Richard Walker, the CEO of the food retailer Iceland, was on Newsnight last night discussing and bewailing the shortage of drivers. He admitted that he voted for Brexit but now his company is a hundred drivers short and Walker is worried about stocking up for the Christmas period. He was on with Andrew Bridgen MP who said we are transitioning to a high wage, high productivity economy and what we are experiencing now are simply growing pains.
Michel Barnier also appeared on Newsnight. He is in the U.K. to promote his book: My Secret Brexit Diary: A Glorious Illusion. Earlier he spoke and answered questions at an LSE webinar. He came across as politicians used to do in this country, wise, calm, measured, serious, truthful and honest. I genuinely don’t believe there is a single political figure in Westminster who could hold a candle to him.
Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, has a review of Barnier's book in The Guardian which is well worth a read.
This morning Huw Merriman, Tory MP for Bexhill and a member of the Transport Select Committee was on Radio 4 suggesting that there was no petrol shortage. The interviewer Sarah Smith pointed out the shortage was of drivers and tried to get him to admit that Brexit was to blame. Naturally he wouldn't and claimed that Germany and Poland were also short of drivers.
Smith was quick to explain they were in the single market and could recruit from elsewhere - precisely what the single market was intended to do - and they weren't experiencing shortages of fuel and food on the continent.
He ignored that and tried to pin the blame on British business for not training enough drivers. To an extent this is true but he implied that it was nothing to do with the government at all. Yet, it was the government that elected to go for the hardest possible Brexit - short of WTO rules - and create a massive supply problem. Business did not want a hard Brexit anyway and certainly not sprung on them overnight on January 1st.
The present government of Vote Leavers (most of them anyway) have spent. a lifetime blaming the EU for all our ills. Now they can't. Aunt Sally has disappeared and their own incompetence is leading to disaster and so they are casting around for someone else to blame.
Iain Duncan Smith, in The Telegraph lays the blame on "brainless bureaucracy" - which must mean our own civil service - while Merriman says British business is at fault. The next shortage will be of groups of people to blame for Brexit. Who will be next in the firing line?
Last week Johnson was making a speech about climate change in which he made this observation without any self-awareness or irony:
"We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
"We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done."
One day someone will have to clear up the mess he has made and sooner or later, it will become crystal clear that our problem in this country is with the politicians like him who are both congenital liars and hopelessly incompetent.
When that happens the truth might dawn on a lot of leave voters that the problem with Brexit is - Brexit.
