Boris Johnson's United Kingdom and Brexit have achieved the strange pirouette of turning a global crisis into a national emergency, in which the possibility of using the army to solve a supply and demand problem has come to be considered without fuss.
The prime minister would be willing, according to
The Times
and the rest of the British media have confirmed, to rescue from the drawers the so-called Operation Escalin, designed two years ago by the Ministry of Defense to face the possibility of the hard Brexit that then took place. feared.
It would serve for hundreds of soldiers to get behind the wheel of the tanker trucks that transport fuel to the service stations of the national territory.
More information
Boris Johnson temporarily 'parks' Brexit to curb the truckers' crisis
Empty shelves and lack of workers: pandemic and Brexit exacerbate UK supply crisis
A sense of panic has been unleashed since last Friday, especially in the south of England, which has led thousands of drivers to queue for hours at service stations across the country. What started as a worrying but manageable crisis has turned into an emergency situation. The truck driver shortage across Europe has been exacerbated in the UK by Brexit. The transport industry estimates that about 90,000 drivers are needed to regain some normalcy. Half of them left the profession during the pandemic, due to retirement, lack of work or other job options. And at least 20,000 more were EU truckers who returned to their countries during lockdown,and they have a difficult return with the new immigration restrictions approved by the Johnson Administration.
That was the reason why BP decided last Friday to close a couple of dozen of its service stations, and announced the lack of at least one type of fuel in many of its servers. There were not enough truckers to supply gas stations, especially those in inner cities. This weekend, Johnson gave his arm to twist, parked the Brexit ideology and allowed 5,000 new visas for EU truckers to be issued. Too late and too few, they denounced both the transport sector and the Labor opposition. The Labor opposition, which has held its annual congress in the town of Brighton since last weekend, has lashed out at the Conservative government's lack of planning: “This crisis was perfectly avoidable, and it is the work of the Downing Street team.An incompetent, chaotic and arrogant government has not brought this situation, despite continuous warnings from the trucking industry, ”said Ed Miliband, who for five years was in charge of Labor.
Even he, however, agreed with the protesters who, at the gates of the Brighton Convention Center, accused Labor of having resigned from the EU and of not even daring to name “the word that starts with B” ( Brexit). Curiously, it was the leader of the German Social Democrats Olaf Scholz, winner of the general elections on Sunday in that country, who set the bell on the cat. The candidate reminded the British that Brexit ended the freedom of movement of people that has now complicated the return of community truckers. Labor's new leader, Keir Starmer, is fleeing like the plague from an issue that divided his party, and tries to blame the chaotic economic situation in the UK simply on the inept management of Johnson and his ministers.
The consequence of all this unresolved debate, aired in the media with big and alarmist headlines, has been a sense of panic and long lines at gas stations, in an image that brought to older Britons the memory of the
Winter of Discontent.
1978. The Association of Gas Stations of the United Kingdom has warned this Monday that some 5,500 of the more than 8,000 service stations throughout the country have already run out of fuel, while the rest are about to end in the same situation.
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As a first emergency measure, the Government has suspended the application of the 1998 Competition Law, to allow oil companies and gasoline distributors to share information and decide on the territorial strategy necessary to avoid shortages. "All this shortage is due, plain and simple, to a generalized situation of panic", explained to the BBC the president of the Association of Gas Stations, Brian Madderson. The priority has been concentrated on the service stations located on the main highways. The gas station pumps in the cities mostly hang the “out of service” sign.
The Secretary of State for Commerce, Kwasi Kwarteng, on whose shoulders have fallen all the staggered crises that have arisen after the pandemic - empty shelves in supermarkets, rising gas and electricity prices, suspension of the national supply of carbon dioxide. carbon, and now the situation of the gas stations -, met this Sunday with representatives of the oil companies to explain the army's deployment plan. And what he heard was an avalanche of objections and problems. The soldiers are not trained to handle huge vehicles, nor do they know the technique to fill the fuel tank or unload the merchandise in the warehouses of the service stations. They are delicate maneuvers for which at least two weeks of training and previous practice would be needed. Then,the panic situation may be over. Or not. That is why the Johnson Administration has described the problem as a
Catch-22
, the term that popularized Joseph Heller's novel: a dilemma that is difficult to escape, because any of the solutions is bad and aggravates the problem. And going to the aid of the army does not seem the best way to calm the panic. At mid-morning on Monday, the Minister of the Environment, George Eustice, was deployed in statements to the media to lower the expectation of the use of soldiers to alleviate the crisis. “We have no plans, at the moment, for the military themselves to drive the trucks. But the Army always has a civil contingency device ready to respond to any emergency, ”the minister downgraded a piece of news that the Johnson government has been unable to deny.
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