Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[The Larch]

Weren't former criminals already earmarked to get jobs in slaughterhouses, as there were lots of vacancies there as well?

[Sheilbh]

Weren't former criminals already earmarked to get jobs in slaughterhouses, as there were lots of vacancies there as well?

That was just industry lobbying for extra employment licenses for low-risk prisoners. As I say the Prison Service is incredibly paranoid so it's really restrictive on what prisoners can do any work outside of the prison.

I'd point out this wasn't specifically about the fuel crisis or slaughterhouses. Raab is the new Justice Secretary so is responsible for prisons and rehabilitation he was talking about his new job with the Spectator who've been running a campaign to allow asylum seekers to work - he cautiously supported that and also talked about prisoners working but it's been reported ('told the Spectator, in comments carried by the Times') as being about the current fuel crisis - but I think that's a little misleading.

His remarks are wider and, as I say, mildly encouraging on asylum seekers and penal reform:

"We've been getting prisoners and offenders to do volunteering and unpaid work," Mr Raab told The Spectator, in comments carried by The Times.

"Why not if there are shortages encourage them to do paid work where there's a benefit for the economy, benefit for society?

"If you give people skin in the game, give them something to lose, if you give them some hope, they're much less likely to re-offend."

Edit And, inveitably, Patel and the Home Office are against it because of course they are

Home Office resisting calls to let asylum seekers work in the UK

Priti Patel is facing growing pleas to let 70,000 claimants seek employment pending a resolution of their status

[Sheilbh]

Incidentally some slides from Mori on the challenge for Starmer. Headling numbers are Tories on 39% and Labour on 36%, but people are not convinced Labour are ready for government:


About 75% of Tory voters (and they got 44% in the last election) are satisfied with the job Johnson is doing, compared with only 40% of Labour voters who are satisfied with Starmer. At this stage of the cycle the government is doing okay (obviously there's no fixed cycle here May was replaced and Johnson won a big majority, Cameron won the first Tory majority in 18 years and Thatcher got far more popular after the Falklands) - Brits generally don't rate their governments or PMs:


And people are not wildly enthusiastic on the government's performance on key issues, but at this stage only 32% of people think they deserve to be re-elected at this point:


But over 50% of people still think Labour's divided and Labour could really do with getting over deficits on issues like the economy () and defence - also fascinating that neither side owns the environment as an issue:


Starmer's personal ratings do not look great (it doesn't help that 40% - I imagine mainly the left - of Labour don't rate him):


But people rate him as capably as Johnson - which is something Corbyn never got against any of the PMs he faced:


I think it's probably very unlikely, especially given their majority, for Labour to win the next election (again last time Labour had this few seats it took 14 years to win again). But there's also stuff here that Starmer and Labour can work with

[Tamas]

Yesterday's "crisis is over, there's more fuel coming in than being consumed" government talk has unceremoniously switched to "well it will last another week or more"

Minister: fuel shortages may last a 'week or so' longer
Motorists could face another week of long queues at the filling stations as demand for petrol remains strong, a Government minister has suggested.

Policing minister Kit Malthouse told the Today Programme that the "return to normality" could take a "week or so".

Malthouse said:

"We are still seeing strong demand in parts of the country around fuel. The distribution mechanism is trying to respond to this unprecedented demand.

"My latest briefing is that the situation is stabilising, that we are seeing more forecourts with a greater supply of fuel and hopefully that, as demand and supply come better into balance over the next few days, week or so, that we will see a return to normality.

"I think if things started to deteriorate further, obviously the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Energy, whose responsibility this is, will have to review the situation."

[Tamas]

The Brexit goalposts have been moved so much, half a year from now the aim of Brexit will always have been to rejoin the Single Market, I recon.

Right now we are abandoning the sunlit uplands and talking about an economic transition where evil business tries to maintain a high immigration low wage economy against the always-planned government intention of low immigration high wage golden age. yep, this is all part of the plan folks, ABSOLUTELY not a haphazard staggering from one crisis to the next

Kwarteng: Economy is in post-Brexit transition
Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has argued that the supply chain disruption hitting the UK, such as the petrol shortages, is part of a transition to a new post-Brexit economy.

In an interview with Conservative Home, published this morning, Kwarteng says the UK is moving away from a "low-wage, high-immigration model" that was rejected in the EU referendum in 2016.

He also claims some employers are resisting this move, having benefitted from an 'influx' of labour from abroad that kept wages down.

Here's the details:

Q: ConHome: Brexit was a vote for many things. It was in part a vote for lower migration of a sort, higher wages, a different economic model.

Isn't what's going on with this difficulty with the petrol fundamentally about the sort of economy we want. The road haulage people, like some of the fruit pickers, like some meat processors, basically want to go back to the old ways.

They want Government to issue hundreds of thousands of visas, and they're trying to use public pressure to get you to change course."

Kwarteng replies:

That's absolutely right, and I've said this a number of times, certainly privately. The reason why constituencies like mine [Spelthorne] voted decisively for Brexit, 60 per cent to 40 per cent, was precisely this issue.

"I remember three weeks before the referendum in 2016, I came out of Staines station and someone came up to me and said 'I'm voting for Brexit.'

"And I said, 'Oh, why are you doing that?'

"And he said, 'Well I haven't had a wage increase in 15 years,' and he was someone who worked in the building trade, lots of people do work, certainly in my constituency, in that kind of self-employed, small business, logistics, construction world.

"And that was in his mind what this was all about. And so, having rejected the low-wage, high-immigration model, we were always going to try to transition to something else.

"What we're seeing now is part of that transition. You're quite right to say people are resisting that, particularly employers that were benefiting from an influx of labour that could keep wages low."


Kwarteng is then asked whether that puts the government in a very difficult political position, as employers can use queues and shortages as a "kind of weapon". So apart from emergency measures, the government can only "tough it out", ConHome suggests.

Kwarteng replies that this 'transition period' could be 'quite short'.

"I think this is a transition period. As economists would describe, between Equilibrium A and Equilibrium B there's always going to be a transition period.

"I think it could be quite short. I think what we're seeing already is quite a lot of investment in the UK. I've got a list on my board of lots of things we've announced, of investments.

"The head of Goldman Sachs said to me three years ago, 'No one's going to invest in the UK because of Brexit.'

"And then about three months ago I said to him, 'Look at all the investment.'

"He said, 'Ah, that's because your assets are cheap [laughter].' They can hop on the left foot and then hop on the right.

"And we're seeing investment, we're seeing success. You speak to investors around the world, they're all very interested in Britain.

"Not just because of the success they saw with things like the vaccine rollout, great science base, great intellectual capital, but also they see us as a less highly regulated, if you can believe it, jurisdiction than many others around the world."

David Henig
@DavidHenigUK
First ever admission from a Minister that Brexit means economic transition. A far cry from all benefit and no cost, and begging the question of why it has taken so long for this to be admitted. Also of what the new UK economy will look like.

[Sheilbh]

Yesterday's "crisis is over, there's more fuel coming in than being consumed" government talk has unceremoniously switched to "well it will last another week or more"

I thought there has always been more fuel coming in than being consumed. The issue is HGV drivers and distribution plus heightened demand not, so not supply into the UK but supply within the UK?

Right now we are abandoning the sunlit uplands and talking about an economic transition where evil business tries to maintain a high immigration low wage economy against the always-planned government intention of low immigration high wage golden age. yep, this is all part of the plan folks, ABSOLUTELY not a haphazard staggering from one crisis to the next

That was definitely a huge party of the argument of leavers. There were so many articles about middle class Remainers who don't have to compete for their jobs benefiting from low costs as consumers, while working class Leavers felt the pressure on wages from being part of a continent-wide labour market. I feel like there were hundreds of articles in the Spectator alone about middle class Remainers lamenting the potential loss of cheap au pairs or lattes because they could pay far lower wages.

I didn't think it was true and I think lots of economists were dubious about it - that may be wrong now. Although I suspect it's actually probably just going to vary a lot from sector to sector. But there's nothing new about that line.

Leave included everyone from people pushing for absolute deregulation/Singapore-on-Thames unleashing of the free market right through to the EU is a boss's union.

I think in retrospect a weakness of the Remain campaign was they tried to campaign too much on a common line which was often set by Cameron/Nr 10 because he was PM - in retrospect they should've taken off the controls and allowed the Tory Remainers to campaign in the cautious way Remain did, but allowed the Lib Dems and centrist wing of Labour to go full Euro-federalist and Corbyn and the left to do a big UK tour with Varoufakis and Iglesias promoting Another Europe is Possible.

Leave could be all things to all men (especially because of the rival campaigns). Remain was just George Osborne stamping on a human face - forever.

The Brexit goalposts have been moved so much, half a year from now the aim of Brexit will always have been to rejoin the Single Market, I recon.

I can't see any way the UK rejoins the Single Market at least for the next decade or re-joins the EU ever. Politics is now (and my guess is for at least the next 20-30 years) about mitigating the costs and trying to identify/take advantage of the possible bits where there is a gap for the UK to do well.

Edit: Unrelated to the above but on my Twitter I've now seen clips of Starmer, Tory ministers and Khan defending Cressida Dick and saying she's the one to change the Met. She's already been Commissioner for four years and what does she have on everyone that they're all willing to back her

[Tamas]

I thought there has always been more fuel coming in than being consumed. The issue is HGV drivers and distribution plus heightened demand not, so not supply into the UK but supply within the UK?

I believe the government's reference was to it arriving to petrol stations, not the island in general. There was definitely "crisis is over" talk yesterday.

[Josquius]

It's ironic on the quitlings with their constant middle class remainer rhetoric is that it's with niche specialist jobs that require an education you might see a shortage leading to a lasting wage boost.
With unskilled labour? Haha no.

And yep. The remain campaign sucked. It was labours failure. They failed to highlight the fact that it was only really the right who seriously wanted this to happen and that Cameron happened to be correct on this one was irrelevant.. Then again knowing Corbyn it'd probably have done little to sway people to remain and instead pushed some wavering tories the other way.

[Tamas]

Hah, my neck of the woods makes it into Guardian live coverage, the BP station in Old Windsor. Seems slightly less maniac than it was when they were blocking both lanes on Sunday:







On Tuesday there was no queue because there was no fuel so I guess this is an improvement.

[Tamas]

Germans citizens based in the UK were, it appears, included in the mass mailing from the Department for Transport, asking them to "consider returning" to the HGV driving sector.

The Independent's Tom Peck explains:

German driving licences issued before 1999 include an entitlement to drive a small to medium-sized truck of up to 7.5 tonnes. It is understood that almost all Germans residing in the UK who hold such a licence have been sent the letter, almost none of whom have ever driven an HGV before.

One 41-year-old German man, who received two copies of the letter at his London home on Friday morning, one addressed to him and another for his wife, told The Independent.

We were quite surprised," he said. "I'm sure pay and conditions for HGV drivers have improved, but ultimately I have decided to carry on in my role at an investment bank. My wife has never driven anything larger than a Volvo, so she is also intending to decline the exciting opportunity.

"It is nice to know there are specialist jobs available here for us though after Brexit. We would never have been headhunted to drive a lorry if we'd gone back to Germany."

The Department of Transport has said that data protection rules meant they were unable to filter the results to remove those with German drivers' licences (or other groups such as ambulance drivers, who also got the letter).

[Sheilbh]

Adding this as another example of my unified theory of British politics - that all issues in the UK are either really about housing, or really about labour relations (which means unbelievably shit management):

DVLA bosses and staff clash over Covid safety and HGV licence delays
DVLA blames strikes for backlog but workers say mismanagement in pandemic led to rise in Covid cases
Steven Morris
@stevenmorris20
Fri 1 Oct 2021 14.02 BST

When the letter from the UK government dropped through Antony Crowther's letter box this week, the frustration that had been building for months turned to rage.

Signed by the transport minister Charlotte Vere, the letter told him his "valuable skills and experience" as a HGV driver had never been more needed. Would he please consider getting behind the wheel again?

That is exactly what Crowther wants to do but can't because his application to get his licence back after a medical emergency is snarled up in a backlog at the DVLA – the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency – in Swansea, south Wales.

"I've spent so many hours trying to get through to the DVLA and the transport department to sort my licence out," said Crowther, 61, from Plymouth. "I want to do my bit and help out. Yes, the money comes in useful but it's not just about that. I like to feel I'm helping by getting stuff moving around the country."

As the scale of the crisis at the DVLA emerged this week, a row has broken out over who is to blame. Workers and their union representatives claim mismanagement during the Covid pandemic at the DVLA has led to the problems. The government and the DVLA blame staff who have been on strike over their working conditions.

It could get worse. Covid cases continue to blight the DVLA, an executive agency of the Department for Transport (DfT), and more industrial action may be on the way this autumn and winter.


Crowther is one of the many twiddling their thumbs when they are desperate to be at work. He suffered a series of cardiac arrests in May but had a pacemaker fitted and five weeks later his doctors said he was fit to drive again.

He set about trying to get his licence back and informed the DVLA. A letter eventually came back saying that the agency's doctor was considering his case. And then nothing more.

This week the DfT admitted in response to a parliamentary question that there were 56,144 applications for vocational driving licences – for lorry and bus drivers – awaiting processing. It said of these, about 4,000 were for provisional licences, while the "vast majority" were for renewals. In most cases, drivers could continue to drive while the application was being processed.

The DVLA said provisional licences were being issued in about five days but conceded that "more complex transactions", for example if medical investigations were needed, may face "longer delays."

DVLA and government sources suggested the problem was, at least in part, down to strikes by members of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS). The PCS said the government had scuppered a deal it had agreed with DVLA managers, which would have halted the industrial action – so the backlog was down to ministers.

The problems at the DVLA were laid bare at meetings of the transport committee in Westminster in January and July.

Union officials told committee members that when Covid first struck, staff were sent home but did not have the technology to do their jobs – and they were not trusted by their managers to work remotely.

Then, the union says, workers were ordered back in too quickly to try to clear the backlog, before their offices were Covid-safe.

It resulted in "the single biggest Covid outbreak of any workplace in the UK", according to the union's general secretary, Mark Serwotka. By that point there had been 643 Covid cases and one death.

Sarah Evans, a union official at the DVLA, told the committee that "massive safety concerns" remained. She claimed too many people were sharing too many facilities, such as lifts, kitchens and toilets.

There have been a series of strikes over conditions during the summer but the PCS says the DVLA is no further forward in prioritising staff safety and no better prepared for waves of the virus over the winter and autumn. Covid cases continue to rise, with the union claiming there were a further 152 cases in September and that the running total is now at 874.

The DVLA insists conditions are safe and that it is not possible for staff processing vocational licences to work from home as they have to help deal with the 60,000 items of mail it receives every day.

[Zanza]

Is there an example for such a high wage low immigration society that Kwarteng refers to anywhere on Earth? I guess Japan, but their economy stagnated for decades now, so probably not a good example. Brexit continues to be an interesting economic experiment. 

[Sheilbh]

Is there an example for such a high wage low immigration society that Kwarteng refers to anywhere on Earth? I guess Japan, but their economy stagnated for decades now, so probably not a good example. Brexit continues to be an interesting economic experiment.

Looking at countries with a lower net migration rate than the UK there's the US, Japan, New Zealand (but not Australia or Canada), South Korea, Taiwan and Israel. And, of course, several EU countries such as Italy, France, the Netherlands and Spain.

Of course the weird thing is it's not really accurate because net migration has not really changed despite Brexit (once you adjust as best you can for covid disruption so there's modeling and estimates going on here). It's fallen for EU citizens but increase from ROTW. Based on current visa levels that's not going to shift, and if anything it will become easier for immigration from outside Europe as trade deals are negotiated - so the Turkey deal liberalised visa rules for Turks, the Indian deal will include easier visas for Indians etc.

What might happen - because it's now all visa based so dependent on employers recruiting people is that we have more immigration in high-wage (or demand sectors) and less in low-wage sectors like hospitality or retail.

And it should be said there is broad support for immigration through recruitment/employers:

But that should not allow category is enough to cause problems for a Tory government if they started flirting with a further right party (though all of those have basically collapsed to nothing now).

Edit: And this was a point made by Sunder Katwala, if you look at all the decisions by this government on immigration since Johnson took over (liberalising student visas, Hong Kong visas for millions, Turkdy trade deal) they are not about reducing the numbers. But there is a shift in composition (with more non-Europeans, more students and more work visas), which ultimately is what 'control' will look like: discretionary policy decisions in the hands of the government that can perhaps increase/decrease overall levels of migration but is more likely to shift the geographic/skills profile.

[Syt]

https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/54325598/

"Needs complete modernising throughout"
"Property can not be used as permanent residence and can not be let out"

[Zanza]

Having immigrants that have to rely on visa privileges, especially those with employer sponsorship, instead of immigrants with citizens rights does indeed increase control.