[Boiler]

Once again, Khazi Kwarteng spekes his branes.

Hire UK workers to drive lorries, minister tells firms

Errrr... have you had your head up your arse this last eighteen months, minister?

[Youngian]

Layabouts receiving too much on benefits will be blamed next for labour shortages. And take a punt on trendy feminists brainwashing women into not having enough children, making a reappearance.

[mattomac]

I saw that headline and wondered which of the idiots had said it.

[Dalem Lake]

Once again, Khazi Kwarteng spekes his branes.

Hire UK workers to drive lorries, minister tells firms

Errrr... have you had your head up your arse this last eighteen months, minister?

He's another one of those "Britannia Unchained" pillocks.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

We discussed this at home.
The trouble is that these Tories who have never known the world of work, or of training or anything other than poncing about (George Osborn, anybody?) simply have no idea of what it takes an individual to retrain, possibly move home and change their lives with a long perood of financial distress or uncertainty. Just as Hunt just thought that junior doctors could stick in some extra hours (for less money) with no added stress or indeed extreme exhaustion. Adding to someone's workload when you have a very light one and several assistants, SPADs and assorted hangers-on to do the work is so very, very typical of the priviliged bastards. Or that people on the minimum wage can just wait a few weeks for their UC whilst they live off their dividends or some such utter fuckwittery.

We got cross.

[Youngian]

Assuming UK drivers will fill the labour shortages (for arguments sake) then wages will begin to fall again. Does it matter if non-foreigners depress wages? What other irons do the ‘blame EU workers’ brigade have for maintaining pay and conditions (like collective bargaining or wage councils)? You’ll get tumble weed if you ask. These people have no interest in the scourge of low pay. Even former public sector trade unionist Paul Embery thinks supply and demand should determined private sector wages levels. As long as there are foreigners to blame for over-supply in deregulated labour markets.

[Youngian]

Villagers in Kent have won a planning appeal to scale Farage’s Garage down by over 90 percent. No Brexit in their backyard

Controversial plans for an enormous Brexit customs clearance park in Dover with a capacity for 1,200 trucks have been dramatically downsized in a major victory for local opponents.

Devastated homeowners have spent seven months fighting the plans, under which former farmland would have been concreted over, an ancient Roman way destroyed and night-time light and noise pollution caused for families living just 25 metres away.


But at a meeting last Friday, representatives from HM Revenue and Customs confirmed to the local parish council their U-turn.

Instead of 1,200 lorries, the site will now accommodate just 96, with 20 extra spaces for reversing trucks, and take up just a quarter of the original space.

HMRC officials told local people they had “learned the lessons” from the vast Brexit lorry park 22 miles away in Sevington, near Ashford https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... lorry-park

[Boiler]

The trouble is that these Tories who have never known the world of work, or of training or anything other than poncing about (George Osborn, anybody?) simply have no idea of what it takes an individual to retrain, possibly move home and change their lives with a long perood of financial distress or uncertainty.

But.. but... surely it's just a question of getting on your bike and looking for work?

I knew a tanker driver once. It is NOT an easy job - and if you want to see what happens when you recruit people who can barely drive a car to drive long wheelbase vans on an impossibly tight schedule, look at delivery drivers. Some are a genuine danger.

I believe it takes six months minimum to learn to drive an artic properly and even then some are not great - I'm thinking of the driver of a Dutch-registered vehicle last week who forced me to brake heavily when he decided that "mirror, signal, manoeuvre" should be performed in reverse order.

It also doesn't alter the fact that bluntly, it's a pretty shit job: often sleeping in the cab away from family, running the risk of being robbed or having your curtain sides slashed (why do you think you see wagons in lay-bys at night with the rear doors open?), eating badly at truck stops and above all, it's boring. That's why lots of older drivers simply hung up their keys when the pandemic took hold. They'd had enough.

As ever, it's MPs with no life experience other than working for Daddy, swanning around in Chambers on a grand an hour or working for merchant banks making more coin in a week than many truck drivers do in several months making these dumb pronouncements.

Here's an idea. Rather like Tory Twats did bits for TV living on benefits back in the 90s, let's see one of then learn to drive a lorry.

[The All New KevS]

Not do much these days, but it was always one of those romanticised occupations with things like Smokey and the Bandit, and Convoy - you know, brave Knights of the road etc.

Whereas the truth is they could tell you how much a bacon roll is at any service station in the land, and as an old friend who did the job for many years told me, "if I ever see a sign for the fucking A68 again, I won't be held responsible for my actions" after months of hauling stuff from Newcastle to Edinburgh.

[The Weeping Angel]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... s-empty-eu

British politics still has remainers and leavers, but those labels tend to describe emotional attachments, not policy prescriptions. Pro-Europeans are not interested in fixing Johnson’s deal, which they see as irredeemable; and leavers cannot concede that their fundamental premise was flawed. Neither side is yet ready to work with the banal reality that Brexit is an unspectacular failure: neither triumph, nor apocalypse. It is the damp smell in British politics that can be endured, but not quite ignored. The longer it is left untreated, the more expensive it will be to fix.

The problem is that we as Remainers over played our hand. I'm old enough to remember when people were predicting we'd have food riots, starvation and it would be the end of civilization as we know it.

[Boiler]

Perhaps we would have been better off just saying "We'll see" in response to the Leave campaigns claims.

Sad to say, but hindsight is always 20/20 vision but I'm almost coming round to the idea that it was right to be dismissed as "Project Fear".

[Boiler]

On shortages and lorry drivers: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... everything

[Boiler]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... s-empty-eu

From that piece:

Plans to impose a UK-only quality mark have been postponed by a year.

I thought we already had one, to wit -

1200px-BSI_Kitemark.svg.png (11.08 KiB) Viewed 3658 times

- or aren't there enough Union Jacks in that for our clown car administration?

[kreuzberger]

If you think that Brexit has been a logistic and operational bout of the sniffles is probably correct, especially in comparison to what is laying in wait, just over the horizon in 16 weeks' and four months' time.

Warning; it ain't pretty. https://www.getreadyforbrexit.eu/en/at-the-uk-border-2/

[Bones McCoy]

I still have 6 tubs of Smash in the attic.

[RedSparrows]

Perhaps we would have been better off just saying "We'll see" in response to the Leave campaigns claims.

Sad to say, but hindsight is always 20/20 vision but I'm almost coming round to the idea that it was right to be dismissed as "Project Fear".

There was always an edge of hyperbole to some Remain rhetoric (not quite of the level of Leave, however) but, even if one was looking only at opportunity costs, let alone actual costs, 'Project Fear' was trite bullshit, waving away complexity in favour of dullard romanticism.

Also, given Leave sold the whole thing as completely problem free, any issue now and in future is at their rehtorical door to boot.

[Tubby Isaacs]

This is perfectly normal behaviour for somebody who thinks things are going well.

[Tubby Isaacs]

"Cost to the taxpayer". Absolute bollocks.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Another variation on "the EU did it wrong" trope from the Man at the Adam Smith Institute.

The EU were immoral, because something philosophical about omission being the same as an act.

[RedSparrows]

That isn't true. Sins of omission and commission are identifiably of a different moral nature, even if they lead to the same end.l
.