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It's going to be a bleak Christmas. Credit: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg via Getty Images
As if things weren’t bad enough already, the coming winter looks set to bring shortages unseen in the British economy for many years. Meat, milk and carbonated drinks are already seeing pressure on supply, while columnists have begun to fret about expected restrictions on Christmas trees and toys. But nothing has hit the public so hard as the petrol shortages, with frantic motorists texting each other to get the latest intel on which stations still have precious supplies. After only a few days of queuing, tempers are already fraying, so it could be a long winter.
With shortages come price rises. Inflation is already running at a fair clip — 3% in August versus the Bank of England’s target of 2%, with a similar rate in the eurozone. But even these figures pale in comparison to the ominous signs emerging from the United States, where inflation is clocking in at 5.3% in August — the highest since 2008.
People are quick to blame whatever political topic is at the top of their mind, and Brexit is an enormously popular choice — and no prizes for guessing why. But domestic concerns are unlikely to explain the shortages and inflation, as the international statistics show. Britain may have had Brexit, but the United States certainly did not — and a bottle of whiskey for anyone who can explain to me how the euro area could leave the European Union.
The driver of the immediate trends seems to be a lack of actual drivers — truck drivers, in particular. Where did they all go? Once again, the stuffed Brexit bear is wheeled out — but he is not very scary. Foreign labour was not scared out of Britain due to an abstract legal change; it was driven out by the Government’s lockdown policies in response to the pandemic, which shuffled many from their jobs onto a souped-up dole. Many realised that the dole is better where they came from on the continent, especially relative to the cost of living, and so they left.
Data published by the ONS shows this clearly. Between January and April 2019 — when Brexit was but months away — around 200,000 visa applications were being registered in Britain. In January and February 2020, after Brexit had happened, these numbers held up. But in March and April, as the lockdown set in, they collapsed to zero. European citizens making applications for the EU Settlement Scheme collapsed, too, from around 350,000 in January 2020 to around 50,000 in April. It wasn’t Brexit.
The truck driver shortage is hitting my home country of Ireland too — a nation that not only stayed in the EU, but has spent the last few years reminding everyone who will listen that they stayed in the EU.
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SubscribeHo hum. The majority of people in the Unherd comments foresaw dramas like this evolving from the beginning of lockdowns – why was this inevitable economic devastation so obvious to us and so completely opaque to so many others in society?
……..because there is a vast difference between having an ‘opinion’ and having to make a ‘decision’ based on an ‘opinion’, even if you have huge amounts of data and or advisors, offering any number of, often conflicting and contradictory, directions of march. Being brave enough to put your head above the parapet is indeed a rare thing, and getting rarer (people should appreciate Churchill more), especially when several hundred thousand deaths might be heaped upon it. Sweden was quite possibly right (to start with), but the UK, and others, possibly weren’t wrong, to try and hedge their bets until more was understood and deaths could be ameliorated. It would have been a brave person indeed who could have said “I am right” and stood by their guns (especially in this very un-stoical day and age) even as the body bags stacked up.
Sweden has most definitely been a success. Their all cause mortality was almost flat to the 10 years till end 2020 and since then their deaths per capita from Covid have steadily dropped from 8th in the world in 2020 to currently at about 45th.
I have no time for leaders who are not bold and practical. It was very evident and logical from fairly early on in the pandemic that lockdowns would have a much higher cost, including loss of life. To spell it out, lockdowns are causing more body bags than Covid. World leaders have been enabled by their feeble citizens who have no logic, basic economic knowledge and imagination.
They would have had to be very bold indeed. Weren’t the projected figures 500k dead? However, Sweden would have had access to the same numbers.
Maybe they understood that their people would act responsibly, and not spread the virus around
Sweden was bold and other leaders had an opportunity to be bold quite early on. Which is why I said in my post that from ‘fairly early on in the pandemic’ we (maybe I should say the unblinkered or those without a nefarious agenda) could see that governments could have corrected their course. Instead they doubled down and inter alia tipped hundreds of millions into poverty (poverty very often = death), crashed businesses and engendered loss of livelihoods, largely stopped providing any other healthcare besides Covid (and all that that entailed) and affected the futures of billions of people, not least of all the young.
Sweden urged people to be responsible, rather than doing full lockdowns. That broadly worked for them, without trashing the economy.
Letting the virus spread wildly seems to be a really bad option.
If I have any of this wrong please let me know
Good point. One way of putting that is that the Swedish population is sufficiently obedient to government advice and public opinion that they could obtain much of the same behaviour without having to make a formal lockdown. Which makes their approach less different than you might think.
There are several viruses running rampant at the moment; I currently have the media dubbed ‘worst cold ever’. Covid was a doddle compared to this.
The government should have updated the symptoms. Cold symptoms and Covid symptoms are virtually identical. Get tested and isolate (I’m not making this up). See https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/new-top-5-covid-symptoms
An important point is that the health mininistry bureaucracy in both Sweden and Denmark started out by relying on their internal models – which were developed for the flu. From which they concluded that there was nothing much you could do, and that it would not be particularly bad anyway. There were predictions that ‘it will all fizzle out, and anyway it will never come here, and if it does it will not be a big deal’. Remember? In Sweden the government left it to the experts get on with it. The Danish government decided at some point that with an unknown disease the downside risk of doing nothing was too great. The Swedish government was indeed bold – but when you are dealing with a pandemic that you do not know and there is a quite significant risk of hundreds of thousands of people dying I would much rather have them be cautious – and leave the boldness to Bolsanaro.
To me the whole thing actually shows that scientists are good to provide data, but bad at taking decisions. They (we) are too used to looking for certainty, and too prone to overestimate the reliability of our current models (since we have nothing else). In research it works out over time, as different theories clash and you end up with enough data to be sure. In real-time policy making you need someone who is used to taking important decisions under uncertainty. Which is another reason why the Swedes were wrong to just leave it to Tegnell. They may have been lucky in the end – but you should not base your policy on luck.
Thanks for the informative update. “leave the boldness to Bolsanaro” is right.
Were the Swedes just lucky, or did they trust their people? Would that approach work here?
Our governments tend to be authoritarian. Maybe that’s understandable during a health crisis
I am pretty sure that simple government advice will buy a lot more compliance in Sweden than in many other places (do any Swedes disagree?), so they can get more locking-down with weaker actions than others can. That is predictable, not luck, but I really do not think the same approach would work in the UK or US.
As for were they lucky in getting a relatively good pandemic with fairly lax measures – well how can you tell? My impression is that their very first estimates were way off (as were many other people’s) and that it could easily have gone a lot worse than it did. But we still do not know, and the situation was so uncertain back then that even the uncertainty could not be estimated properly.
It wasn’t luck. He followed the pandemic guidelines laid out over the last 100 years by Western science. The lockdowns and mask wearing were looked at in the past and deemed not to work with a highly infectious respiratory virus. I would also warn that the restrictions in Denmark, Norway, and Finland looked a lot more like Sweden outside of the spring of 2020. Nobody talks about that… so he wasn’t alone. Norway ended all restrictions last week. Sweden still has limits on large crowds.
Because so many others in society foresaw a high risk of lots of people dying form COVID and were not willing to accept x hundred thousand deaths to keep the pubs in business. Whereas the Unherd commentators (and the Swediish government) chose to believe that nobody much would die – or simply did not think it was important. Since nobody really knew at the start how this was going to pan out, everybody had to gamble. Personally I prefer to err on the side of trying to keep people alive.
But it is plainly obvious that it was NOT just about keeping the pubs in business. Far from it. I often find your comments intelligent, thought provoking and frequently balanced Rasmus but this one was just plain silly and emotive nonsense.
Thanks, I agree so won’t weigh in further.
I took the pub comment as short for keeping the economy rolling along
In that case it was also a rather lazy comment.
Yes, it’s weird that we ended up with different approaches from the same data.
And yes, countries that didn’t strive to keep people alive, like Brazil, had a huge death toll. I think I’m right in saying that Sweden did try to keep people alive, just in a different way.
I’d love some educated opinions on that
Those clever poople who foresaw masses of people dying invariably happened to be on full pay, and largely “working” from home.
Maybe if they were forced to share the pain of the pubowners, small businesses etc and had to take say a 50% pay cut whenever there was a lockdown, there might have been a lot more appreciation for the financial aspects of safety at all costs
Maybe – but that cuts both ways. The people who predicted that this would be no worse than the flu were mostly those who had a lot to lose from restrictions. Or who were so opposed to government intervention that they preferred to stick to individual solutions no matter how many people would die that way. If we are to get anywhere with this, both sides need to discuss it on the data, not to select our data based on our opinions and interests and refuse to listen to anyone whose interests are different.
Yes, I think it’s a human failing – to form an opinion, then look for data that confirms it, and ignore data that doesn’t.
It takes great discipline to avoid doing it. You have to be prepared to humbly admit that you were wrong
Yes, I think it’s a human failing – to form an opinion, then look for data that confirms it, and ignore data that doesn’t.
It is human. That’s the way our brains work. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
In all this talk there has been no clear identification of those most likely to die and therefore the most in need of protection. The fact that this statistical work has not been done is worrying. Having someone die with Covid 19 on them is not the same of dying from it.
Looking at information in ther media deaths apppear to be greatest amongst those over 80 years in age, have Type 2 Diabetes, are over weight, poor lung capacity and some heart related condition.
A few years ago the Chief Medical Officer said obesity was the greatest threat to health in Britain. The truth may be obesity coupled with Diabetes and heart disease and poor lung capacity. Therefore as the population of the UK increase for those over eighty years in age, if the poor health increases, they will become more susceptible to diseases such as Covid but also the 1968/69 Flu.
The question which is not asked is what is the probability of someone with all these criteria dying in the next 1 to 3 years ? Does Covid mainly kill people over eighty years of age who have multiple health problems and may have died within the next 1 to 3 years? Therefore are these the people on whom health care should have been targeted?
Also what medication can be taken to help prevent getting Covid and/or it progressing to the next stage? None of my comments remove benefit of vaccination.
I have great sympathy with that
To be fair, I think that pretty much everybody understood that lockdowns would have a significant impact on the economy.
What I objected to then and still object to now is that there was no attempt to compare the overall impact of lockdown with the supposed benefits. It was assumed by the government and media outlets that there was no alternative and that no economic cost was too high.
Indeed, if I remember correctly, Ofcom ruled that a media outlet even questioning the necessity for lockdowns would be in breach of Ofcom’s code of conduct.
The PM could have come out and said plainly that lockdown was going to cost us £500 billion and would prevent, say, half a million excess deaths and that he judged that the amount was worth the outcome. But he didn’t and neither did anybody else.
People should certainly make that kind of calculation. But given that both costs and benefits were wildly uncertain, any precise numbers were bound to be wrong. How (serious question) should politicians present a prediction where both costs and benefits could be wrong by a factor of maybe four – in either direction?
Whether it is in any way realistic to expect precise, reliable and well-thought-out predictions of policy consequences from Boris Johnson (of all people) is another question.
Maybe the government would have got more support if they just came clean. This is what we’re going to do based on this sum, but it’s likely to be wildly wrong. Why do they always pretend to know the unknowable. Just state the known unknowns
Agreed.
Yes, exactly right, except I don’t know if such figures exist. But even a back-of-envelope calculation, with suppositions, would have been useful.
People here state that lockdowns kill more people than the virus. Are there any figures, or models to support that, or is it just an opinion based on nothing?
I think people understood there would be an impact on the economy, but I think they failed to link that impact to the human cost. The models which linked non-pharma interventions to potential life lost for COVID were experimental, reposing on many assumed variables which have since been shown to be wrong.
Against this, we have very robust models which link life expectancy to GDP. We know that lockdowns will cost lives. And we have seen it – 100 million starving in the developing world, and many many to pay the price over the coming years, even in the developed world.
This is copy and pasted from Facebook which explains it all somewhat
Jim Titheridge
So, you are running out of food on the shelves, fuel in the garages, you can’t buy things you need, because the shops can’t get their supplies.
Why is that?
A shortage of goods? No
A shortage of money? No
A shortage of drivers to deliver the goods? Well, sort of.
There isn’t actually a shortage of drivers, what we have, is a shortage of people who can drive, that are willing to drive any more. You might wonder why that is. I can’t answer for all drivers, but I can give you the reason I no longer drive. Driving was something I always yearned to do as a young boy, and as soon as I could, I managed to get my driving licence, I even joined the army to get my HGV licence faster, I held my licence at the age of 17. It was all I ever wanted to do, drive trucks, I had that vision of being a knight of the roads, bringing the goods to everyone, providing a service everyone needed. What I didn’t take into account was the absolute abuse my profession would get over the years.
I have seen a massive decline in the respect this trade has, first, it was the erosion of truck parking and transport café’s, then it was the massive increase in restricting where I could stop, timed weight limits in just about every city and town, but not all the time, you can get there to do your delivery, but you can’t stay there, nobody wants an empty truck, nobody wants you there once they have what they did want.
Compare France to the UK. I can park in nearly every town or village, they have marked truck parking bays, and somewhere nearby, will be a small routier, where I can get a meal and a shower, the locals respect me, and have no problems with me or my truck being there for the night.
Go out onto the motorway services, and I can park for no cost, go into the service area, and get a shower for a minimal cost, and have freshly cooked food, I even get to jump the queues, because others know that my time is limited, and respect I am there because it is my job. Add to that, I even get a 20% discount of all I purchase. Compare that to the UK £25-£40 just to park overnight, dirty showers, and expensive, dried (under heat lamps) food that is overpriced, and I have no choice but to park there, because you don’t want me in your towns and cities.
Ask yourself how you would feel, if doing your job actually cost you money at the end of the day, just so you could rest.
But that isn’t the half of it. Not only have we been rejected from our towns and cities, but we have also suffered massive pay cuts, because of the influx of foreign drivers willing to work for a wage that is high where they come from, companies eagerly recruited from the eastern bloc, who can blame them, why pay good money when you can get cheap labour, and a never ending supply of it as well. Never mind that their own countries would suffer from a shortage themselves, that was never our problem, they could always get people from further afield if they needed drivers.
We were once seen as knights of the road, now we are seen as the lepers of society. Why would anyone want to go back to that?
If you are worried about not getting supplies on your supermarket shelves, ask your local council just how well they cater for trucks in your district.
I know Canterbury has the grand total of zero truck parking facilities, but does have a lot of restrictions, making it difficult for trucks to stop anywhere.
Do you want me to go back to driving trucks? Give me a good reason to do so. Give anyone a good reason to take it up as a profession.
Perhaps once you work out why you can’t, you will understand why your shelves are not as full as they could be.
I tried it for over 30 years, but will never go back, you just couldn’t pay me enough.
Thank you to all those people who have shared this post. I never expected such a massive response, but am glad that this message is getting out there. I really hope that some people who are in a position to change just how bad it is for some drivers, can influence the powers that be to make changes for the better. Perhaps some city and town councillors have seen this, and are willing to bring up these issues at their council meetings. It surely cannot be too much to ask of a town/city to provide facilities for those who are doing so much to make sure their economies run and their shops and businesses are stocked with supplies. I never wanted any luxuries, just somewhere safe to park, and some basic ablutions that are maintained to a reasonable standard. I spent my nights away from my home and family for you, how much is it to ask that you at least give me access to some basic services.
There are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of licence holders just like me, who will no longer tolerate the conditions. So the ball is firmly in the court of the councils to solve this problem.
WOW. 100,000 shares in a week.
I have been humbled by the number of people who have never been involved in transport expressing concern about just how badly truck drivers are treated. I don’t think the general public have really ever given it a thought, but I have been pleased to see so many express their displeasure about how we have to live while just providing a service for all of them.
I have heard from a number of news outlets since posting this, but not a single councillor or politician has contacted me.
Not that I think anything will change. Trucks always have been an inconvenience for local governments, and the cost of catering for them is left to someone else, anyone else, yet there is no someone else out there.
I avoided another aspect of the job, that makes it bad even for those who try to get home every night.
We have many transport hubs where goods are collected and then distributed onwards to supermarkets and large retailers. Anyone who has delivered to any of these regional distribution centres will tell you the same story. You arrive there at a fixed time slot (don’t be late or you will face serious delays), and you will be told where to park and then where to take your paper work, after that, you will be instructed to back onto a bay at some point, to be unloaded. it might take just 20 minutes to unload a truck, but you can bet that the time spent in this RDC will be much longer, waiting for a bay to tip, waiting for them to actually unload you, and then what is usually the longest wait. Waiting for your paper work, so you can carry on to the next job. It is no wonder there is a shortage of trucks on the roads, 1/2 of them are stuck inside these soulless places waiting for a piece of paper.!
This is an example of people making regulations and undertaking designs of warehouses who have never done the job. The reason why the RN was so good up to to the 1830s was that all officers started as Midshipmen and had to do all the jobs the sailors did plus learn the mathematics of navigation, gunnery and loading. Consequently, they knew what was possible and what was impossible.
Britain is run by clerks such as politicians, civil servants, lawyers, journalists, accountants , etc who have never done the job. When Britain was run by people who had undertaken practical work such as Naval and Military Officers, Chartered Engineers, Farmers, Manufacturers , Craftsmen and Foremen we were successful.
The situation is not about Party Politics but character tempered by experience: especially adversity.
Hubert, brilliant article. We need articles by people who do the job.
I hope articles like this get a wider viewing and ensure something is done to make the job and the system more effective and humane. Even ordinary car drivers seem to be seen as the enemy these days but at least we can boycott hostile towns and go home! Obsession with fining and money making won’t work ultimately!
“Many of the Tories in government appear to have PPE degrees from Oxbridge“
My understanding, from speaking to a family member who recently graduated, is that the proto-politicians at Oxford (don’t think Cambridge offers PPE) simply drop economics after first year. Seems to add up (even if they can’t).
Both Brexit and lockdown drove (us) out …
Lockdown just accelerated the process
Does anyone still believe this is unintended? I guess that makes sense if you believe that governments are full of well-meaning but dim-witted individuals. Me, I believe this veneer of bumbling incompetence exhibited by our current crop of politicians is a cover for sheer malice, i.e. shortages and inflation caused by lockdowns are a feature, not a bug.
Why would they want shortages and inflation? I’m probably missing something here
I believe it’s about destroying free markets in order to bring about ‘green’ command economies.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/an-economist-explains-what-covid-19-has-done-to-the-global-economy/
Admittedly, I am a paranoiac, but so far all my fears about this pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns have proven true.
Your argument, however, would be made stronger if you could supply examples of similar problems in Italy, Belgium, France, Spain, Czech Republic, etc. Instead you gloss over it and barely mention Ireland and the US.
Yes that’s a fair point – I think it’s a freedom of movement question.
Firstly we are an island, secondly and more importantly, in or out of the EU we’re non-Schengen. So combined with the first it’s just that much more difficult to move in and out of the UK. But the fact still stands that it’s the lockdowns that have impacted this to a far greater degree.
The ever-changing border restrictions due to covid have less impact when you can just drive across the border or not to deliver goods. Say from Netherlands to Belgium. However arranging and paying for transit to the UK is an added cost and complication independent of Brexit.
Now a fair argument could be made that within the EU we could work to fix this easier. But I don’t think it’s a strong one given the EU’s track record and slow bureaucratic process that can’t attach the UK to the continent geographically.
There is no specific piece of Brexit legislation that has made it more difficult to operate in or out of the UK yet for drivers or other workers, so by the same token those blaming Brexit are basing it on nothing. You still do not need a visa to enter the UK on an EU passport, and can remain for up to 6 months without one.
Thanks. I wish the author had made these points.
You might be interested to learn that the Swiss (!) had to cancel 30 train services between Lausanne and Geneva on Tuesday because of a shortage of personnel. The problems will continue, they say, until a new batch of trained drivers are ready to work (end October). This does suggest that measures taken during the pandemic (and they were relatively light in CH) were the reason, though I haven’t heard anyone say so officially.
Apparently changes in IR 35 haver also persuaded people to stop being lorry drivers. The causes appear to be
Politicians, media and civil servants lack broad industrial experience and arer ignorant to the fact that major problems usually occur where several factors come together.
The simplest solution would be to ask those drivers who have left the industry what would be needed for them to return. Next assess the admin required to obtain a licence.
Good summary, yes, the perfect storm.
Edit: also valuable thought-provoking contribution from Hubert above.
Greetings from the continent, where schadenfreude for the shortages is in full flow, where this is all being blamed almost exclusively on Brexit and where any attempt to point out that this problem is due to a number of factors results in one being labelled a populist. Give me strength: this determination to blame every single thing on Brexit and see it as proof of how it was the “wrong” decision is fast becoming pathological.
Incidentally, I read today that Austria’s army is already doing exercises to prepare for an electricity blackout, which we have apparently only narrowly avoided twice in the past few months. People in glass houses…
Um, what about David Miles and his collaborators at Imperial (no, not including that fraudster) who concluded in a paper produced in the late spring of 2020 that the net costs of a March to June 2020 lockdown were – even with the most favourable assumptions – likely to be at least £68bn, taking everything, including Covid deaths, into account. See here for a summary https://voxeu.org/article/uk-lockdown-balancing-costs-against-benefits
The truth is that our so-called leading politicians pretty well knew all of this from very near the start, and those who didn’t could have known if they had wanted to. Most knew that the long term harms would far exceed any short term benefits. But they lacked the leadership, courage, and strength of character to do anything but follow a fearful mob cajoled and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party and other mafiosi-like private interests in to a spiral of interventions which have left them and the public trapped in a web of their own lies.
Those few of them who possess a conscience will never be able to forgive themselves for what they have done. But even now, when the net costs are so clearly mounting, none of them can find the humility to admit they got things wrong. Instead they allow big pharma to drain the public purse as kids endure another term of masked isolation and abuse by paranoiac teachers, their minds warped by incessant brainwashing spewed out by our once-loved and world famous state broadcaster, while the death toll in our mis-managed hospitals from vaccine-escaped variants, and sheer neglect and despair, rises daily.
Moral cowards.
Excellent article, plain speech and the truth clearly expressed. Of course a politician, any politician, has to temper his actions to the prevailing orthodoxy, but ultimately the prizes go to the bold (even those who look as though they are trimming, but in reality are being bold).
Incidentally, one of the great tragedies of recent EU times is that the Irish have stayed in; they admittedly have received large bribes to do so, but they have prospered – and become an enterprising nation of great style and creativity – by acting as competitively independent. Why not actually do it? Throw off the Euro smother blanket and be free. You did it with the Brits after all
Bolsanaro was bold. So was Hugo Chavez. How many prizes do they get?
I also think the media and Remainers screeching constantly that Britain is racist, fascist and unwelcoming doesn’t help. No country should be criticised for wanting controlled immigration or to deport undesirables – and most countries do just that. But for some reason if the UK does it it’s somehow unacceptable? Weird.
Well if France would deport some Brits would that be fascist racism or just controlling immigration? Weird.
This article says almost nothing to justify its title – it ignores Brexit almost entirely. And if taking Britain out of the Single Market and Customs Union, is not an intervention, I don’t know what is.
Yes, why did they do that? Seemed stupid to me
Brexit and lockdown are related. Both are about ending freedom of movement.
Brexit tops you going to Europe for a job. Lockdown stops you going for a holiday.
Brexit stops you studying abroad. Lockdown limits your study options to a childhood bedroom or an overpriced prison.
Brexit turns your local Polish deli into an empty shuttered unit. Lockdown does the same to the whole High Street.
Boris was only doing what he was elected to do.
So one would expect that every country which employed lockdowns (i.e. everywhere in Europe bar Sweden) will now be suffereng from similar shortages. If they are, news of this doesn’t seem to have reached the British media. But only Britain had Brexit. Just saying.
That’s a good point. I expect it’s because of a number of factors. Katharine Eyre was just saying that Austria’s army is already doing exercises to prepare for an electricity blackout, but we don’t hear about these things