It's the Sun wot won it

Today, your "super soaraway Sun", is launching a campaign to find 2,000 HGV driver to fix the 100,000 driver shortage, nationally.

I may not be a smart man, but that seems to be some 98,000 peope short.

But whatever.

I have driven trucks.

Its not a fun job. I can remember the long hours, nowhere to have a break, falling asleep at the wheel, having to spend two hours loading the truck before leaving the depot, and all the other stuff.

It was hard.

I was doing it as an agency driver, extra work on top of my job in the RAF, so the pay was a bonus. But wasn't good.

There are rules now about hours you can drive in a day, consequative days, week, month, and mandated days of rest and so on. Its complicated, and is not for everyone. And haulage companies hired lots of drivers from the EU so they could drive wages and costs down.

Now those people have left and either can't or won't come back.

So, there is a finite pool of labour in the UK. There is a 100,000 shortage in drivers, 100,000 shortage in the care industry, untold vacancies in agriculture picking fruit and vegetables, same in hospitality. Imagine if I decided to leave my job as a bartender to become a driver as the pay increased. I would have a new job, once I passed the (soon-to-be-easier) test, work longer hours on bigger trucks, but my orignal job would be vacant, in an inustry with tens of thousands of vacancied.

In short, me becoming a driver would create a labour shortage somewhere else.

The UK economy is/was big enough to support employement for more people than actually live here.

And then, along came Brexit.

Maybe Sun journalists would like to become lorry drivers instead? instead of them having peddalled the anti-immigrant lies that brought Brexit, maybe someone taking ownership and consequences of their actions?

Maybe not.

All people deserve higher wages, paid for what hours they work and enough to be able to buy a house, support their family.

And if we need immigrants, either from the EU or elsewhere to keep the economy going, then we must, because until we accept that, the labour and materials shortages will only serve to make the economy shrink further.

Another example of imposing economic sanctions upon ourselves.