Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[The Brain]

She terrifies me. Being able to keep hold of her seat despite all that's being going on with the police and all the London knife crime etc, must mean she is a real mean bastard. The fact that she is a woman, which had to make it ten times harder to ever reach her spot let alone keep it, scares me even more.

Do Hungarians like have some kind of bad experience with powerful women or something?

No, but I am quite very certain that due to discrimination, being a woman is a distinct disadvantage in one's career in nearly all fields and especially in previously male-dominated fields like the police force. So if a man who is failing in his high-level high public visibility job needs X level of political maneuvering to keep his job, a woman in the some position must need about 10X level of political maneuvering for the same.

Relax. It was just an Elizabeth Bathory joke.

It's funny that I doubt most Hungarians are even aware of Elizabeth Bathory.

We need more herstory.

[Tamas]

Continuing my topic of disgusting creatures started with the giant spiders above, I have read that the UK has extended the "grace period" of not doing the Britain-to-Northern Ireland checks we agreed to do. The reason for the indefinite postponement of the agreed procedure is to not hinder ongoing talks about not doing them. Apparently just pushing an arbitrary deadline out every time we reach it is silly (I paraphrase but that's what the relevant minister said).

[garbon]

I went down to the car this morning. At the entrance to our building (but inside) there was one palm-sized spider on each side of the round light piece on the wall, and their young half-palm sized cousin on the opposite wall.

I SO hate spider mating season. These giant ones are exceedingly disgusting. They combine unnatural size, disgusting dark brown colour, and uncanny speed. Bleh.

My husband wanted credits for killing one that he found but all I can think is I wish you hadn't told me.

[Sheilbh]

Pretty incredible stat from Sam Freedman (originally the Institute of Fiscal Studies):

Sam Freedman
@Samfr
The NHS budget increase means it will represent 44% of all public service spending in 2024/25 up from 27% in 1999-2000. The real story of austerity is not a reduction in the size of the state but the NHS (and pensions) sucking up all the cash.
Covid will hopefully be a one off but the demographic and healthcare trends driving this aren't going away. At some point it stops being sustainable without some radical thinking or technological change.
Another way of expressing the issue. In cash terms grants to local authorities have fallen by 30% since 2010 and *before covid* the NHS budget had increase by 20% since 2010.
I'm not sure just saying OK we need to spend more money is a good enough answer. I'd be happy with a tax/spend base quite a bit higher than we have now but not one that grows indefinitely.

I think part of it is the austerity of the 2010s which basically made the NHS the welfare system of last resort. The austerity decisions - and the Treasury in general for the last 10-15 years at least - were entirely based on false economies. Spending was cut to save money, but the spending would just pop up again later often in the NHS. For example there's been a huge rise in A&E treatments for the homeless and they are often complex cases that the NHS - with a duty of care - has to engage multiple teams to work on; I'm not convinced there's a net saving from the budget cuts to prevent homelessness when balanced off against that cost.

There's something similar with social care which is - and will continue to be - under-resourced and mainly delivered by local authorities (who've had their budgets slashed). When I was in hospital last year there was one elderly man who'd been on the ward for months. In fairness he had regular visits from the social care team from Southwark council (and did have family) and turned down at least one property with assisted living while I was there, but I imagine the cost of him taking up a bed in a ward etc is higher than the cost from a well-funded social care system.

Edit: Separately, I see the Telegraph are taking the tax raise well

Boris's shameful Tory betrayal guarantees the total victory of socialism in Britain

Interesting trend of a return to this type of ideological language, which sort of disappeared in the 90s and 00s - you see it in the UK, US but also, say, Germany with the CDU's most red-baiting campaign in decades. I can sort of see the reasoning in the UK and the US because the rise of AOC, Corbyn, Bernie (though I think they are quite different) has clearly highlighted the existence of a left in the Democrats/Labour and that, at the minute I think, the energy is with that side of politics. It seems less explicable to me in Germany around the fear of a government invluding the Left because of Scholz but I may just be misreading the risk. Maybe part of it's the rise of China too - there is now a very powerful self-proclaimed communist state which is clearly not just, inevitably sliding towards liberal democracy.

But this sort of line about the risk of socialism is something that was absolutely core in UK politics during the post-war/Cold War when Labour very strongly identified as a socialist party and the Tories were the opposition to that.

[Tamas]

I went down to the car this morning. At the entrance to our building (but inside) there was one palm-sized spider on each side of the round light piece on the wall, and their young half-palm sized cousin on the opposite wall.

I SO hate spider mating season. These giant ones are exceedingly disgusting. They combine unnatural size, disgusting dark brown colour, and uncanny speed. Bleh.

My husband wanted credits for killing one that he found but all I can think is I wish you hadn't told me.

At our household, I have instituted a strict "no windows/balcony doors open after sunset" policy for the entirety of September.  This was made possible by me installing a magnetic mosquito web thing at the bedroom window this summer, so that can stay open. I used the remaining material from that installation put a net over the bathroom wall-fan as well.

[garbon]

We this summer added one to bedroom window too (velcro based) . And we've one on balcony door that splits in middle but still has small gaps compared to window one with no gaps.

[Tamas]

I miss inside-opening windows.

[Duque de Bragança]

Re. people who shouldn't be in a job (and what a sub-headline ):

Confusing a black rugby player who advocates for laptops for school children, with a black soccer player who advocates for lunch meals for school children, doesn't seem that outrageous.

It's Britain.  We can't possibly understand these people and their fanatism for rugby.

/Tyr
What kind of rugby? Union or League (XIII or XV for those not from the ™Norf™)?

[Sheilbh]

Another really good FT piece on driver shortages - and a lot of truth here. Again I think the other side of low prices in supermarkets and powerful supermarkets is exploited labour, which was enabled (though not created) by free movement plus expansion.

We need to start paying more for things and all jobs should have decent conditions because this isn't just about pay, though paying people enough and you can still treat them like shit is definitely a thing in this country's labour market:

Why eastern European truckers are not planning to return to the UK
Poor working conditions, tax changes and Covid combine with Brexit to create enduring labour shortage
Marton Dunai in Budapest, Agata Majos in Warsaw and Peter Foster in Brighton

After 14 years working as a lorry driver in the UK, Zsolt Gabor hung up his keys at the end of March and went back to Hungary for good.

Conditions had become unbearable during the coronavirus pandemic, which along with the effects of Brexit has left Britain at least 90,000 truck drivers short, manifesting itself in growing supply chain problems.

Gabor said the shortage of drivers, and problems trying to find a flight back to Hungary because of pandemic restrictions, effectively meant his final shift in the UK lasted three months with only the mandatory minimum breaks. He was never off for more than 45 hours.

At the height of the pandemic that meant his lorry's cab was his home. The final straw came when a policeman ordered him back into his truck citing lockdown restrictions. "I was not even allowed to take a walk at the end of my shift," he said. With a bad back and a family waiting back in Hungary, Gabor decided he had had enough.

Logistics UK, the trade body for hauliers, said Britain had a chronic driver shortage for many years, but the problem was now acute. Industry leaders have called on the government to add heavy goods vehicle drivers to its shortage occupation list, which would give foreign hauliers an exemption from post-Brexit immigration rules that bar them from being hired.

Zsolt Gabor from Hungary worked for 14 years as a lorry driver but quit at the end of March and went home

The government has not completely ruled out taking action but late last month Kwasi Kwarteng, business secretary, wrote to business leaders urging them to hire UK-based workers instead, pointing out that foreign labour only offered "a short-term, temporary solution".

Even if an exemption was granted, it seems unlikely many of those that have left the UK would return so readily. The Financial Times has spoken to dozens of eastern European HGV drivers who used to work in Britain but have gone elsewhere to work.

Many cite similar tales of poor working conditions for quitting but other reasons include poor wages compounded by a tax reform, known as IR35, that prevented most drivers from operating as limited companies, resulting in a significant cut to take-home pay.

Add to that Brexit. For truckers that meant endless paperwork, including customs procedures they were never trained for and queues at the border. Other issues included the need to take UK driving exams that many truckers did not have the language skills for, along with a more hostile attitude to foreigners in Britain.

Moreover, Europe as a whole is short of truckers. "It is a global driver shortage across Europe, not an isolated problem of one country," said Zsolt Barna, chief executive of Waberer's, one of eastern Europe's largest hauliers based in Budapest.

Some EU member states are proportionately worse off than the UK, Barna pointed out, including Romania, a key source of truckers for the UK over the years, which out of a population of 20m is 20,000 drivers short.

For the EU drivers that have left but still have the right to return and live in the UK, the prospects of higher pay that some UK companies are now offering was not enough. Many said they had already found work elsewhere on higher wages and in a better working environment.

Peter Kovecs, another Hungarian, lasted two years in England. After inheriting his family's farm he came to the UK to earn money to reinvest in the business and had planned to stay for longer. But after his experience he said nothing would tempt him back.

"They bullied us while the drivers kept coming," Kovecs said. "Now they are begging us." Once he had saved £60,000 he decided to go home even though that was below the target he had set himself. "I will never go back. I like England, it's a great country, I will take the family there one day, but to work, the way they treat people? Never again."

Krzysztof, who declined to give his surname, worked for four years in the UK before returning to Poland in 2020. His wife became pregnant and they decided they wanted the child to be raised in their homeland.

He now drives trucks in Poland and Germany and has no plans to return to the UK permanently, even if the pay was better. He said IR35 was the final straw for him and many Polish drivers he knew.

"From what I know, many drivers came back [to Poland] because they could no longer work as independent contractors. Most of the people that I know [in the UK] want to come back, invest their money in Poland," he said.

In contrast, after living in the UK for eight years, where he worked mostly in warehouses, Jakub Burzykowski had intended to return after going home to Poland to obtain an HGV licence.

"I heard that the wages [of truck drivers] in the UK were great and there was a shortage of drivers so there shouldn't be any problem with finding a job," he said.

But on his return earlier this year he was refused entry and deported due to a mix up over his right to work in the UK, known as EU settled status. He now works in Germany. "What would make Polish drivers choose the UK instead of Germany? Simplified visa procedures. From what I read, there was some pressure on the British government to simplify it, but they said no."

He added: "I really wanted to work in the UK, I have some friends and a part of my family lives there . . . I miss it."

Dan Myers, managing director of transport in UK and Ireland at XPO Logistics, urged the government to reconsider adding lorry drivers to the shortage occupation list. "As a short-term, interim solution, it's a sensible, pragmatic way," he said.

But Kieran Smith, chief executive of Driver Require, a recruitment agency, disagreed. "If we work on the basis of bringing back foreign workers as the solution, then we are grievously misguided," he said, noting that it was better to focus on attracting back some of the 300,000 Brits who hold HGV licences but have quit.

He pointed to Office for National Statistics data that showed at the start of the pandemic about 40,000 of the 300,000 truck drivers in the UK were from the EU. By the end of March 2021, that figure had halved to around 20,000, but about 5,000 had returned since April.

The ONS also found that 50,000 UK-based drivers had left the profession since the pandemic began, mainly those over 45. "My hypothesis is that these older drivers had been stood down during the pandemic, or were isolating from Covid-19, and then realised they didn't want to come back to it at their age," he said.

For Gabor, his decision to quit trucking pushed him into driver recruitment back in Hungary after his former British employer asked him for help to find a replacement. Ultimately though the post-Brexit immigration rules have meant his agency, RightDriver, ended up focusing on Ireland.

He has begun tapping drivers in non-EU Balkan states, including Serbia and North Macedonia, and said if they could not work in Ireland they would be available to work in the UK. "They would just have to lift the restrictions already."

Additional reporting by Harry Dempsey

I basically agree with Kwarteng's point - but I don't think he's following through to the consequences to fix that which will be significant improvements in working conditions and pay (which will have an impact) so some of the 300,000 people here with HGV licences who don't work in the industry want to go back.

It's a totally different sector and different issues but reading this reminds me of articles you read in the legal press of partners at law firms who are utterly baffled at why so many people quit after parental leave

Edit: Also just whenever I read about British bosses I end up thinking about that tweet-meme:

Me sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Me reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

Edit: And not unrelatedly - I've noticed before that Labour's policy is that private sector organisations shouldn't be trying to bring staff back until they have ventilation and should be moving to permanent WFH on a broad basis while trying to force their own staff back into the office; while the Tories are trying to encourage everyone back into the office while Raab and Johnson were "responding" to Afghanistan on holiday. The latest version:

Nicola Woolcock
@nicolawoolcock
Gavin Williamson doesn't turn up in person to Universities UK conference in Newcastle - but uses his videolink speech to warn universities to get back to in person teaching....

[Richard Hakluyt]

Interesting that Mr Kovecs saved £60k in just two years of UK trucking. It certainly strongly backs the idea that simply increasing pay may not be the solution.

[Sheilbh]

Amazing - at last a left perspective on Geronimo and the tax avoiding role of alpacas

9th September 2021   
The economic consequences of alpacas
Morgan Jones

Wikimedia Commons

Where were you when you learned that Geronimo the alpaca had been killed? I, like a character in a particularly heavy-handed state of the nation novel, was in a waiting room at King's College Hospital, having just received my second covid vaccine. While there was not quite open mourning amongst the newly inoculated, it's safe to say that never before has the British public been so captivated by an alpaca, even if it did have bovine tuberculosis. Geronimo's ordeal, along with the considerably more unedifying tale of Pen Farthing and his cats and dogs, has seen us spend the dregs of this miserable summer examining our nation's very odd relationship with animals. Recent polling shows that 40% of people think that animal lives are worth just as much as yours and mine, and a lurking 3% thinks animals are actually more worthy than the rest of us. However, when it comes to alpacas (and other "new world camelids" like llamas, guanacos or vicunas, as gov.uk refers to them), there is an altogether less fluffy reason to welcome them into your home, heart, and financial planning regimen. Namely, they can do wonders for your tax bill.

Spending time on the UK's various alpaca keeping websites and forums, "tax reasons" are regularly cited as a key motivation for scattering a few camelids on your land. After the initial purchase price, alpacas are cheap to keep- one site informs us that "vets cost and feeding will come to about £200 annually", and they are hardy and reasonably long-lived.

Agricultural land – "occupied wholly or mainly for the purposes of husbandry"- is taxed at a different rate to land not used for agricultural purposes, and alpacas, putting aside their inherent nobility and appealing, fibrous coats, are some of the most cost-effective farm animals out there.

As another UK based alpaca-keeping site tells us:

  "The purchase price of breeding stock, barns and fencing is depreciable against tax. Owners can breed their alpacas, increase the size and value of the herd and not pay tax until and unless the animals are sold. If the alpacas are actively raised for profit, all related expenses – veterinary care, feed, breeding costs – can be set against income."

As Keep Alpacas UK informs us, "these kinds of savings can be a major benefit of ownership".

While all of this is perfectly legal, there has been at least one case of alpaca-related tax fraud in the UK in recent years, with one Yorkshire woman jailed in 2019 for false VAT claims on her alpaca farm.

This is a problem not localised to the UK. In 2017, then-US Senator Jeff Flake (remember him? Briefly meteorically famous amidst the chaos of the Trump presidency, now apparently US ambassador to Turkey?) railed against "outlandish loopholes" in the tax code, including what he referred to as the "alpaca tax fleece", where people avoided property tax by keeping alpacas; "it's not like livestock", the Senator commented, indicating that he viewed the camelids as more akin to "exotic pets". With this campaign he incurred a backlash from the Alpaca Owners Association, who somewhat unconvincingly retaliated that "we are a livestock industry. Just like the sheep industry, we shear our animals once a year, we turn that into marketable products – clothing and things".

Helen MacDonald, Geronimo's owner, insisted that her poor benighted alpaca was simply a beloved pet (a category of whose tax status I am unsure). Nonetheless, the Geromino saga and accompanying marches down Whitehall drew the ire of a disparate coalition of people who saw killing the alpaca as the first step in building more houses, breaking the triple lock, and prizing the cold hand of donkey sanctuary donating middle England boomers from the controls of the British state. There is something almost cartoonishly vindicating about the idea that even Geronimo's camelid brethren are not unsullied by the hands of capital, and that even a humble field of alpacas has something to say about the ways in which wealth is stored, protected and retained in the UK. Everything is about house prices, apart from alpacas, which are about tax avoidance.

[Josquius]

Wow. Didn't see that angle coming.
Alpacas - the Boris Johnson of the animal kingdom?
Endearingly messy and awkward, but cold hard tories when it comes down to it.

[Valmy]

I can't help but feel like maybe this alpaca business is not the big deal thing British seem to think it is.

[Tonitrus]

Just you wait...King Charles will appoint one a bishop.

[Barrister]

I can't help but feel like maybe this alpaca business is not the big deal thing British seem to think it is.

My brother and sister in law have a farm.  Their kid, m nephew, is getting into sheep farming (apparently they're much easier than cattle plus with the growing immigrant communities there's a good market for mutton).  I asked about the wool - they just throw it away.  You only get pennies per pound and it's just not worthwhile to sell it.

They also have, not an alpaca, but a llama.  Apparently it helps to keep coyotes away from the sheep.  It's not marketable in any way.