NEWS · 08 October 2021
Our message on Brexit is finally starting to get through. 74% of people surveyed this week agree that Brexit is to blame for the shortage of lorry drivers in the UK – and so for the knock-on fuel and food shortages.
In the latest YouGov poll, 53% now say Brexit is going badly – the highest seen yet – compared to just 18% who think it is going well. If you're receiving this newsletter then you've known for a long time that Brexit would be a disaster – now that view is going mainstream, fast.
So many crises it's getting hard to keep track
Even the biggest fan of Brexit and Boris Johnson is going to have an increasingly hard time avoiding the day to day shortages caused by leaving the EU. Brexit means a rolling crisis in every sector of the economy – and new ones continue to pop up thick and fast.
After calling in the army to buy itself a (temporary) slow-down in the petrol crisis, the government now faces:
- A growing cull of pigs because of the shortage of meat processing workers.
- One of the largest school canteen suppliers has advised schools to start stockpiling food so children can be fed through the winter.
- Dairy farmers are having to pour tens of thousands of litres of milk down the drain because of the lack of lorry drivers – one reason why supermarket milk shelves are often sitting empty.
- The makers of Quality Street chocolates have said they may not be able to supply enough for Christmas, because of "supply chain issues" – aka Brexit.
- Only 27 drivers (or 127, if you believe Boris Johnson's version) have taken up the government's three-month HGV visa, meaning lorry driver shortages will not let up.
All of that is from the last few days alone – and there's a lot more out there that isn't making it into the press yet. Every kind of food and drink that gets transported in a lorry (that's most of them!) is having problems.
Beyond the shortages, there's also the loss of opportunities, with the boss of computer chip maker Intel today revealing that the UK is no longer being considered for a chip factory – because of Brexit. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said that before Brexit, the company "absolutely would have been seeking sites for consideration" in the UK. But "post-Brexit... we're looking at EU countries and getting support from the EU".
At Tory party conference, Boris Johnson had no answers to any of this, and indeed barely any policy substance at all – just more empty 'optimism' and promises of sunlit uplands. With a hard winter ahead, this is the time to declare as loudly as we can: the cause of all these problems is Brexit.
Back on the streets
Almost two years after the general election, and after these times of pandemic lockdowns, it was good to see anti-Brexit protesters taking to the streets again outside the Tory conference in Manchester. Our message was: "Brexit isn't working!"
Thank you to Andy Barton for the photographs, and thank you to everyone who came to the protest.
