverty when they declined, and now coal and steel have gone altogether, leaving nothing but memories, outmoded institutions and migration to places where people have jobs and lives.

However some South Wales towns, though still in the lower socio-economic brackets, are experiencing quiet revivals. As themselves, with their own traditions, they retain all the old problems. But as dormitory towns for Cardiff, which as the capital of Wales always has jobs available, some are once again becoming a desirable alternative, where the greenery and cheaper old houses are more of a draw than the old pits and factories.

It is largely popular taste, not deliberate policy, which has created this revival. But it gives the UK a way back into the EU. If, like a small valleys town, it can be content to be part of someone else’s success, it does have a way forward.

There are other international alliances which the British public don’t find as threatening as the EU. All of these have well established trade relations with the EU, and want more.

The UK may be geographically isolated from bodies like MERCOSUR and NAFTA, but if these bodies can use the UK as an outpost through which to deal with Europe, the UK can use both its denuded trade relations with the EU and any arrangement with these bodies to its advantage, as a staging post providing the best of both worlds.

Most countries live in the shadow of others, hoping to take advantage of their benefits. This is the not the tradition of the UK, but it is better than anything BoJo can offer – and would be seen as such by both the rest of the world, which would take the UK seriously again, and the British public, who will gain some trade and supply benefits as an upgraded EU partner without the negatives they hold the EU responsible for.

Any leader, one who can offer a vision where not all foreigners are evil, and the British are still inherently good, has a future, provided [that leader] can offer one. It won’t be anyone around at the moment, but it can be done – and then, in the spirit of 1 Corinthians 13:12, people will have the guts to admit that they do know that BoJo and his clowns are the equivalent of Warren G. Harding and his Ohio Gang, because they have some credible alternative with which to compare them.

Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Read more: https://journal-neo.org/2021/10/22/the-world-keeps-asking-why-does-bojo-keep-getting-away-with-it/

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Here in Aussieland we have the "Scotty of Nappy Marketing" effect which is similar to Bojo the clown's claptrap, except our serious clown bathes in holy water every morning, then fudges reality with hypocritical brilliant slogans... This clown does not make us laugh, but make us cry in our cornflakes, daily. "Crying is good for your soul" he would say as he hides a blind trust with "no investigation of the caper because..." — he is protecting his arse, but won't say...

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Most UK residents now believe Brexit has been bad for the economy, according to an Opinium poll conducted to mark the third anniversary of the country’s departure from the EU and published on Saturday.  

A slight majority (54%) of survey respondents found Brexit had negatively impacted the UK economy as a whole, while a dismal 13% thought its outcome had been good.  

A similar percentage (53%) thought Brexit had hurt the UK’s ability to control immigration, while even more (57%) saw an undesirable effect on their country’s ability to import European goods. Nearly two in three respondents (63%) believed leaving the EU was contributing to inflation and the cost-of-living crisis, compared to just 8% who thought they were getting a better deal in the shops post-Brexit. 

More than a third (35%) of those polled believed exiting the bloc had negatively impacted their own financial situation, with just one in ten reporting it had helped them financially.  

The effect on salaries and wages was viewed unfavorably by 40%, with just 11% saying they saw a benefit, while nearly half (47%) saw an unfavorable impact on the National Health Service, compared to just 9% who thought things had improved.  

“Public discontent at how Brexit has been handled by the government continues, with perceived failings even in areas previously seen as a potential benefit from leaving the EU,” Opinium head of policy and public affairs James Crouch told The Guardian. However, he said, “Brexit is likely to be a secondary issue at the next election compared to the state of the economy and the NHS, which are the clear priority for voters.” 

While the UK voted to leave the EU in 2016 by a four-point margin, with 52% in favor of the move, it did not actually exit until January 2020 – two months before the government’s decision to shut down the economy and lock down the population in response to the Covid-19 pandemic plunged the country into its worst recession since record-keeping by the Office for National Statistics began in 1955.  

https://www.rt.com/news/589986-british-regret-brexit-poll-economy/

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