Wednesday, August 11, 2021
Government plans for permanent lorry queues post Brexit
The smooth transition to a post-Brexit economy that we were promised by government ministers has not materialised, and many of us are faced with half-empty supermarket shelves, as the shops' just-in-time resupply policies struggle to cope with a shortage of lorry drivers and bureaucratic delays at our borders.
It is estimated that the UK needs another 100,000 drivers if lorry-based supply chains are to recover, but there is no sign of even a fraction of that number being recruited in the near future, especially with most non-British drivers being put off by over-zealous immigration controls amonsgt many other barriers imposed by an increasingly xenophobic government.
And if those drivers were to miraculously appear then what should they expect? Queues and more queues. That is certainly the message ministers are giving out with their intention to make permanent emergency powers put in place to handle post-Brexit queues of lorries.
The Guardian reports that Operation Brock, a traffic management system designed to cope with queues of up to 13,000 lorries heading for mainland Europe across Kent, was meant to end by October 2021, after being extended once when the Brexit transition period ended in December 2020.
They say ministers are planning to make the provisions indefinite by removing “sunset clauses” from the legislation that set out when the powers would expire. It means the emergency protocol can be activated at any time to govern the flow of lorries around the Port of Dover and Channel tunnel at Folkestone with contraflow systems:
Naomi Smith, the chief executive of the internationalist campaign group Best for Britain, said: “This is an admission that far from ‘teething problems’, the government expects supply problems from their rushed Brexit deal to continue indefinitely.
“Shelves are empty and our supply chains are already at breaking point. The government should be seeking improvements to their deal with Europe rather than preparing to make Kent a permanent lorry park.”
None of this was on the side of the Boris Bus back in 2016.
