UK Politics & Brexit Discussion

[Dr. Gonzo]

On 26/09/2021 at 10:39, Gunnersauraus said:

I'm not panicking with feul. I've heard this before. If feul runs out it's a great excuse to get out of work 

I think the biggest issue is the impact it makes on supply chains. If lorry drivers can't get petrol, supermarkets can't stock food, restaurants can't get shipments in, shops can't get their shipments of products to sell, etc. And when shit like that happens, the quality of life drastically is reduced.

And this all stems from the shortage of lorry drivers... which is a direct consequence of Brexit. It's a failure of our government to figure these things out before the official "divorce date" to avoid shit like this.

[Bluebird Hewitt]

Many, many dull cunts unfortunately. All this because of the shittest of our media. 

They really need a good wobble. 

[RandoEFC+]

Hearing nothing but bad news and divisions coming out of the Labour conference. Starmer and his team pushing for unnecessary further power grabs while the unelectable far left of the party continue to undermine the leadership and convince themselves there's a hope in hell that they'll ever get close to the power they need to help the people in the country they claim to want to help while calling each other "comrade" on stage.

I'm sick of all of them. The country desperately needs someone to get Boris Johnson and the Tories out of power. It shouldn't even actually be difficult after all the calamity they've presided over and there's two more years of Brexit fallout down the tracks before the next election. It should be a walk in the park. Yet the Labour "Centre" are too paranoid about being associated with Corbyn in any way or being dubbed Marxists to offer any sort of progressive or coherent vision (and several of his policies remain actually quite popular) while the aggrieved Labour "Left" have spent the last 18 months barely hiding their desire to see Starmer fail because it makes the 80-seat drubbing their holy Messiah took look less embarrassing. And that's not to say the Labour centrists were any better when the man they didn't want was in charge.

Wake up and smell the coffee. The current prime minister, the people around him and the Brexit chaos that comes as a part of the package need to be cleared out. Get together, find a compromise, clear them out and when you have the power to actually help people, decide how to do it. As long as Boris Johnson is in Downing Street, neither wing of the Labour Party has any business pretending they're any less bad than the other.

[Dr. Gonzo]

Given that this looks like it stems directly from ending freedom of movement with the EU... what's the answer here for the UK's reliance for borrowed labour that it no longer has access to?

The most obvious answer is probably "employers need to increase wages" - when we've got shit like a shortage of lorry drivers, that's going to make an impact on the supply chain for everything. Nurses are still required to throw themselves into debt so they can fill jobs that we're absolutely desperate for them to solve.

I honestly don't understand how so many people in business could have been so shortsighted with regards to Brexit. It's the basic principle of economic scarcity applied to manpower - we're not in the EU anymore so employers don't have that labour pool of 450m+ to hire from. They've got to hire from the UK labour pool, and that's a much smaller group of prospective employees.

They'll have to pay more to fill those jobs. It's weird too because prior to Brexit, unemployment was at its lowest rate in 40 years. Did we need to open up lorry drivers, fruit & veg packing, meat packing, etc. to the UK jobs market? It's a self-induced labour shortage in critical areas that keep a country running.

Is there any other solution other than getting employers to pay workers more?

[Dr. Gonzo]

5 minutes ago, RandoEFC said:

Hearing nothing but bad news and divisions coming out of the Labour conference. Starmer and his team pushing for unnecessary further power grabs while the unelectable far left of the party continue to undermine the leadership and convince themselves there's a hope in hell that they'll ever get close to the power they need to help the people in the country they claim to want to help while calling each other "comrade" on stage.

I'm sick of all of them. The country desperately needs someone to get Boris Johnson and the Tories out of power. It shouldn't even actually be difficult after all the calamity they've presided over and there's two more years of Brexit fallout down the tracks before the next election. It should be a walk in the park. Yet the Labour "Centre" are too paranoid about being associated with Corbyn in any way or being dubbed Marxists to offer any sort of progressive or coherent vision (and several of his policies remain actually quite popular) while the aggrieved Labour "Left" have spent the last 18 months barely hiding their desire to see Starmer fail because it makes the 80-seat drubbing their holy Messiah took look less embarrassing. And that's not to say the Labour centrists were any better when the man they didn't want was in charge.

Wake up and smell the coffee. The current prime minister, the people around him and the Brexit chaos that comes as a part of the package need to be cleared out. Get together, find a compromise, clear them out and when you have the power to actually help people, decide how to do it. As long as Boris Johnson is in Downing Street, neither wing of the Labour Party has any business pretending they're any less bad than the other.

Labour's divisions make them a very unviable party, at least on a national level. They're just a bit of a joke, tbh - a decade of Tory led governments steering the country into the ground... and they can't even come together to get the Tories out of power in a way that appeals to many voters.

Centrists and the left of Labour have more in common with each other ideologically than they do with the Tories (or any other party) - yet their squabbling and constant attempts at undermining indicates that both sides of the party are more interested in remaining an opposition party than having any real hand at governance. At least that's how it looks to me - because a party that can't even find common ground within itself is not a party that looks like it can come to common ground regarding governing the fucking country.

And Labour need to be concerned with optics, because optics are what have gotten them slaughtered in recent years. Surely labour must have some political strategists that have noticed that how the media covers them & what the electorate thinks of them? The party needs to be making sure the optics of Labour change from this ineffectual party that can't even come to agreement within itself and presenting themselves to the public as the people to vote for if they want to get Boris and the Tories out and stop the decade long rot of the country.

I'm very left wing, but I think the left of labour needs to have surgeon remove their heads from their arses. The vast majority of people in the UK don't give a fuck about Corbyn's dismal failure other than the fact that he's probably completely unelectable as PM - and they certainly don't give a fuck about the ideological purity of one of the 2 big parties in the UK. Until Labour is in power, they should be doing all they can to promote the idea that Starmer > Johnson. Ideological purity can come once they've got power and once the more left wing views of labour are more politically relevant.

Similarly, the centrists need to accept that there were reasons why Corbyn's views were popular and they shouldn't try to isolate or just fuck off the actual left wing of the left wing party in the UK. There's a way to take in some of what Corbyn's view was for the UK and also a way to temper that and make it more appealing for centrists and moderates to find a way to bring the party together. But trying to flatly reject anything associated with Corbyn as a view the party should have is stupid and does nothing but further the divisions within the own party.

I hate Tony Blair, but I think he was spot on when he said the party has become more of a protest movement than a political party. And in an opposition party, it's fine to be a loud voice of protest against the party controlling government. But it really just looks like we've got 2 wings of a party protesting each other, all while their real opposition holds the power of the country in it's hand after a decade of shit governance.

[Honey Honey]

12 hours ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

Given that this looks like it stems directly from ending freedom of movement with the EU... what's the answer here for the UK's reliance for borrowed labour that it no longer has access to?

The most obvious answer is probably "employers need to increase wages" - when we've got shit like a shortage of lorry drivers, that's going to make an impact on the supply chain for everything. Nurses are still required to throw themselves into debt so they can fill jobs that we're absolutely desperate for them to solve.

I honestly don't understand how so many people in business could have been so shortsighted with regards to Brexit. It's the basic principle of economic scarcity applied to manpower - we're not in the EU anymore so employers don't have that labour pool of 450m+ to hire from. They've got to hire from the UK labour pool, and that's a much smaller group of prospective employees.

They'll have to pay more to fill those jobs. It's weird too because prior to Brexit, unemployment was at its lowest rate in 40 years. Did we need to open up lorry drivers, fruit & veg packing, meat packing, etc. to the UK jobs market? It's a self-induced labour shortage in critical areas that keep a country running.

Is there any other solution other than getting employers to pay workers more?

Coronavirus led to 40,000 HGV tests being cancelled. 25,000 fewer candidates passed their tests in 2020. The test backlog now in 2021 can't be cleared quickly enough because there aren't enough assessors. Thousands of drivers left the country because of Covid and haven't returned. 

Yet upping wages and issuing some visas to people from other countries also with driver shortages will sort things out? Does free movement do anything but mask non existent public policy? Is the goal simply to get back to teetering on the brink instead of having gone over the edge like now. Bearing in mind that we are over the edge because of consumer behaviour.

Reality is the government were warned in June/July and they ignored the warnings. Only now trying to get assessors out of retirement or from the army to clear a backlog. This is a public policy failure and incompetence. 

[RandoEFC+]

The Tories are the experts at telling us that it's our own fault for not listening when they told us not to panic-buy, and the British public are the experts at letting them do it because we'd rather point at our neighbours and blame it on them to justify our own "every man for himself" approach towards making sure we have what we need ourselves. 

Actually those people wanting to blame it all on Brexit when it isn't all Brexit are not being particularly helpful because they're playing the role of bitter, salty Remainers which is perfect for the Daily Express and GB News. Brexit hasn't helped though and one of the HGV driver unions in Europe has openly scoffed at the solution put forward of offering fixed-term visas to a certain number of European drivers that end on the 24th of December. Who'd have thought that "do our Christmas deliveries for us but then clear off before the day please" isn't an appealing message to potential overseas employees who already have their opinions of the UK coloured by five years of anti-immigrant and anti-European rhetoric and the end of freedom of movement. It is worth pointing out to this government and pro-Brexiters in general that you can't ask people not to blame Brexit when the government's top solution is to temporarily reverse the headliner Brexit policy of ending Freedom of Movement. It's not broadly acknowledged in the UK but many Europeans now see us as quite a nasty country and much of the European media openly enjoys our post-Brexit mishaps. We can feel sorry for ourselves but eventually we'll have to accept that we'll reap what we have sown.

[Bluewolf]

2 hours ago, The Premier Steve's said:

Yet upping wages and issuing some visas to people from other countries also with driver shortages will sort things out?

 

30 minutes ago, RandoEFC said:

Actually those people wanting to blame it all on Brexit when it isn't all Brexit are not being particularly helpful because they're playing the role of bitter, salty Remainers which is perfect for the Daily Express and GB News. Brexit hasn't helped though

 

 

[RandoEFC+]

I'm not listening to Maajid Nawaz because he chats mostly shit between the occasional salient points he makes. I don't get why those of us who have had the consequences of Brexit inflicted upon us despite voting against it are being the bad guys or counter-productive when we point it out. It's not about undo-ing Brexit, it's about moving the people around us to a place where they actually listen when experts say "if we do this, then these things will happen" instead of listening to rent-a-quote backbench MPs, be they Conservatives or from another party. Those who voted or supported Leave weren't shy with their "I told you so"s when we sorted our vaccine procurement before the EU even though it wasn't as simple as us being able to do it because we left. Still, two wrongs don't make a right and I'd rather we had a debate faced on the full factual situation which goes beyond Brexit being the cause of the shortages.

[Guest]

Has brexit played any role in the feul shortage? From what I have heard it has little to do with it. Are other countries getting issues?

[Dave]

Maybe Man City should sell petrol at the Etihad to increase attendances.

[DeadLinesman]

11 minutes ago, Gunnersauraus said:

Has brexit played any role in the feul shortage? From what I have heard it has little to do with it. Are other countries getting issues?

There’s no fuel shortage and that’s the problem. Absolutely overhyped by the media and made worse by the average dickhead panicking.

[Guest]

Just now, DeadLinesman said:

There’s no fuel shortage and that’s the problem. Absolutely overhyped by the media and made worse by the average dickhead panicking.

My tank if just under half full. I'm not worried if it runs out it runs out. I'll get a beer and relax 

[RandoEFC+]

Yeah it's more that they don't have enough drivers to deliver the fuel to the garages. The issue is that some drivers have left the UK and gone to the EU, or drivers that worked across the whole EU including the UK can no longer enter the UK with freedom of movement. But aside from that, Covid has stopped a bunch of people getting their HGV licence and all the other stuff Harvey mentioned earlier.

[DeadLinesman]

2 minutes ago, Gunnersauraus said:

My tank if just under half full. I'm not worried if it runs out it runs out. I'll get a beer and relax 

My problem is I have to worry to an extent. I’m a key worker and have to travel 30+ miles in and out of Liverpool every day with associated mileage around the city as well. I can easily use a full tank a week what with my own personal mileage to football/gym/family etc. It’s bellends simply filling up for the sake of it that boils my piss. People have been seen filling 10+ petrol cans in the back of their cars. Asda usually get through 8000 litres a day. It was 28000 on Friday. Absolute fuckwits.

[Dr. Gonzo]

3 hours ago, Bluewolf said:

 

 

 

Not sure I wanna watch a Maajid Nawaz video, tbh I don’t buy that you can just walk away from a group like Hizb ut-Tahrir… so I think he’s either a liar… or something more sinister. Dodgy man, for sure.

But telling people they’re wrong to say I told you so is always wrong also.

[Stan]

Few friends and neighbours in adjacent streets have had fuel siphoned from their cars overnight. 

[Dr. Gonzo]

2 hours ago, Stan said:

Few friends and neighbours in adjacent streets have had fuel siphoned from their cars overnight. 

People being absolute cunts at the first news of "panic" doesn't bode well if there ever is any sort of societal collapse.

[Honey Honey]

No one more entrepreneurial than the criminal. When they couldn't sell drugs in lockdown the stole dogs and catalytic converters. Now in the fuel game.

[Bluewolf]

4 hours ago, Stan said:

Few friends and neighbours in adjacent streets have had fuel siphoned from their cars overnight. 

 

1 hour ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

People being absolute cunts at the first news of "panic" doesn't bode well if there ever is any sort of societal collapse.

That used to happen all the time when we were kids... That's why they got fuel caps that locked 

[Dr. Gonzo]

14 minutes ago, The Premier Steve's said:

No one more entrepreneurial than the criminal. When they couldn't sell drugs in lockdown the stole dogs and catalytic converters. Now in the fuel game.

I don't think drug sales during the lockdown really went down, tbh. Yes there were the early reports that "drug dealers stick out in COVID times" - but I think that means there were just more arrests at the beginning of lockdown as the drug trade had to adapt to how to sell drugs during a pandemic when people aren't meant to be going around to other peoples' houses. The cost of drugs in the UK is way up though. Source: I've got a friend back home who works many jobs, and one of them is dealing.

Stealing catalytic converters is something junkies do for money. Would drug dealers cut into their customer's livelihoods like that? Probably, they're sort of arseholes 

[Honey Honey]

3 hours ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

I don't think drug sales during the lockdown really went down, tbh. Yes there were the early reports that "drug dealers stick out in COVID times" - but I think that means there were just more arrests at the beginning of lockdown as the drug trade had to adapt to how to sell drugs during a pandemic when people aren't meant to be going around to other peoples' houses. The cost of drugs in the UK is way up though. Source: I've got a friend back home who works many jobs, and one of them is dealing.

Stealing catalytic converters is something junkies do for money. Would drug dealers cut into their customer's livelihoods like that? Probably, they're sort of arseholes 

The catalytic converter thief's around my mates turn up with baseball bats, broad daylight, have beaten someone up before and smashed the shit out of someone else's car for challenging them. They also sometimes don't bother hiding their identities. However it is London, most of the CCTV hasn't worked for 15 years in this city.

[Dr. Gonzo]

8 minutes ago, The Premier Steve's said:

The catalytic converter thief's around my mates turn up with baseball bats, broad daylight, have beaten someone up before and smashed the shit out of someone else's car for challenging them. They also sometimes don't bother hiding their identities. However it is London, most of the CCTV hasn't worked for 15 years in this city.

Holy shit! Definitely doesn't sound like junkies then... just brazen criminal arseholes.

[Tommy]

22 hours ago, Gunnersauraus said:

Are other countries getting issues?

No issues whatsoever.

[Azeem]

The recent fights over toilet papers and stuff shows that most people can't throw a proper punch even if their life depends on it.