The benefits of Brexit

By Pete North - June 30, 2021

This week the remainer press is busy wailing abut the shortage of lorry drivers. As we have identified, this is a system wide problem across the whole of the EU going back as far as 2012. Brexit has merely brought the crunch point forward.

The cause is not quite so straightforward. As much as the industry suffers a recruitment crisis, it also has a major retention problem – and thousands of people who exited the occupation have zero intention of returning. Because they’re treated like garbage.

As much as the pay sucks, the stress levels are enormous, the deadlines tight, often unreasonable and inflexible, the lifestyle is unhealthy; working long hours and eating badly (expensive convenience foods). There is then the onerous and overzealous officialdom, where drivers are harassed, clamped on rest periods, and fined when illegal immigrants hide in the back. The industry can’t even retain the cheap labour they import because they treat them like dogs.

Further to this, not much has been done to make the job viable for women. Only 2,200 of the 315,000 registered truck drivers in the UK are female – because it’s not safe and employers don’t make proper facilities available. The hardest thing, I understand, is the lack of women’s lavatories. Many sites only have one, usually disgusting, driver toilet.

So when you add to this the refusal to pay a competitive wage, a refusal to train, and a systemic reliance on exploitation, one has very little sympathy for the wailing of the haulage which now want to bring in more foreign drivers that they can’t even retain.

Not forgetting that the system has already absorbed all the European drivers, and EU haulage firms are now looking outside of the EU for even cheaper Filipino drivers – with obvious ramifications for road safety and accident rates. In 2007, The Times reported that foreign lorries were three times more likely to be in collisions than British lorries and the number of crashes caused by foreign vehicles increased by 47 per cent in five years. It could get worse with non-EU drivers, often with fake qualifications.

One forgets, though, that it’s only a relatively recent thing that our roads were choked with HGVs. That’s an EU/single market thing – made worse by way of being a freight corridor for Ireland. Though we can talk about the increased value of trade in goods because of the single market, nothing is ever said of how much we have to spend on our roads and infrastructure to accommodate a logistics system built entirely around EU scale lorries – and the social costs of doing so.

Ultimately the model of borderless trade built around the large HGV is one that is ideal and perfectly sensible for mainland Europe but was never suitable for the UK. Our infrastructure and road scale couldn’t cope with it – and still can’t thus we spend to reinforce failure.

We have gradually become accustomed to the absurdity of this model. Back when I lived in Bristol, my local shop was a Tesco Extra, and when the resupply truck came in, they had to close and cordon off the entire car park because if anyone pulled in, the lorry couldn’t reverse out. And when it did, it brought the whole Gloucester Road North to a standstill. HGVs being where they shouldn’t be has become the norm.

In recent months, I’ve looked at exploitation in the EU food production system and its links with organised crime, and then at the systemic exploitation in the haulage sector undermining wages, but then it also extends to the distribution centres in the UK and the subsequent final mile delivery sector. We often hear about the EU’s system of Farm to Fork food safety, but less is said of the Farm to Fork exploitation. The only way you could seriously believe that the EU upheld decent labour standards is if you work in an office far away from any of the dangerous trades.

As much as there are ethical and environmental questions looming over this system, there is also the question of sustainability. That we are now talking about shortages in supermarkets is largely because the system is wholly pegged to single sources of supply, through a supermarket logistics system built around the HGV.

Undoing this monstrosity, though, is not so easy. First and foremost we’ve added an extra ten or more million people to the population since joining the single market and self-sufficiency is a non-option – but there is certainly every cause to reconsider some of the trends in food production over the last thirty years. We once had a system of local slaughterhouses only a few miles from the farm instead of corporate scale death factories. Rebooting that would be a good start. We may wish to consider tariff liberalisation on meat if we want a viable meat industry.

The problem, as I understand it, is the supermarkets and their system of national standardisation, where consumers expect to be able to buy the same product at the same price in any store around the country. That, to a considerable degree, precludes local and artisanal products. Just as the consumer prefers nicely presented and sorted fruit and veg, they have similar habits with meat. Anyone younger than me has never known the system to be any different.

That is not a case for going back to the good old days when the British diet was drab, and overall standards compared to now were poor. Meat producers are now selling directly on the basis of higher quality and the local virtue. It seems the smart money is on cutting the supermarkets out of the loop entirely. As much as our food and farming policy needs to inform our trade policy, it should also be looking at ways to cut HGVs out of the system. Town and city traffic managers need to be cutting them out.

But then we create a new problem in that smaller loads and smaller vehicles means a need for more drivers. This presents less of a problem than finding HGV drivers being that it doesn’t coast upward of £5k to qualify, but it’s still difficult finding reliable drivers and retaining them. But that’s for much the same reasons. Delivery drivers are on insecure contracts and treated like dirt. They want foreign labour because abusing the staff is far easier to get away with. Nobody cares about them.

That is the ugly truth of our system. Non-unionised immigrant labour is easier to push around, and easier to exploit, and so long as consumers (remainers especially) keep getting high quality, cheap off-season goods, they don’t care. They care more about animal welfare than human welfare. As much as British unions have allowed this to happen, undermining the livelihoods of their members, they have become part of the EU’s “civil society” machine, and are no longer national unions as such. They carry the national branding but their input is to the EU regulatory system which exacerbates many of the problems.

I fought hard to keep the single market, but now we’re out I would fiercely oppose re-joining it. Not only was it a mistake to join it, the more one examines the negative externalities, the more horrifying it looks. But again it’s not simply a case of just blaming the EU. Much of our system falls over due to a complete absence of effective enforcement. We have enforcement officers who are largely serving as pettifogging revenue officers, but few are dedicated to the proper functioning of the system, barely aware that it is a system.

The emergent crisis, therefore, presents us with an opportunity to rethink the whole system (not least because we no longer have a choice) and being out of the EU means we don’t have to ask permission from Brussels to re-regulate a system that was never suited to the British Isles. Instead we can build a system based on local production and local enforcement.

For the moment, all our policy makers and industrial influencers can come up with is demands for yet more immigration, but having left the EU, some five million people have applied for settled status – yet even they can’t be persuaded to do all these jobs we can’t fill. Immigration, therefore, is only a sticking plaster, as immigrants come in to do a short spell in the key sectors then move to other jobs. The visa system then serves as a funnel, while the structural problems remain unaddressed – and we further increase the population, placing more demands on the national food and logistics infrastructure.

Unless and until we are willing to rethink the model, we will not solve the manpower shortage. It is a structural problem, and it has been growing for years even with open borders to the EU. It will certainly improve matters if the haulage industry cleans up its act, pays more and trains more drivers, but ultimately, we need a broader package of national reforms, including a radical overhaul of our perennially dysfunctional welfare system.

Whichever way you look at it, our model of cheap food was always going to come to a crunch point even had we remained in the EU. Brexit, though, has forced the issue, and in the same way the EU has always employed the “beneficial crisis” there is a major opportunity for Britain to do likewise – seizing the opportunity. After all, it is the remain leaning Guardian that told us for so many years that locally sourced food was better for us and slave labour was bad.

This ought to be rich pickings for the Labour party, satisfying its metropolitan base who bang on about carbon food miles, conditions for the working poor and the environment – and it may even win back some the working class people they’ve abandoned. But they just can’t admit there might actually be benefits to Brexit. Our political class simply cannot imagine doing anything in the direct national interest or doing anything differently to the EU. That is why they’re dying – and they deserve to.