Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
You did not say Europe is half a million truckers short and I would rather listen to truckers who do the job to be honest
Why do you think there are no fuel shortages and empty shelves in the EU, Mr G?
I've experienced no fuel shortages or empty shelves here at all.
I'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
Apart from one Saturday where my local Sainsbury’s had no rice, pasta and the frozen aisles were empty I’ve experienced no shortages at all either at Sainsbury’s or my local Tesco or my local costcutter.
I see often, usually FBPE type remainers, going on about shortages and posting pictures of them yet my reality is this is not the case.
So part from that time you saw empty aisles, there are no empty aisles.
The cognitive dissonance is strong with this one.
It really isn’t, I’m just concurring with the poster above. Talk of widespread shortages and empty aisles is not the reality a lot of people had. When you read FBPE remainer types going on about it you’d believe there was continually no food on the shelves. It’s. It true. One trip to the shops and a few empty shelves is hardly conclusive proof of widespread shortages. The shelves are not different to pre brexit days really.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left the PB Tory club, BigG does not like Boris, I think even Casino has gone off the government so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
By your definition of a genuine Tory?* Or by the more mainstream definitin of someone who habitually votes Tory and/or is a Conservative Party member?
*To be honest, I thought that was a group of 1 Surprised that Charles, MM and Sandpit make the cut.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
Yep, that section struck me at the time, more for the lack of self awareness that it applied precisely to the life and works of one Boris Johnson than anything else. Unless it was genius level self satire of course…
He was trolling us.
Surely not, Big G? Trolling us? Or healthy debate?
I meant the PM! He must have known he was describing his own behaviour, and would have got a semi from winding up his detractors and owning the libs. The whole thing is just a massive ego trip and trolling opportunity for him. This is why he wanted the top job.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left the PB Tory club, BigG does not like Boris, I think even Casino has gone off the government so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
By your definition of a genuine Tory?* Or by the more mainstream definitin of someone who habitually votes Tory and/or is a Conservative Party member?
*To be honest, I thought that was a group of 1 Surprised that Charles, MM and Sandpit make the cut.
Certainly at the bare minimum someone who voted Tory at the 2019 general election and will still definitely vote Tory at the next general election
Interesting to hear from Grant Shapps that testing capacity now is double what it was pre-pandemic, and that a post-Brexit change in rules is part of what has changed things.
That's an improvement. So not only are wages going up but testing is going up too? Seems like a win/win for Brexit.
It is fascinating from an ideological perspective though to see the case for Brexit collapse in real time. They seem to have settled, for the moment, on the idea that Brexit was about social justice for HGV drivers.
And the freedom not have a trade deal with the USA.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
There are certainly multiple well-known problems with the industry that have been widely reported, but until or unless people see plain evidence that the problems are as bad in neighbouring countries - which they haven't, and neither have I, frankly - Brexit will feature heavily.
I agree and made a similar point yesterday.
In America people are facing the same issues but they just pay whatever escalated prices are needed and get on with it. Inflation is running higher there, but the invisible hand is doing its job.
In the UK rather than 'Keep Calm And Carry On' we have 'whinge incessantly about Brexit'.
If you want to moan and moan then that's fine, you have free speech. But it won't get much done, not like gritting your teeth and actually paying your drivers or for timber or whatever the price the market demands.
I suggest that the issue is not necessarily Brexit itself, bit the apparent assumption in Government and Leavers generally, that 'we'll just Leave and all will be well'.
Very little thought was given to anything other than the obvious, and in many cases that was bodged.
All is well.
Its not the Government's job to fix companies supply chains, that's their own job. If something needs to change, they need to change it, and the market will ensure they do.
It very much is the government's job to mitigate problems its policies have created.
The existence of a market economy does not absolve government from responsibility for its own lack of foresight.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
“Trucks are in short supply, and the worsening driver shortage has made the recruitment and retention of these more difficult than ever, as private fleet owners are competing for them with the trucking industry.
To navigate through the turbulent market, Crane’s analysts diagnosed a need for more collaboration with transport providers, involving better use of data. Mr Jindel raised a more basic form of collaboration by making the trucker’s job easier, such as not having a driver wait several hours for his truck to be loaded.
This requires a change in mindset. “Shippers have always taken the attitude ‘the trucker needs me, he will wait’,” he said”
There was an interesting video blog on Youtube from a UK truck driver, will have to dig it out. Was just following his routine, explaining what he did.
They seem to have a lot of the hurry-hurry-wait garbage. Complete with "penalties if you don't get the frozen load to delivery point by time X. Arrive, no-one there to take the delivery - so no sign off. Start ringing bells, phoning people...."
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left, I think even Casino is moving so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
PB Tories don’t necessarily support every pratfall from HMG, but they can generally be relied upon to push various gammony tropes.
In that they function a bit like a herd of columnists for a right wing tabloid.
It is fascinating from an ideological perspective though to see the case for Brexit collapse in real time. They seem to have settled, for the moment, on the idea that Brexit was about social justice for HGV drivers.
Collapse?
The case for Brexit is going fantastically. People are quite literally getting what they voted for - and what Sir Stuart Rose warned against which was highlighted here repeatedly at the time by Brexiteers as a good not bad thing.
Your crocodile tears that you can't get cheap peasants anymore won't change my opinion.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left, I think even Casino is moving so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
Have we found a Starmer fan yet?
There are plenty, including myself, who say he is "not too bad", "better than others say", "no one obviously better available" but have we found anyone who is a real fan, excited by him and talks him up?
There must be one even though I can't think of them at the moment, but to say they are equivalent in numbers here to Boris fan boys is absurd.
I am just waiting for Stramer to actually do something. Kicking a few of the loonies out was a start. Not an end. Not even a middle.
Kinnock was doing more than this, at this stage. And before you say it, 1997 couldn't have happened without the spadework that Kinnock put in.
Yes his job was much more like Kinnock's than Blair's. Kinnock's big fight with militant was about 2-3 years after he took power though, so not sure Starmer is behind schedule. And this generation of Corbynista's seem to have sunk with less of a fight than the Scargill and Hattons of the 80s.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
Tbh Philip, I rate most of what you post on here and although our political views differ markedly, I generally enjoy the challenge your well-argued points deliver to my world view. It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. However, you're flogging a dead horse on this one.
To answer your specific point: 'It's low wage open immigration that has ended' - it's the ending of low wage open immigration that's causing the current crisis.
Absolutely it is I agree.
Which is a good thing. An end to low wages is literally what people voted for.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
That is quite a remarkable piece of autobiographical writing.
Actually his speech was quite entertaining and well received
‘We go live to Big_G Towers in North Wales for a reaction..’
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left the PB Tory club, BigG does not like Boris, I think even Casino has gone off the government so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
By your definition of a genuine Tory?* Or by the more mainstream definitin of someone who habitually votes Tory and/or is a Conservative Party member?
*To be honest, I thought that was a group of 1 Surprised that Charles, MM and Sandpit make the cut.
Certainly at the bare minimum someone who voted Tory at the 2019 general election and will still definitely vote Tory at the next general election
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
There are certainly multiple well-known problems with the industry that have been widely reported, but until or unless people see plain evidence that the problems are as bad in neighbouring countries - which they haven't, and neither have I, frankly - Brexit will feature heavily.
I agree and made a similar point yesterday.
In America people are facing the same issues but they just pay whatever escalated prices are needed and get on with it. Inflation is running higher there, but the invisible hand is doing its job.
In the UK rather than 'Keep Calm And Carry On' we have 'whinge incessantly about Brexit'.
If you want to moan and moan then that's fine, you have free speech. But it won't get much done, not like gritting your teeth and actually paying your drivers or for timber or whatever the price the market demands.
I suggest that the issue is not necessarily Brexit itself, bit the apparent assumption in Government and Leavers generally, that 'we'll just Leave and all will be well'.
Very little thought was given to anything other than the obvious, and in many cases that was bodged.
All is well.
Its not the Government's job to fix companies supply chains, that's their own job. If something needs to change, they need to change it, and the market will ensure they do.
It very much is the government's job to mitigate problems its policies have created.
The existence of a market economy does not absolve government from responsibility for its own lack of foresight.
Indeed and testing capacity for HGV drivers has been doubled apparently.
If it needs to be increased further, it should be. Since testing is a regulation the government is responsible for, that is their responsibility.
Allowing cheap labour instead of paying a good wage - or getting a high wage visa for migrants - is not their responsibility.
I have this image of the ghost of Jim Callaghan exiting the aircraft and in chorus with all the PB Boris fanbois exclaiming "crisis, what crisis?"
Sunny Jim never said it when he was alive though.
It is nonetheless an urban myth that lives on in the British psyche.
In that case scratch out Jim, and just leave it as a chorus of PB fanbois.
I believe it was a Sun headline which was then used to beat Callaghan over the issue. A reminder of when the Sun had influence, so at least some things have got better!
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
Yep, that section struck me at the time, more for the lack of self awareness that it applied precisely to the life and works of one Boris Johnson than anything else. Unless it was genius level self satire of course…
He was trolling us.
Surely not, Big G? Trolling us? Or healthy debate?
I meant the PM! He must have known he was describing his own behaviour, and would have got a semi from winding up his detractors and owning the libs. The whole thing is just a massive ego trip and trolling opportunity for him. This is why he wanted the top job.
Sorry, I was referring to Big G telling me off for accusing someone of Trolling all the time...
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left, BigG does not like Boris, I think even Casino has gone off the government so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
Will the last PB Tory turn out the light... Assuming it's still working, of course.
Always amusing to see HYFUD reducing the Tories as much as possible... In the end the only true Tory is him.
Good, say I, then the rest of us can punish and destroy the Conservative party for what they have inflicted on us over the past 5 years.
Starmer wants to rebalance the relationship between workers and employers. Meanwhile, back in the real world, Brexit and Covid have combined to raise lorry drivers' wages, save time and money for office workers WFH, and just today the government is to ensure restaurant owners pass on tips to staff. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58669632
Starmer's been hit by a double (or treble) whammy. Boris pinched the popular bits from Corbyn. Real life has helped. And while Labour looks at attracting back voters lost to the right, it is shedding support to the Greens, per Yougov:-
Of those 2019 Labour voters who gave us a party vote intention (i.e. excluding those who will not vote or are currently unsure), 78% said they would stick with Labour. At this point 11% would vote Green instead, 4% would now vote Conservative, and another 4% would vote Liberal Democrat. A mere 1% would switch to Reform UK. This suggests that Labour face their biggest thread from the left – specifically the Greens – when it comes to shoring up their voter base from the last election. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/09/23/labour-are-struggling-make-big-inroads-voters-are-
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
You did not say Europe is half a million truckers short and I would rather listen to truckers who do the job to be honest
Why do you think there are no fuel shortages and empty shelves in the EU, Mr G?
I've experienced no fuel shortages or empty shelves here at all.
I'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
The issue we have is that it's clear there are intermittent and store / petrol station specific issues.
Yet because a lot of people on here have not seen any problems they don't believe there is an issue.
It reminds me of the 8 year old who did a scientific experiment to confirm if the tooth fairy existed. He proved that the fairy didn't exist and then discovered his parents no longer gave him money for lost teeth.
And do you think those issues are being reported proportionately?
I have friends, family and colleagues all over the country. Not a single one has raised this as an issue - the only ones that do are the usual FBPE suspects on Twitter and the media hacks that retweet them, so I take it with a massive pinch of salt.
The Government and supermarket chains are talking about challenges in some areas but it's far from the national crisis it's made out to be.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left, BigG does not like Boris, I think even Casino has gone off the government so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
Will the last PB Tory turn out the light... Assuming it's still working, of course.
Always amusing to see HYFUD reducing the Tories as much as possible... In the end the only true Tory is him.
Good, say I, then the rest of us can punish and destroy the Conservative party for what they have inflicted on us over the past 5 years.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
Where is the evidence of point 1 - I just don't believe there are 100,000 HGV drivers able to start work tomorrow.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
I have a question. Anyone who is claiming JSA/UC and has a driving license should be able to do a delivery job. Shouldn’t the numbers on JSA/UC be dropping dramatically?
Good question. Would be interesting to see the stats. Last few Amazon deliveries I've had I would say 50% of them were in saloon cars. Which I'd not seen before.
In our class-ridden society I can't help noticing that about half my Sainsbury delivery drivers are older people (mostly but not all men) speaking in well-educated accents. I've chatted to a few about their previous jobs - redudant office work and one former teacher. They are so uniformly cheerful that it has to be company policy to require it, but most seem genuinely content - "takes up time but driving around delivering trays of food is pretty easy money" said one. They're on a bit more than minimum wage but they do say the pay isn't great - seems to be £9-10/hour, which doesn't get you far in Surrey.
Yes, that's my experience.
Of course, if you do 2 x 8 hour shifts a week on that, if you're retired, then you double your weekly state pension and only pay a bit of IT on it.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left the PB Tory club, BigG does not like Boris, I think even Casino has gone off the government so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
By your definition of a genuine Tory?* Or by the more mainstream definitin of someone who habitually votes Tory and/or is a Conservative Party member?
*To be honest, I thought that was a group of 1 Surprised that Charles, MM and Sandpit make the cut.
Certainly at the bare minimum someone who voted Tory at the 2019 general election and will still definitely vote Tory at the next general election
Anyone who definitely knows at this stage who they are going to vote for in the next GE doesn't really deserve a vote imo.
Some thought and judgement should be required before voting, surely?
I have this image of the ghost of Jim Callaghan exiting the aircraft and in chorus with all the PB Boris fanbois exclaiming "crisis, what crisis?"
Sunny Jim never said it when he was alive though.
He said
"Well, that's a judgment that you are making. I promise you that if you look at it from outside, and perhaps you're taking rather a parochial view at the moment, I don't think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos."
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
Where is the evidence of point 1 - I just don't believe there are 100,000 HGV drivers able to start work tomorrow.
Maybe not tomorrow, maybe they'd need to give notice to their current employers.
How many HGV qualified drivers are there in the UK? Not HGV drivers, but HGV qualified, do you have the figure?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left, I think even Casino is moving so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
PB Tories don’t necessarily support every pratfall from HMG, but they can generally be relied upon to push various gammony tropes.
In that they function a bit like a herd of columnists for a right wing tabloid.
It is fascinating from an ideological perspective though to see the case for Brexit collapse in real time. They seem to have settled, for the moment, on the idea that Brexit was about social justice for HGV drivers.
I always know you're struggling for real arguments when you resort to ad hominem.
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Sounds good from labour. Now they need to do something about second home owners, holiday lets and Airbnb’s that blight many rural and coastal communities pricing locals and workers needed locally out. Giving people priority on a new build in Blackburn or Stoke May be good for that area but labour needs to do much much more.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
You did not say Europe is half a million truckers short and I would rather listen to truckers who do the job to be honest
Why do you think there are no fuel shortages and empty shelves in the EU, Mr G?
I've experienced no fuel shortages or empty shelves here at all.
I'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
The issue we have is that it's clear there are intermittent and store / petrol station specific issues.
Yet because a lot of people on here have not seen any problems they don't believe there is an issue.
It reminds me of the 8 year old who did a scientific experiment to confirm if the tooth fairy existed. He proved that the fairy didn't exist and then discovered his parents no longer gave him money for lost teeth.
And do you think those issues are being reported proportionately?
I have friends, family and colleagues all over the country. Not a single one has raised this as an issue - the only ones that do are the usual FBPE suspects on Twitter and the media hacks that retweet them, so I take it with a massive pinch of salt.
The Government and supermarket chains are talking about challenges in some areas but it's far from the national crisis it's made out to be.
I should also be clear, the Aldi issues aren't within Aldi, it's missed / delayed deliveries to the warehouse that is the issue there (the warehouse is 1/2 mile from our local Aldi which is the regional flagship store for the regional head office at the warehouse).
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
I have a question. Anyone who is claiming JSA/UC and has a driving license should be able to do a delivery job. Shouldn’t the numbers on JSA/UC be dropping dramatically?
Good question. Would be interesting to see the stats. Last few Amazon deliveries I've had I would say 50% of them were in saloon cars. Which I'd not seen before.
In our class-ridden society I can't help noticing that about half my Sainsbury delivery drivers are older people (mostly but not all men) speaking in well-educated accents. I've chatted to a few about their previous jobs - redudant office work and one former teacher. They are so uniformly cheerful that it has to be company policy to require it, but most seem genuinely content - "takes up time but driving around delivering trays of food is pretty easy money" said one. They're on a bit more than minimum wage but they do say the pay isn't great - seems to be £9-10/hour, which doesn't get you far in Surrey.
Yes, that's my experience.
Of course, if you do 2 x 8 hour shifts a week on that, if you're retired, then you double your weekly state pension and only pay a bit of IT on it.
And no NI.
(I presume the employers NI is still due for employees over Stare Retirement Age?)
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
You did not say Europe is half a million truckers short and I would rather listen to truckers who do the job to be honest
Why do you think there are no fuel shortages and empty shelves in the EU, Mr G?
I've experienced no fuel shortages or empty shelves here at all.
I'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
Fresh vegetables and salad stuff in Tesco Pembroke Dock is always very patchy. Asparagus is barely above twig stage when there. Acres of bananas only. Very few carrots. strawberries/raspberries/grapes. Sometimes no diet coke. Prices have gone up as well. There used to be a lot of clubcard money off, but not there now.
(I'm glad someone remembers the Sparticus reference btw...)
Thanks. If it's always very patchy then it sounds like it's unrelated to the current situation.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality...
That bit is one of the rare occasions Boris has spoken from the heart.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left, I think even Casino is moving so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
Have we found a Starmer fan yet?
There are plenty, including myself, who say he is "not too bad", "better than others say", "no one obviously better available" but have we found anyone who is a real fan, excited by him and talks him up?
There must be one even though I can't think of them at the moment, but to say they are equivalent in numbers here to Boris fan boys is absurd.
I am just waiting for Stramer to actually do something. Kicking a few of the loonies out was a start. Not an end. Not even a middle.
Kinnock was doing more than this, at this stage. And before you say it, 1997 couldn't have happened without the spadework that Kinnock put in.
Yes his job was much more like Kinnock's than Blair's. Kinnock's big fight with militant was about 2-3 years after he took power though, so not sure Starmer is behind schedule. And this generation of Corbynista's seem to have sunk with less of a fight than the Scargill and Hattons of the 80s.
Kinnock came into the job at a run, as I remember. The big fights were building from the start. He was very clear that he wanted to build an electable Labour Party and set out to do that.
As you say, the opposition to Starmer is much thinner. What is he waiting for.
There are tons of social democratic policies out there, that he could adopt.
Consider my idea for a National Emergency line of funding for the NHS. A yearly budget for emergency provisions. Would remove the whole "run the place at 99% of capacity" thing. Argument would be that this would be cheap insurance for the next plague.... Spend it on "over capacity" in certain areas.
Surely, training more doctors and nurses, more equipment, etc would be popular from left to right in the Labour party?
I have a question. Anyone who is claiming JSA/UC and has a driving license should be able to do a delivery job. Shouldn’t the numbers on JSA/UC be dropping dramatically?
Good question. Would be interesting to see the stats. Last few Amazon deliveries I've had I would say 50% of them were in saloon cars. Which I'd not seen before.
In our class-ridden society I can't help noticing that about half my Sainsbury delivery drivers are older people (mostly but not all men) speaking in well-educated accents. I've chatted to a few about their previous jobs - redudant office work and one former teacher. They are so uniformly cheerful that it has to be company policy to require it, but most seem genuinely content - "takes up time but driving around delivering trays of food is pretty easy money" said one. They're on a bit more than minimum wage but they do say the pay isn't great - seems to be £9-10/hour, which doesn't get you far in Surrey.
Yes, that's my experience.
Of course, if you do 2 x 8 hour shifts a week on that, if you're retired, then you double your weekly state pension and only pay a bit of IT on it.
Good points by you both. My stepdad, in his mid sixties, does 12 hours a week for Sainsbury’s delivering shopping and it is great for topping up his private pension and he plans to continue once he gets his state pension. It’s good, flexible, work and Gives him a focus.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
Likewise in agriculture.
The mantra of fruit and veg farmers in southern England has evolved since the 1990s:
The locals aren't willing to do the work so get some Northerners to do it. The Northerners aren't willing to do the work so get some Irish to do it. The Irish aren't willing to do the work so get some Portuguese to do it. The Portuguese aren't willing to do the work so get some Poles to do it. The Poles aren't willing to do the work so get some Romanians to do it. The Romanians aren't willing to do the work so get some Bulgarian to do it. The Bulgarians aren't willing to do the work so get some Ukrainians to do it.
I believe they're now trying to get workers from Central Asia.
Well it might give the Afghan refugees a job opportunity but the model is fundamentally flawed.
Starmer wants to rebalance the relationship between workers and employers. Meanwhile, back in the real world, Brexit and Covid have combined to raise lorry drivers' wages, save time and money for office workers WFH, and just today the government is to ensure restaurant owners pass on tips to staff. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58669632
Starmer's been hit by a double (or treble) whammy. Boris pinched the popular bits from Corbyn. Real life has helped. And while Labour looks at attracting back voters lost to the right, it is shedding support to the Greens, per Yougov:-
Of those 2019 Labour voters who gave us a party vote intention (i.e. excluding those who will not vote or are currently unsure), 78% said they would stick with Labour. At this point 11% would vote Green instead, 4% would now vote Conservative, and another 4% would vote Liberal Democrat. A mere 1% would switch to Reform UK. This suggests that Labour face their biggest thread from the left – specifically the Greens – when it comes to shoring up their voter base from the last election. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/09/23/labour-are-struggling-make-big-inroads-voters-are-
From the view at this moment the next election looks likely to be decided on who is less bad and less unsuccessful rathe than on affirmatives. SKS has been markedly unsuccessful at emphasising Labour positives. In particular he tends to talk in abstract terms. This is less useful for those not in power than for those who have power. Those not in power have a make a better offer in terms that make practical, not abstract, sense. Making a better offer rather than having more uplifting thoughts has not yet been tried by Labour.
I have this image of the ghost of Jim Callaghan exiting the aircraft and in chorus with all the PB Boris fanbois exclaiming "crisis, what crisis?"
Sunny Jim never said it when he was alive though.
It is nonetheless an urban myth that lives on in the British psyche.
In that case scratch out Jim, and just leave it as a chorus of PB fanbois.
I believe it was a Sun headline which was then used to beat Callaghan over the issue. A reminder of when the Sun had influence, so at least some things have got better!
It's funny how some things don't change though.
I'm reading Dominic Sandbrook at the moment and there's a picture in his book of Jim Callaghan laying a foundation stone at Ruskin College in Oxford in 1976. At that point he'd been in office barely 6 months.
Behind him, you have a left-wing mob of students displaying a sign, "This stone was laid by a Tory".
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
Where is the evidence of point 1 - I just don't believe there are 100,000 HGV drivers able to start work tomorrow.
Maybe not tomorrow, maybe they'd need to give notice to their current employers.
How many HGV qualified drivers are there in the UK? Not HGV drivers, but HGV qualified, do you have the figure?
What definition of being qualified do you wish to use?
I'm not being pedantic here but it's perfectly possible to have passed your test but the entitlement and DQC can be expired.
If that's the case it's a matter of filling in forms to get your license updated (but remember DVLA are on strike) and doing 35 hours of training.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
Tbh Philip, I rate most of what you post on here and although our political views differ markedly, I generally enjoy the challenge your well-argued points deliver to my world view. It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. However, you're flogging a dead horse on this one.
To answer your specific point: 'It's low wage open immigration that has ended' - it's the ending of low wage open immigration that's causing the current crisis.
Absolutely it is I agree.
Which is a good thing. An end to low wages is literally what people voted for.
Of course I support ending low wages but I'll believe it when I see it.
Oh really? I think you missed it. Ending the open door for low skilled labour ends the era of low wages.
Sixth, we will have a sensible regime for the movement of people that allows us to replace the awful immigration policy we have now - a combination of an open door for low skilled labour and convicted criminals from the EU while simultaneously stopping highly skilled people from outside the EU coming to the UK to contribute.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
Yep, that section struck me at the time, more for the lack of self awareness that it applied precisely to the life and works of one Boris Johnson than anything else. Unless it was genius level self satire of course…
He was trolling us.
Surely not, Big G? Trolling us? Or healthy debate?
I meant the PM! He must have known he was describing his own behaviour, and would have got a semi from winding up his detractors and owning the libs. The whole thing is just a massive ego trip and trolling opportunity for him. This is why he wanted the top job.
Sorry, I was referring to Big G telling me off for accusing someone of Trolling all the time...
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Sounds good from labour. Now they need to do something about second home owners, holiday lets and Airbnb’s that blight many rural and coastal communities pricing locals and workers needed locally out. Giving people priority on a new build in Blackburn or Stoke May be good for that area but labour needs to do much much more.
Not really.
The six month priority does not do much. If a developer can get £320k in 6 months or £300k from a first time buyer now, they will generally wait out the 6 months.
And as for restricting foreign purchasers in new developments, setting it at 50% is surely a piss take? For a few developments it might be better than the status quo but try selling "we will look after you, only half the new homes we are building are going to rich foreigners" on the doorstep.
I have a question. Anyone who is claiming JSA/UC and has a driving license should be able to do a delivery job. Shouldn’t the numbers on JSA/UC be dropping dramatically?
Good question. Would be interesting to see the stats. Last few Amazon deliveries I've had I would say 50% of them were in saloon cars. Which I'd not seen before.
In our class-ridden society I can't help noticing that about half my Sainsbury delivery drivers are older people (mostly but not all men) speaking in well-educated accents. I've chatted to a few about their previous jobs - redudant office work and one former teacher. They are so uniformly cheerful that it has to be company policy to require it, but most seem genuinely content - "takes up time but driving around delivering trays of food is pretty easy money" said one. They're on a bit more than minimum wage but they do say the pay isn't great - seems to be £9-10/hour, which doesn't get you far in Surrey.
Yes, that's my experience.
Of course, if you do 2 x 8 hour shifts a week on that, if you're retired, then you double your weekly state pension and only pay a bit of IT on it.
And no NI.
(I presume the employers NI is still due for employees over Stare Retirement Age?)
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left, I think even Casino is moving so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
PB Tories don’t necessarily support every pratfall from HMG, but they can generally be relied upon to push various gammony tropes.
In that they function a bit like a herd of columnists for a right wing tabloid.
It is fascinating from an ideological perspective though to see the case for Brexit collapse in real time. They seem to have settled, for the moment, on the idea that Brexit was about social justice for HGV drivers.
Collapse?
The case for Brexit is going fantastically. People are quite literally getting what they voted for - and what Sir Stuart Rose warned against which was highlighted here repeatedly at the time by Brexiteers as a good not bad thing.
Your crocodile tears that you can't get cheap peasants anymore won't change my opinion.
I think some people are just desperate to be vindicated.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left, I think even Casino is moving so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
Have we found a Starmer fan yet?
There are plenty, including myself, who say he is "not too bad", "better than others say", "no one obviously better available" but have we found anyone who is a real fan, excited by him and talks him up?
There must be one even though I can't think of them at the moment, but to say they are equivalent in numbers here to Boris fan boys is absurd.
I am just waiting for Stramer to actually do something. Kicking a few of the loonies out was a start. Not an end. Not even a middle.
Kinnock was doing more than this, at this stage. And before you say it, 1997 couldn't have happened without the spadework that Kinnock put in.
Yes his job was much more like Kinnock's than Blair's. Kinnock's big fight with militant was about 2-3 years after he took power though, so not sure Starmer is behind schedule. And this generation of Corbynista's seem to have sunk with less of a fight than the Scargill and Hattons of the 80s.
Kinnock came into the job at a run, as I remember. The big fights were building from the start. He was very clear that he wanted to build an electable Labour Party and set out to do that.
As you say, the opposition to Starmer is much thinner. What is he waiting for.
There are tons of social democratic policies out there, that he could adopt.
Consider my idea for a National Emergency line of funding for the NHS. A yearly budget for emergency provisions. Would remove the whole "run the place at 99% of capacity" thing. Argument would be that this would be cheap insurance for the next plague.... Spend it on "over capacity" in certain areas.
Surely, training more doctors and nurses, more equipment, etc would be popular from left to right in the Labour party?
Yes, he got a policy pass from me during covid, but now he needs some policies to win over middle income workers. There are lots out there, but he needs to start being identified with them now and with some passion or conviction.
I have a question. Anyone who is claiming JSA/UC and has a driving license should be able to do a delivery job. Shouldn’t the numbers on JSA/UC be dropping dramatically?
Good question. Would be interesting to see the stats. Last few Amazon deliveries I've had I would say 50% of them were in saloon cars. Which I'd not seen before.
In our class-ridden society I can't help noticing that about half my Sainsbury delivery drivers are older people (mostly but not all men) speaking in well-educated accents. I've chatted to a few about their previous jobs - redudant office work and one former teacher. They are so uniformly cheerful that it has to be company policy to require it, but most seem genuinely content - "takes up time but driving around delivering trays of food is pretty easy money" said one. They're on a bit more than minimum wage but they do say the pay isn't great - seems to be £9-10/hour, which doesn't get you far in Surrey.
Yes, that's my experience.
Of course, if you do 2 x 8 hour shifts a week on that, if you're retired, then you double your weekly state pension and only pay a bit of IT on it.
And no NI.
(I presume the employers NI is still due for employees over Stare Retirement Age?)
That's a good question.
Employer NI and Apprenticeship levy are unavoidable.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
So you have borders to your free market capitalism?
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
In the longer term, the parts of agriculture that haven't yet been automated and industrialised (like soft fruit picking) will be so.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
Likewise in agriculture.
The mantra of fruit and veg farmers in southern England has evolved since the 1990s:
The locals aren't willing to do the work so get some Northerners to do it. The Northerners aren't willing to do the work so get some Irish to do it. The Irish aren't willing to do the work so get some Portuguese to do it. The Portuguese aren't willing to do the work so get some Poles to do it. The Poles aren't willing to do the work so get some Romanians to do it. The Romanians aren't willing to do the work so get some Bulgarian to do it. The Bulgarians aren't willing to do the work so get some Ukrainians to do it.
I believe they're now trying to get workers from Central Asia.
Well it might give the Afghan refugees a job opportunity but the model is fundamentally flawed.
Aren’t many of the afghan refugees intelligent and educated people. They are more likely to want to do something a little more than that.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
Tbh Philip, I rate most of what you post on here and although our political views differ markedly, I generally enjoy the challenge your well-argued points deliver to my world view. It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. However, you're flogging a dead horse on this one.
To answer your specific point: 'It's low wage open immigration that has ended' - it's the ending of low wage open immigration that's causing the current crisis.
Absolutely it is I agree.
Which is a good thing. An end to low wages is literally what people voted for.
Why are you upset about the end of low wages?
For me, this was one of the two* potentially legitimate concerns about free movement and one positive that might come from Brexit.
However, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Great for HGV drivers, possibly (as long as the market doesn't adjust to other forms of distibution, more rail etc actually cutting demand and wages longer term). Possibly good for other jobs that have to be here - supermarket staff etc. Of course, higher wages in these sectors also mean higher food prices, which are a greater share of the income of those on lower incomes. Does your average person in, say, the lowest 10% of income pre-Brexit end up better off in buying power? I don't know.
There are also those jobs that can move easily. Call centres, some manufacturing. There's a limit on higher wages there due to lack of competition for jobs as, at some point, it becomes moe economical to move the jobs to where the workers are available at lower prices, particularly if you can't import the workers instead. Those people will probably not get big pay rises (some might move to higher paid jobs in e.g. HGV driving, but not everyone) but the cost of food etc will increase.
Overall, does reducing cheap labour supply make things better or worse on average for those on lowest incomes before Brexit? I don't know. Some winners for sure, some losers too. For some of these jobs a similar effect could have been achieved through an increase in minimum wage, but with similar pros and cons (other jobs, the pay is going up much higher/was already above minimum wage so less relevant).
*The other being pressure on services in some areas, although that only changes if people leave in large numbers. Given some of those leaving are providing the services (e.g. NHS) it doesn't necessarily follow that pressures ease - and government could have done more to address these issues in affected areas anyway.
Tests will also be made shorter by removing the ‘reversing exercise’ element – and for vehicles with trailers, the ‘uncoupling and recoupling’ exercise
...but reversing accidents are the ones that kill old ladies who cross behind the truck. Now is it a justifiable defence for a driver facing a death by careless driving charge to claim "no one trained me to look out for old ladies crossing blind behind me"? I work in an industry where we kill more people than any other, primarily through vehicle and pedestrian conflicts. This is nonsense!
I'm sorry, but my greatest fears for the unravelling of genuinely sensible health and safety legislation and regulation, post Brexit are coming true.
On occasions, safety rules are not just red tape they have a purpose.
This is Scott. It hasn't been removed. FBPE : Full-on Bullshitters Pro-EU. Pity there isn't an L in FBPE.
Knowing what "authorised third party testers" can look like, Scott's point still stands. Who is the authorised third party tester in this case anyway? I suspect it could be the "Operator" (the Transport Manager in most cases). "Show me how you reverse ... yeah, that's fine, off you go".
This is all occuring on Johnson's watch, whether it is his direct fault or not, he bends over and takes the caning, but a handful of posters on here are wringing their hands "ooh, it not the fault of Brexit, it's not the fault of Boris", s*** happens"
Perhaps we need to focus on evidence.
Scott repeats a piece of BS he has been BS-ing about for days. Fine, that's Scott and what he does. These elements have not been removed from tests done by lgv drivers.
@Mexicanpete, your point is a series of assumptions built into a leaning tower of FUD. Without evidence that our roads are now more dangerous, it means nothing.
Do you have some evidence that the testing regime is assessed as more risky, or not, or is actually more risky?
Incidentally, here is the most recent EU data that I can find showing that road fatalities on UK roads for HGV traffic are around half of the EU average (4.3 vs 8.1 deaths per million pop), despite this country being so densely populated with such a strange road system ie the same story as general road safety.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
Absolutely that video is a lie. Its undated and falsely credits him as "Vote Leave".
He did not say that during the referendum as part of Vote Leave. Vote Leave agreed that leaving the Single Market was policy and he stuck to that line throughout the referendum even though he'd said differently years previously.
Taking what someone said years ago, then falsely claiming they said that in a different role at a different date, is a lie. Anyone sharing that knowing its a lie should be ashamed of themselves.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
Yep, that section struck me at the time, more for the lack of self awareness that it applied precisely to the life and works of one Boris Johnson than anything else. Unless it was genius level self satire of course…
He was trolling us.
Surely not, Big G? Trolling us? Or healthy debate?
I meant the PM! He must have known he was describing his own behaviour, and would have got a semi from winding up his detractors and owning the libs. The whole thing is just a massive ego trip and trolling opportunity for him. This is why he wanted the top job.
Sorry, I was referring to Big G telling me off for accusing someone of Trolling all the time...
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Sounds good from labour. Now they need to do something about second home owners, holiday lets and Airbnb’s that blight many rural and coastal communities pricing locals and workers needed locally out. Giving people priority on a new build in Blackburn or Stoke May be good for that area but labour needs to do much much more.
Not really.
The six month priority does not do much. If a developer can get £320k in 6 months or £300k from a first time buyer now, they will generally wait out the 6 months.
And as for restricting foreign purchasers in new developments, setting it at 50% is surely a piss take? For a few developments it might be better than the status quo but try selling "we will look after you, only half the new homes we are building are going to rich foreigners" on the doorstep.
The only problem with the "Rich Foreigners stealing our homes" thing is what are they doing with them?
IIRC occupancy in London is north of 98% - yup, 2% of homes are unoccupied. When you start including build work etc. it is pretty clear that the towers of empty flats thing is a myth.
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Sounds good from labour. Now they need to do something about second home owners, holiday lets and Airbnb’s that blight many rural and coastal communities pricing locals and workers needed locally out. Giving people priority on a new build in Blackburn or Stoke May be good for that area but labour needs to do much much more.
Not really.
The six month priority does not do much. If a developer can get £320k in 6 months or £300k from a first time buyer now, they will generally wait out the 6 months.
And as for restricting foreign purchasers in new developments, setting it at 50% is surely a piss take? For a few developments it might be better than the status quo but try selling "we will look after you, only half the new homes we are building are going to rich foreigners" on the doorstep.
50%. I must have misread it as 5%. That’s pathetic.
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Newbuilds are typically overpriced and full of snagging issues for the first few years, not great as an investment property. They tend not to rise in value for the first 10 years or so, they can even fall in value in the first few years.
I have been trying to get my head about what to do about this issue in light of all the discussions. Much of the anger and grievances arise from the fact that buy to let investors and first time buyers compete over the same properties, which are typically not new builds, they are fixer uppers with a good chance of capital growth. The investors come in with cash and take the cheap housing away from first time buyers, hoping to then flip the house for a capital gain. Most people of my generation have some experience of this. It contributed to our own 2 year agony of trying to buy a house. We were simply outbid on 2 houses by investors trying to cash in on a rising market this way. It was very frustrating, seeing these older people loitering around the place planning to buy houses and let it back to people like us, or force us out of the area that we live in. Yet when we finally got on to the ladder, we benefitted from the situation, as the same process drove house price growth. The answer is probably to not get in to this game at all if you are an investor, if you have any self awareness you would feel like shit about the situation. But much depends on the market you are playing in, so blanket national policy interventions are not a good answer.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
So you have borders to your free market capitalism?
Yes we have borders to our market, yes of course we do.
International trade has to follow international rules. If people want to come to this country they can do so if they get a visa, I support making visas easy to get so long as the wages are high and not low.
Imagine Brexit supporters said ‘Leaving the EU has increased wages for HGV drivers in the UK’ aim the face of an article from a Lorry Driver trade mag from 2018 saying how wages were rising, & forecast to keep rising, for HGV drivers all over the EU, and another from a USA trade mag in 2021 saying how wages were rising there also, and in Asia - that it was a worldwide phenomenon.
Do we think the Remain posse would not be quoting these at us, pointing out it is risible to credit Boris for something positive that is taking place worldwide, and would have done whether he were PM or not? Yet when it’s a problem all over the world, the blame all lies with us leaving the EU
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Sounds good from labour. Now they need to do something about second home owners, holiday lets and Airbnb’s that blight many rural and coastal communities pricing locals and workers needed locally out. Giving people priority on a new build in Blackburn or Stoke May be good for that area but labour needs to do much much more.
The likes of Blackburn and Stoke don't have the unaffordable housing issue.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left the PB Tory club, BigG does not like Boris, I think even Casino has gone off the government so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
By your definition of a genuine Tory?* Or by the more mainstream definitin of someone who habitually votes Tory and/or is a Conservative Party member?
*To be honest, I thought that was a group of 1 Surprised that Charles, MM and Sandpit make the cut.
I am a Tory. I've never voted for another party in a UK general election. However, there have been times when I've gone for a different option in the local and european elections, and I've gone on strike from being a member (twice) too. I don't like being taken for granted.
I'm not just going to vote for the LDs or Labour out of spite, or to teach the Tories a lesson, unless I believe in their platform and it aligns with my values. I believe in voting for things and not against them.
However, I might go on strike and abstain from voting Tory and, if something better eventually turns up that's more "me", sure, I'll consider it.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
Where is the evidence of point 1 - I just don't believe there are 100,000 HGV drivers able to start work tomorrow.
Maybe not tomorrow, maybe they'd need to give notice to their current employers.
How many HGV qualified drivers are there in the UK? Not HGV drivers, but HGV qualified, do you have the figure?
So what would their "current employers" do?
Plus I asked a second question. As they are now well paid (hurrah) you would be in favour of the govt allowing foreign HGV drivers to come to work here, I presume?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left, I think even Casino is moving so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
Have we found a Starmer fan yet?
There are plenty, including myself, who say he is "not too bad", "better than others say", "no one obviously better available" but have we found anyone who is a real fan, excited by him and talks him up?
There must be one even though I can't think of them at the moment, but to say they are equivalent in numbers here to Boris fan boys is absurd.
I am just waiting for Stramer to actually do something. Kicking a few of the loonies out was a start. Not an end. Not even a middle.
Kinnock was doing more than this, at this stage. And before you say it, 1997 couldn't have happened without the spadework that Kinnock put in.
Yes his job was much more like Kinnock's than Blair's. Kinnock's big fight with militant was about 2-3 years after he took power though, so not sure Starmer is behind schedule. And this generation of Corbynista's seem to have sunk with less of a fight than the Scargill and Hattons of the 80s.
Kinnock came into the job at a run, as I remember. The big fights were building from the start. He was very clear that he wanted to build an electable Labour Party and set out to do that.
As you say, the opposition to Starmer is much thinner. What is he waiting for.
There are tons of social democratic policies out there, that he could adopt.
Consider my idea for a National Emergency line of funding for the NHS. A yearly budget for emergency provisions. Would remove the whole "run the place at 99% of capacity" thing. Argument would be that this would be cheap insurance for the next plague.... Spend it on "over capacity" in certain areas.
Surely, training more doctors and nurses, more equipment, etc would be popular from left to right in the Labour party?
More doctors and nurses would be popular with Labour supporters which is why it is already government policy. Let me say it again, Boris pinched the popular bits from Labour. You are right that sweating NHS assets meant no spare capacity but that is not a slogan for the ages while Boris is chanting 40 new hospitals and 50,000 new nurses.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
Likewise in agriculture.
The mantra of fruit and veg farmers in southern England has evolved since the 1990s:
The locals aren't willing to do the work so get some Northerners to do it. The Northerners aren't willing to do the work so get some Irish to do it. The Irish aren't willing to do the work so get some Portuguese to do it. The Portuguese aren't willing to do the work so get some Poles to do it. The Poles aren't willing to do the work so get some Romanians to do it. The Romanians aren't willing to do the work so get some Bulgarian to do it. The Bulgarians aren't willing to do the work so get some Ukrainians to do it.
I believe they're now trying to get workers from Central Asia.
Well it might give the Afghan refugees a job opportunity but the model is fundamentally flawed.
There can't be a free market solution to this. In a genuine hard nosed global free market UK agriculture would not look like it does. Like most countries the iron laws of free markets are not allowed to operate. Just reflect on the significance of: non rateable status, subsidy, inheritance tax exemptions, other tax exemptions, and other things I can't think of.
Once an industry is in fact an arm of the state in these ways it is not free to operate as if it were a free market. In a free global market most of this would not exist.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
So you have borders to your free market capitalism?
Yes we have borders to our market, yes of course we do.
International trade has to follow international rules. If people want to come to this country they can do so if they get a visa, I support making visas easy to get so long as the wages are high and not low.
Tests will also be made shorter by removing the ‘reversing exercise’ element – and for vehicles with trailers, the ‘uncoupling and recoupling’ exercise
...but reversing accidents are the ones that kill old ladies who cross behind the truck. Now is it a justifiable defence for a driver facing a death by careless driving charge to claim "no one trained me to look out for old ladies crossing blind behind me"? I work in an industry where we kill more people than any other, primarily through vehicle and pedestrian conflicts. This is nonsense!
I'm sorry, but my greatest fears for the unravelling of genuinely sensible health and safety legislation and regulation, post Brexit are coming true.
On occasions, safety rules are not just red tape they have a purpose.
This is Scott. It hasn't been removed. FBPE : Full-on Bullshitters Pro-EU. Pity there isn't an L in FBPE.
Knowing what "authorised third party testers" can look like, Scott's point still stands. Who is the authorised third party tester in this case anyway? I suspect it could be the "Operator" (the Transport Manager in most cases). "Show me how you reverse ... yeah, that's fine, off you go".
This is all occuring on Johnson's watch, whether it is his direct fault or not, he bends over and takes the caning, but a handful of posters on here are wringing their hands "ooh, it not the fault of Brexit, it's not the fault of Boris", s*** happens"
Perhaps we need to focus on evidence.
Scott repeats a piece of BS he has been BS-ing about for days. Fine, that's Scott and what he does. These elements have not been removed from tests done by lgv drivers.
@Mexicanpete, your point is a series of assumptions built into a leaning tower of FUD. Without evidence that our roads are now more dangerous, it means nothing.
Do you have some evidence that the testing regime is assessed as more risky, or not, or is actually more risky?
Incidentally, here is the most recent EU data that I can find showing that road fatalities on UK roads for HGV traffic are around half of the EU average (4.3 vs 8.1 deaths per million pop), despite this country being so densely populated with such a strange road system ie the same story as general road safety.
But you have told me Scott's post is spurious because we are testing complex manoeuvres, just not by DVSA examiners. You suggested in future we will use third party assessment to reduce the backlog. I am asking who are these third party assessors, who in future are going to carry out the assessment of complex manouvres?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
Tbh Philip, I rate most of what you post on here and although our political views differ markedly, I generally enjoy the challenge your well-argued points deliver to my world view. It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. However, you're flogging a dead horse on this one.
To answer your specific point: 'It's low wage open immigration that has ended' - it's the ending of low wage open immigration that's causing the current crisis.
Absolutely it is I agree.
Which is a good thing. An end to low wages is literally what people voted for.
Why are you upset about the end of low wages?
For me, this was one of the two* potentially legitimate concerns about free movement and one positive that might come from Brexit.
However, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Great for HGV drivers, possibly (as long as the market doesn't adjust to other forms of distibution, more rail etc actually cutting demand and wages longer term). Possibly good for other jobs that have to be here - supermarket staff etc. Of course, higher wages in these sectors also mean higher food prices, which are a greater share of the income of those on lower incomes. Does your average person in, say, the lowest 10% of income pre-Brexit end up better off in buying power? I don't know.
There are also those jobs that can move easily. Call centres, some manufacturing. There's a limit on higher wages there due to lack of competition for jobs as, at some point, it becomes moe economical to move the jobs to where the workers are available at lower prices, particularly if you can't import the workers instead. Those people will probably not get big pay rises (some might move to higher paid jobs in e.g. HGV driving, but not everyone) but the cost of food etc will increase.
Overall, does reducing cheap labour supply make things better or worse on average for those on lowest incomes before Brexit? I don't know. Some winners for sure, some losers too. For some of these jobs a similar effect could have been achieved through an increase in minimum wage, but with similar pros and cons (other jobs, the pay is going up much higher/was already above minimum wage so less relevant).
*The other being pressure on services in some areas, although that only changes if people leave in large numbers. Given some of those leaving are providing the services (e.g. NHS) it doesn't necessarily follow that pressures ease - and government could have done more to address these issues in affected areas anyway.
A lot of firms that outsourced call centres have brought things back to the UK as outsourcing didn't end up the way they hoped it would.
I did love the fact that for about 3 years the customer service of Plusnet (BT's cheap sister brand) was based in the UK while BT desperately worked to extract themselves from overseas sites and return the work to the UK.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
Likewise in agriculture.
The mantra of fruit and veg farmers in southern England has evolved since the 1990s:
The locals aren't willing to do the work so get some Northerners to do it. The Northerners aren't willing to do the work so get some Irish to do it. The Irish aren't willing to do the work so get some Portuguese to do it. The Portuguese aren't willing to do the work so get some Poles to do it. The Poles aren't willing to do the work so get some Romanians to do it. The Romanians aren't willing to do the work so get some Bulgarian to do it. The Bulgarians aren't willing to do the work so get some Ukrainians to do it.
I believe they're now trying to get workers from Central Asia.
Well it might give the Afghan refugees a job opportunity but the model is fundamentally flawed.
Afghans need jobs and the farming jobs there are mainly opium which is generally frowned on so this sounds like a pretty great model? What's the problem with it specifically? As far as I can see everyone gets their fruit and veg, everyone involved gets a better job, and the only thing that might see production drop is opium, which is already seeing lower demand because it's getting out-competed by fentanyl.
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Sounds good from labour. Now they need to do something about second home owners, holiday lets and Airbnb’s that blight many rural and coastal communities pricing locals and workers needed locally out. Giving people priority on a new build in Blackburn or Stoke May be good for that area but labour needs to do much much more.
The likes of Blackburn and Stoke don't have the unaffordable housing issue.
Exactly. Labour need to do so much more especially areas where affordability is an issue and tackling the causes of it.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left, I think even Casino is moving so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
PB Tories don’t necessarily support every pratfall from HMG, but they can generally be relied upon to push various gammony tropes.
In that they function a bit like a herd of columnists for a right wing tabloid.
It is fascinating from an ideological perspective though to see the case for Brexit collapse in real time. They seem to have settled, for the moment, on the idea that Brexit was about social justice for HGV drivers.
Collapse?
The case for Brexit is going fantastically. People are quite literally getting what they voted for - and what Sir Stuart Rose warned against which was highlighted here repeatedly at the time by Brexiteers as a good not bad thing.
Your crocodile tears that you can't get cheap peasants anymore won't change my opinion.
I think some people are just desperate to be vindicated.
FOM will age like the slave trade - it was never anything else but exploitation of cheap immigrant labour, and playing the working poor of the continent off each other, to benefit fat cats
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
Where is the evidence of point 1 - I just don't believe there are 100,000 HGV drivers able to start work tomorrow.
Maybe not tomorrow, maybe they'd need to give notice to their current employers.
How many HGV qualified drivers are there in the UK? Not HGV drivers, but HGV qualified, do you have the figure?
What definition of being qualified do you wish to use?
I'm not being pedantic here but it's perfectly possible to have passed your test but the entitlement and DQC can be expired.
If that's the case it's a matter of filling in forms to get your license updated (but remember DVLA are on strike) and doing 35 hours of training.
It's not possible to just start driving again.
35 hours? Less than a working week?
I would prefer to use HGV qualified as doing less than week of training is eminently achievable, but if you'd prefer to use those with DQC entitlement then maybe quote both numbers. Do you have either or both numbers?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
I think this is Boris’s Thatcher moment but as champion of the left rather than the right.
The Trots took the economy to the brink by trying to choke off the lifeblood of the economy. Thatcher stood firm and found a way to break their resistance without giving them what they wanted.
This time it’s the entrepreneurial class deliberately taking the economy to the brink, in the hope the government folds and gives them back cheap foreign labour.
Boris should use emergency legislation to enforce higher minimum wages and working conditions for hauliers and tear up some of the red tape.
It feeds into Mark Blythe’s (Brown Uni) general narrative, where the power swung too far in favour of workers post WW2 but it’s now swung too far towards the capital owning class.
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Sounds good from labour. Now they need to do something about second home owners, holiday lets and Airbnb’s that blight many rural and coastal communities pricing locals and workers needed locally out. Giving people priority on a new build in Blackburn or Stoke May be good for that area but labour needs to do much much more.
Not really.
The six month priority does not do much. If a developer can get £320k in 6 months or £300k from a first time buyer now, they will generally wait out the 6 months.
And as for restricting foreign purchasers in new developments, setting it at 50% is surely a piss take? For a few developments it might be better than the status quo but try selling "we will look after you, only half the new homes we are building are going to rich foreigners" on the doorstep.
The only problem with the "Rich Foreigners stealing our homes" thing is what are they doing with them?
IIRC occupancy in London is north of 98% - yup, 2% of homes are unoccupied. When you start including build work etc. it is pretty clear that the towers of empty flats thing is a myth.
Aren't the empty homes in London concentrated in the posho bits ?
Bishops Avenue, Mayfair mansions, £50m flats in the Shard etc ?
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
Where is the evidence of point 1 - I just don't believe there are 100,000 HGV drivers able to start work tomorrow.
Maybe not tomorrow, maybe they'd need to give notice to their current employers.
How many HGV qualified drivers are there in the UK? Not HGV drivers, but HGV qualified, do you have the figure?
So what would their "current employers" do?
Plus I asked a second question. As they are now well paid (hurrah) you would be in favour of the govt allowing foreign HGV drivers to come to work here, I presume?
What their current employers do is up to them to sort out.
I'd have absolutely no problems with people following visa procedures to get a visa to work as a HGV driver if someone wishes to sponsor them for a visa following the same visa procedures any other migrant has to go through.
It is very good that wages are rising albeit that creates inflationary pressure as discussed yesterday on here in the morning and, it turns out, by the Bank of England in the afternoon (PB leading the way).
At some point the buck has to stop and rising wages and prices and wages and prices become a problem for the country in all sorts of ways that we won't repeat. The BoE is worried about it which seems a reasonably independent institution.
But the issue that policy makers have to grapple with, and the comparison is with the supermarkets and their treatment of their suppliers, is whether the benefit to the whole country (via lower or suppressed wages/prices) is more important than the factor inputs (ie wages in this case) being kept low.
Tests will also be made shorter by removing the ‘reversing exercise’ element – and for vehicles with trailers, the ‘uncoupling and recoupling’ exercise
...but reversing accidents are the ones that kill old ladies who cross behind the truck. Now is it a justifiable defence for a driver facing a death by careless driving charge to claim "no one trained me to look out for old ladies crossing blind behind me"? I work in an industry where we kill more people than any other, primarily through vehicle and pedestrian conflicts. This is nonsense!
I'm sorry, but my greatest fears for the unravelling of genuinely sensible health and safety legislation and regulation, post Brexit are coming true.
On occasions, safety rules are not just red tape they have a purpose.
This is Scott. It hasn't been removed. FBPE : Full-on Bullshitters Pro-EU. Pity there isn't an L in FBPE.
Fair enough - it sounds a reasonable move. The only thing that does need to be asked is why this wasn't done anyway? Was it a bit of meaningless bureaucracy that they forgot to get rid of? Or are there safety considerations that are being put to one side because they're seen as minor?
Not sure why it wasn't done. And not sure why this wouldn't be picked up in contingency planning for exit from lockdown over the last 18 months; the issue was forseeable. I put that down to the lackadaisical style of this Govt - lack of thoroughness, too many unforced errors. It still needs a Jeeves function, and needed one throughout, and now needs to be sufficiently focused on getting the normal stuff done that needs doing, divorced from post-Brexit politics. IMO that is what will lose them support more than anything else.
I do think that the DVSA will have had involvement. Given that the current govt is a sieve I think we might have heard if there was actually any data showing a potential problem.
The data in my other post shows that basic HGV safety in the UK is near the top on EU researched numbers.
But I can well see that a single accident will be all over the media and Angela Rayners twitter feed about how the sky is falling in.
Had an interesting conversation with an FBPEr last night, which I might post later.
It is very good that wages are rising albeit that creates inflationary pressure as discussed yesterday on here in the morning and, it turns out, by the Bank of England in the afternoon (PB leading the way).
At some point the buck has to stop and rising wages and prices and wages and prices become a problem for the country in all sorts of ways that we won't repeat. The BoE is worried about it which seems a reasonably independent institution.
But the issue that policy makers have to grapple with, and the comparison is with the supermarkets and their treatment of their suppliers, is whether the benefit to the whole country (via lower or suppressed wages/prices) is more important than the factor inputs (ie wages in this case) being kept low.
No rising wages are not a problem, they're an entirely good thing so long as the market can afford them.
For too many years people have claimed that rising prices are a good thing, while rising wages are a bad one. That misrepresentation has to be reversed.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
Where is the evidence of point 1 - I just don't believe there are 100,000 HGV drivers able to start work tomorrow.
Maybe not tomorrow, maybe they'd need to give notice to their current employers.
How many HGV qualified drivers are there in the UK? Not HGV drivers, but HGV qualified, do you have the figure?
What definition of being qualified do you wish to use?
I'm not being pedantic here but it's perfectly possible to have passed your test but the entitlement and DQC can be expired.
If that's the case it's a matter of filling in forms to get your license updated (but remember DVLA are on strike) and doing 35 hours of training.
It's not possible to just start driving again.
35 hours? Less than a working week?
I would prefer to use HGV qualified as doing less than week of training is eminently achievable, but if you'd prefer to use those with DQC entitlement then maybe quote both numbers. Do you have either or both numbers?
It's periodic so I don't think it's allowed to do it over a single week - in fact the suggest route appears to be to resit modules 2 and 4 of the cat C driving exam again..
In future could you spend 30 seconds checking stuff on google before posting unchecked thoughts - it would make the discussions why more useful if you validated your arguments...
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
Likewise in agriculture.
The mantra of fruit and veg farmers in southern England has evolved since the 1990s:
The locals aren't willing to do the work so get some Northerners to do it. The Northerners aren't willing to do the work so get some Irish to do it. The Irish aren't willing to do the work so get some Portuguese to do it. The Portuguese aren't willing to do the work so get some Poles to do it. The Poles aren't willing to do the work so get some Romanians to do it. The Romanians aren't willing to do the work so get some Bulgarian to do it. The Bulgarians aren't willing to do the work so get some Ukrainians to do it.
I believe they're now trying to get workers from Central Asia.
Well it might give the Afghan refugees a job opportunity but the model is fundamentally flawed.
Afghans need jobs and the farming jobs there are mainly opium which is generally frowned on so this sounds like a pretty great model? What's the problem with it specifically? As far as I can see everyone gets their fruit and veg, everyone involved gets a better job, and the only thing that might see production drop is opium, which is already seeing lower demand because it's getting out-competed by fentanyl.
The more is fundamentally flawed because you need ever poorer countries to source your labour supply from.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
Tbh Philip, I rate most of what you post on here and although our political views differ markedly, I generally enjoy the challenge your well-argued points deliver to my world view. It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. However, you're flogging a dead horse on this one.
To answer your specific point: 'It's low wage open immigration that has ended' - it's the ending of low wage open immigration that's causing the current crisis.
Absolutely it is I agree.
Which is a good thing. An end to low wages is literally what people voted for.
Why are you upset about the end of low wages?
For me, this was one of the two* potentially legitimate concerns about free movement and one positive that might come from Brexit.
However, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Great for HGV drivers, possibly (as long as the market doesn't adjust to other forms of distibution, more rail etc actually cutting demand and wages longer term). Possibly good for other jobs that have to be here - supermarket staff etc. Of course, higher wages in these sectors also mean higher food prices, which are a greater share of the income of those on lower incomes. Does your average person in, say, the lowest 10% of income pre-Brexit end up better off in buying power? I don't know.
There are also those jobs that can move easily. Call centres, some manufacturing. There's a limit on higher wages there due to lack of competition for jobs as, at some point, it becomes moe economical to move the jobs to where the workers are available at lower prices, particularly if you can't import the workers instead. Those people will probably not get big pay rises (some might move to higher paid jobs in e.g. HGV driving, but not everyone) but the cost of food etc will increase.
Overall, does reducing cheap labour supply make things better or worse on average for those on lowest incomes before Brexit? I don't know. Some winners for sure, some losers too. For some of these jobs a similar effect could have been achieved through an increase in minimum wage, but with similar pros and cons (other jobs, the pay is going up much higher/was already above minimum wage so less relevant).
*The other being pressure on services in some areas, although that only changes if people leave in large numbers. Given some of those leaving are providing the services (e.g. NHS) it doesn't necessarily follow that pressures ease - and government could have done more to address these issues in affected areas anyway.
One issue is the lack of investment in productivity over a number of years. Hands were literally cheaper than machines.
The classic that I remember is from the Economist in the 1980s. They asked why, since a German steelworker cost 20x as much (literally) than an Indian steelworker, there were any German steelworks.
The answer was that the German steelworker produced 21x steel (IIRC).
So the German worker was cheaper.
This is true across a range of industries - a combination of investment in productivity by the company and a decent social/legal/infrastructure framework creates a level of productivity that supports the higher wages.
For example, I worked for a company with software development teams around the world. Since they were working on bit of the same system, the comparison was almost perfectly fair. India was the most expensive place to get software developed - due to productivity. London was second cheapest....
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
Where is the evidence of point 1 - I just don't believe there are 100,000 HGV drivers able to start work tomorrow.
Maybe not tomorrow, maybe they'd need to give notice to their current employers.
How many HGV qualified drivers are there in the UK? Not HGV drivers, but HGV qualified, do you have the figure?
So what would their "current employers" do?
Plus I asked a second question. As they are now well paid (hurrah) you would be in favour of the govt allowing foreign HGV drivers to come to work here, I presume?
What their current employers do is up to them to sort out.
I'd have absolutely no problems with people following visa procedures to get a visa to work as a HGV driver if someone wishes to sponsor them for a visa following the same visa procedures any other migrant has to go through.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
Where is the evidence of point 1 - I just don't believe there are 100,000 HGV drivers able to start work tomorrow.
Maybe not tomorrow, maybe they'd need to give notice to their current employers.
How many HGV qualified drivers are there in the UK? Not HGV drivers, but HGV qualified, do you have the figure?
What definition of being qualified do you wish to use?
I'm not being pedantic here but it's perfectly possible to have passed your test but the entitlement and DQC can be expired.
If that's the case it's a matter of filling in forms to get your license updated (but remember DVLA are on strike) and doing 35 hours of training.
It's not possible to just start driving again.
35 hours? Less than a working week?
I would prefer to use HGV qualified as doing less than week of training is eminently achievable, but if you'd prefer to use those with DQC entitlement then maybe quote both numbers. Do you have either or both numbers?
It's periodic so I don't think it's allowed to do it over a single week - in fact the suggest route appears to be to resit modules 2 and 4 of the cat C driving exam again..
In future could you spend 30 seconds checking stuff on google before posting unchecked thoughts - it would make the discussions why more useful if you validated your arguments...
I responded to what you wrote. If something needs to be resat then that should be facilitated, it isn't the end of the world. If it takes two weeks instead of one, or even three weeks, then who gives a crap? We've had this issue supposedly for six months now. Plenty of time to do modules 2 and 4 again surely if people had been offered sufficient pay and conditions to tempt them back.
So do you have the figures on how many qualified people there are? Or not?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
With regard to PB political bias, I don't really see any. My concern is that it just seems to skew towards older people, ie - retired people and those with adult children. Some of us are certainly in our 30s and 40s (like me), but it seems like there are very few young people. In gender terms, it seems to be quite male dominated; although it is difficult to say with certainty. Maybe this is inevitable in a forum about politics, I don't know.
Comments
I'm sceptical.
*To be honest, I thought that was a group of 1
That's an improvement. So not only are wages going up but testing is going up too? Seems like a win/win for Brexit.
The existence of a market economy does not absolve government from responsibility for its own lack of foresight.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK.
2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions.
3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers.
4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions.
5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages.
6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour.
7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
They seem to have a lot of the hurry-hurry-wait garbage. Complete with "penalties if you don't get the frozen load to delivery point by time X. Arrive, no-one there to take the delivery - so no sign off. Start ringing bells, phoning people...."
The case for Brexit is going fantastically. People are quite literally getting what they voted for - and what Sir Stuart Rose warned against which was highlighted here repeatedly at the time by Brexiteers as a good not bad thing.
Your crocodile tears that you can't get cheap peasants anymore won't change my opinion.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
http://www.voteleavetakecontrol.org/briefing_newdeal.html\
Of course I support ending low wages but I'll believe it when I see it.
https://twitter.com/Sime0nStylites/status/1441287984641314820?s=19
If it needs to be increased further, it should be. Since testing is a regulation the government is responsible for, that is their responsibility.
Allowing cheap labour instead of paying a good wage - or getting a high wage visa for migrants - is not their responsibility.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
I am still on the naughty step!
Good, say I, then the rest of us can punish and destroy the Conservative party for what they have inflicted on us over the past 5 years.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58669632
Starmer's been hit by a double (or treble) whammy. Boris pinched the popular bits from Corbyn. Real life has helped. And while Labour looks at attracting back voters lost to the right, it is shedding support to the Greens, per Yougov:-
Of those 2019 Labour voters who gave us a party vote intention (i.e. excluding those who will not vote or are currently unsure), 78% said they would stick with Labour. At this point 11% would vote Green instead, 4% would now vote Conservative, and another 4% would vote Liberal Democrat. A mere 1% would switch to Reform UK. This suggests that Labour face their biggest thread from the left – specifically the Greens – when it comes to shoring up their voter base from the last election.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/09/23/labour-are-struggling-make-big-inroads-voters-are-
Is HYFUD the only Tory in the village? (bach)
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
Of course, if you do 2 x 8 hour shifts a week on that, if you're retired, then you double your weekly state pension and only pay a bit of IT on it.
Some thought and judgement should be required before voting, surely?
"Well, that's a judgment that you are making. I promise you that if you look at it from outside, and perhaps you're taking rather a parochial view at the moment, I don't think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos."
CWC was a summary of that
How many HGV qualified drivers are there in the UK? Not HGV drivers, but HGV qualified, do you have the figure?
I should also be clear, the Aldi issues aren't within Aldi, it's missed / delayed deliveries to the warehouse that is the issue there (the warehouse is 1/2 mile from our local Aldi which is the regional flagship store for the regional head office at the warehouse).
(I presume the employers NI is still due for employees over Stare Retirement Age?)
As you say, the opposition to Starmer is much thinner. What is he waiting for.
There are tons of social democratic policies out there, that he could adopt.
Consider my idea for a National Emergency line of funding for the NHS. A yearly budget for emergency provisions. Would remove the whole "run the place at 99% of capacity" thing. Argument would be that this would be cheap insurance for the next plague.... Spend it on "over capacity" in certain areas.
Surely, training more doctors and nurses, more equipment, etc would be popular from left to right in the Labour party?
The mantra of fruit and veg farmers in southern England has evolved since the 1990s:
The locals aren't willing to do the work so get some Northerners to do it.
The Northerners aren't willing to do the work so get some Irish to do it.
The Irish aren't willing to do the work so get some Portuguese to do it.
The Portuguese aren't willing to do the work so get some Poles to do it.
The Poles aren't willing to do the work so get some Romanians to do it.
The Romanians aren't willing to do the work so get some Bulgarian to do it.
The Bulgarians aren't willing to do the work so get some Ukrainians to do it.
I believe they're now trying to get workers from Central Asia.
Well it might give the Afghan refugees a job opportunity but the model is fundamentally flawed.
I'm reading Dominic Sandbrook at the moment and there's a picture in his book of Jim Callaghan laying a foundation stone at Ruskin College in Oxford in 1976. At that point he'd been in office barely 6 months.
Behind him, you have a left-wing mob of students displaying a sign, "This stone was laid by a Tory".
I'm not being pedantic here but it's perfectly possible to have passed your test but the entitlement and DQC can be expired.
If that's the case it's a matter of filling in forms to get your license updated (but remember DVLA are on strike) and doing 35 hours of training.
It's not possible to just start driving again.
Sixth, we will have a sensible regime for the movement of people that allows us to replace the awful immigration policy we have now - a combination of an open door for low skilled labour and convicted criminals from the EU while simultaneously stopping highly skilled people from outside the EU coming to the UK to contribute.
The six month priority does not do much. If a developer can get £320k in 6 months or £300k from a first time buyer now, they will generally wait out the 6 months.
And as for restricting foreign purchasers in new developments, setting it at 50% is surely a piss take? For a few developments it might be better than the status quo but try selling "we will look after you, only half the new homes we are building are going to rich foreigners" on the doorstep.
Tank's half full, should I try to fill it up just in case? Nah- I'll take a chance.
However, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Great for HGV drivers, possibly (as long as the market doesn't adjust to other forms of distibution, more rail etc actually cutting demand and wages longer term). Possibly good for other jobs that have to be here - supermarket staff etc. Of course, higher wages in these sectors also mean higher food prices, which are a greater share of the income of those on lower incomes. Does your average person in, say, the lowest 10% of income pre-Brexit end up better off in buying power? I don't know.
There are also those jobs that can move easily. Call centres, some manufacturing. There's a limit on higher wages there due to lack of competition for jobs as, at some point, it becomes moe economical to move the jobs to where the workers are available at lower prices, particularly if you can't import the workers instead. Those people will probably not get big pay rises (some might move to higher paid jobs in e.g. HGV driving, but not everyone) but the cost of food etc will increase.
Overall, does reducing cheap labour supply make things better or worse on average for those on lowest incomes before Brexit? I don't know. Some winners for sure, some losers too. For some of these jobs a similar effect could have been achieved through an increase in minimum wage, but with similar pros and cons (other jobs, the pay is going up much higher/was already above minimum wage so less relevant).
*The other being pressure on services in some areas, although that only changes if people leave in large numbers. Given some of those leaving are providing the services (e.g. NHS) it doesn't necessarily follow that pressures ease - and government could have done more to address these issues in affected areas anyway.
Scott repeats a piece of BS he has been BS-ing about for days. Fine, that's Scott and what he does. These elements have not been removed from tests done by lgv drivers.
@Mexicanpete, your point is a series of assumptions built into a leaning tower of FUD. Without evidence that our roads are now more dangerous, it means nothing.
Do you have some evidence that the testing regime is assessed as more risky, or not, or is actually more risky?
The industry is regulated by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, DVSA here. Are you implying that they are incompetent, or had no input?
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/driver-and-vehicle-standards-agency
Incidentally, here is the most recent EU data that I can find showing that road fatalities on UK roads for HGV traffic are around half of the EU average (4.3 vs 8.1 deaths per million pop), despite this country being so densely populated with such a strange road system ie the same story as general road safety.
https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/sites/default/files/pdf/statistics/dacota/bfs20xx_hgvs.pdf
He did not say that during the referendum as part of Vote Leave. Vote Leave agreed that leaving the Single Market was policy and he stuck to that line throughout the referendum even though he'd said differently years previously.
Taking what someone said years ago, then falsely claiming they said that in a different role at a different date, is a lie. Anyone sharing that knowing its a lie should be ashamed of themselves.
IIRC occupancy in London is north of 98% - yup, 2% of homes are unoccupied. When you start including build work etc. it is pretty clear that the towers of empty flats thing is a myth.
I have been trying to get my head about what to do about this issue in light of all the discussions. Much of the anger and grievances arise from the fact that buy to let investors and first time buyers compete over the same properties, which are typically not new builds, they are fixer uppers with a good chance of capital growth. The investors come in with cash and take the cheap housing away from first time buyers, hoping to then flip the house for a capital gain. Most people of my generation have some experience of this. It contributed to our own 2 year agony of trying to buy a house. We were simply outbid on 2 houses by investors trying to cash in on a rising market this way. It was very frustrating, seeing these older people loitering around the place planning to buy houses and let it back to people like us, or force us out of the area that we live in. Yet when we finally got on to the ladder, we benefitted from the situation, as the same process drove house price growth. The answer is probably to not get in to this game at all if you are an investor, if you have any self awareness you would feel like shit about the situation. But much depends on the market you are playing in, so blanket national policy interventions are not a good answer.
International trade has to follow international rules. If people want to come to this country they can do so if they get a visa, I support making visas easy to get so long as the wages are high and not low.
Do we think the Remain posse would not be quoting these at us, pointing out it is risible to credit Boris for something positive that is taking place worldwide, and would have done whether he were PM or not? Yet when it’s a problem all over the world, the blame all lies with us leaving the EU
I'm not just going to vote for the LDs or Labour out of spite, or to teach the Tories a lesson, unless I believe in their platform and it aligns with my values. I believe in voting for things and not against them.
However, I might go on strike and abstain from voting Tory and, if something better eventually turns up that's more "me", sure, I'll consider it.
Who wouldn't?
Plus I asked a second question. As they are now well paid (hurrah) you would be in favour of the govt allowing foreign HGV drivers to come to work here, I presume?
The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;
https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Once an industry is in fact an arm of the state in these ways it is not free to operate as if it were a free market. In a free global market most of this would not exist.
I did love the fact that for about 3 years the customer service of Plusnet (BT's cheap sister brand) was based in the UK while BT desperately worked to extract themselves from overseas sites and return the work to the UK.
I would prefer to use HGV qualified as doing less than week of training is eminently achievable, but if you'd prefer to use those with DQC entitlement then maybe quote both numbers. Do you have either or both numbers?
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
The Trots took the economy to the brink by trying to choke off the lifeblood of the economy. Thatcher stood firm and found a way to break their resistance without giving them what they wanted.
This time it’s the entrepreneurial class deliberately taking the economy to the brink, in the hope the government folds and gives them back cheap foreign labour.
Boris should use emergency legislation to enforce higher minimum wages and working conditions for hauliers and tear up some of the red tape.
It feeds into Mark Blythe’s (Brown Uni) general narrative, where the power swung too far in favour of workers post WW2 but it’s now swung too far towards the capital owning class.
Bishops Avenue, Mayfair mansions, £50m flats in the Shard etc ?
I'd have absolutely no problems with people following visa procedures to get a visa to work as a HGV driver if someone wishes to sponsor them for a visa following the same visa procedures any other migrant has to go through.
At some point the buck has to stop and rising wages and prices and wages and prices become a problem for the country in all sorts of ways that we won't repeat. The BoE is worried about it which seems a reasonably independent institution.
But the issue that policy makers have to grapple with, and the comparison is with the supermarkets and their treatment of their suppliers, is whether the benefit to the whole country (via lower or suppressed wages/prices) is more important than the factor inputs (ie wages in this case) being kept low.
I do think that the DVSA will have had involvement. Given that the current govt is a sieve I think we might have heard if there was actually any data showing a potential problem.
The data in my other post shows that basic HGV safety in the UK is near the top on EU researched numbers.
But I can well see that a single accident will be all over the media and Angela Rayners twitter feed about how the sky is falling in.
Had an interesting conversation with an FBPEr last night, which I might post later.
Don't see many of those around these days, but I do agree that Kimble is a crap President and needs to go........
Insurrection in Barcelona over arrest of independence leader in Italy
Well, not quite insurrection but demonstrations most certainly
Sure @HYUFD will be interested
For too many years people have claimed that rising prices are a good thing, while rising wages are a bad one. That misrepresentation has to be reversed.
In future could you spend 30 seconds checking stuff on google before posting unchecked thoughts - it would make the discussions why more useful if you validated your arguments...
The classic that I remember is from the Economist in the 1980s. They asked why, since a German steelworker cost 20x as much (literally) than an Indian steelworker, there were any German steelworks.
The answer was that the German steelworker produced 21x steel (IIRC).
So the German worker was cheaper.
This is true across a range of industries - a combination of investment in productivity by the company and a decent social/legal/infrastructure framework creates a level of productivity that supports the higher wages.
For example, I worked for a company with software development teams around the world. Since they were working on bit of the same system, the comparison was almost perfectly fair. India was the most expensive place to get software developed - due to productivity. London was second cheapest....
So do you have the figures on how many qualified people there are? Or not?