Brexit: the new European slave barons

By Pete North - June 3, 2021

There were a number of times up to 2020 when my public position of joining Efta and remaining in the EEA were in conflict with many of my critiques of the EU where a soft Brexit would have meant no change in multiple areas of concern. It was hard to convincingly reconcile them and in the end concluded that EEA was a pretty disappointing compromise, but nonetheless one we should make anyway. Everything in politics is a compromise.

Now that we have left, though, I accept it. As much as re-joining the EEA is unlikely to ever be on the cards, thereby rendering any further campaigning a waste of time, I would in all likelihood oppose such a move. Once you’ve lost that trade it isn’t simply a matter of pulling a lever and it all comes back.

Much of my concern was centred on trade, and particularly trade in goods as regards to frictionless trade but that was back when we were talking about frictionless trade as an unalloyed economic good. This is perhaps where hard Brexiteers could have made a better case for themselves. Instead of lying and pretending there wouldn’t be any major problems, they could have made a full throated case against it. Which isn’t difficult to do.

This morning I caught Dennis McShane wailing about the difficulties in the haulage industry, claiming we were short of some 15,000 drivers.

I’m not sure how we suddenly find ourselves short by such a large number, but one would hazard a guess that there aren’t many volunteering to do the jobs. It’s bloody hard work, the hours are long, it’s dangerous for a number of varied reasons and the pay sucks. The industry is rife with exploitation which in many instances could easily be described as modern slavery.

During lockdown, a new haulage business model grew in strength in which a trucking company registers itself in a lower-wage country within the EU – Lithuania, for example, and then recruits truck drivers from even poorer countries outside of the EU – Ukraine, the Philippines, or even Sri Lanka. Truckers are on the road continuously driving for months at a time with limited rest days and no medical insurance. Drivers sleep, eat and live in their trucks – a space not bigger than 4 square meters – relieving themselves in their trucks or on the roadside.

Migrant truck drivers are paid wages as low as €1.76-€2.13 per hour while they transport goods manufactured by multi-million dollar corporations throughout the wealthiest European countries like Germany, France, and the Netherlands.

Though the use of Filipino drivers is new, this is not by any means a new phenomenon. It’s just that paying low wages to eastern Europeans wasn’t cheap enough for the haulage industry who cut every corner imaginable. Somebody is making a lot of money out of it but it isn’t the drivers.

This, incidentally, has major implications for road safety in Britain. And as ever, when there are accidents, the media does not tell us the nationality of the driver so we have no way of knowing the nature of the problem or how serious it might be. Like much else in UK media. A report from 2015 in the Daily Mail has it that motorway accidents involving foreign lorries have soared by 14 per cent in just two years – with Polish juggernauts (unspecified driver nationality) topping the international crash league table on UK roads. Tangentially, EU migrants are responsible for an upsurge in drink driving offences.

While they tot up the value of EU trade in driver accompanied loads, we are entitled to deduct the lost time in traffic jams and congestion, particularly where there are accidents where the air ambulance is called out (£2.5k per sortie).

But then this isn’t just about the haulage industry. The price of Mr McShame’s salad is a growing problem with modern slavery. In the UK, the number of modern slavery cases rose by 35% from 2016-17, with agriculture and the food industry among the worst sectors. An estimated 10,000 to 13,000 people are being exploited in the food and farming industry. In agriculture, some workers – mainly Romanian and Bulgarian men in their 20s and 30s – are putting in 15-hour days in “horrific” conditions for less than the minimum wage. Workers from eastern Europe, especially Poland and Lithuania, are also regularly being exploited.

If that much is true for our agricultural exports, much the same is true of our fisheries. For all that we’ve had endless debates about what forms to fill in in order to send molluscs to the EU, absolutely nothing whatsoever is said of the slave labour used to harvest shellfish. And what is true of our exports goes double for our imports. An expose from Spanish greenhouses revealed massive exploiting of Moroccan migrants, while Italian agriculture is essentially Mafia run. The entire single market system of trade in food produce is underpinned by exploitation.

But then the Tories wouldn’t run on that line in that their subsequent FTAs with Australia, Brazil and Mexico would have to come under the same spotlight. Cheap food more often than not is soaked in blood. But it is somewhat bizarre to see Labour politicians past and present complaining at the lack of cheap salads produced by slaves and delivered by exploited Filipinos, particularly as the left have been bashing us over the head for an entire year over Britain’s role in the slave trade.

The shortages created by Brexit and Covid is a real opportunity not only to reform farming and rethink our relationship with food, it invites us to ask broader questions about how we do things. I’m of the view that Britain should emulate the Kibbutz movement, only in Herefordshire and Lincolnshire, and get young people living and working away, picking fruit and veg to save for education. If you provide passable entertainment and safe accommodation, kids will have a great time, make friends and learn what they’re made of. It could even impact our epidemic of knife crime. The devil makes work for idle hands.

There is absolutely nothing stopping farmers from doing this without prompting from government. Any time you catch UK food producers whining about staff shortages, they’re really just making excuses for the lack of imagination. There were an estimated 728,000 young people in the UK who were NEET in January to March 2021. 447,000 18-24 year olds were unemployed in January-March 2021, while 1.66 million were economically inactive. Yet business tells us we need more immigrants. I don’t buy it.

Until recently Eastern European workers didn’t have to re-register their private vehicles so weren’t paying tax, were often uninsured and living with substantially fewer overheads, particularly accommodation costs, so could very easily undercut British workers. Yet Tony Blair said in 2014 that “politicians should not tell the “white, working class, unemployed youth” that they would find jobs if there were fewer Polish people working in the UK. He said that the answer should be to provide young people with the education and skills they need to “face the world’s challenges and overcome them.”

But as much as he was wrong we never did get round to providing young people with the education and skills they need because we keep finding even cheaper sources of immigration to exploit. So long as Mr McShane gets his blood-soaked off-season salad, nobody seems to care.