Johnson’s reverse
Faced with the undeniable evidence of the problem, Johnson reversed. The premier had to convince anti-EU hawks such as Interior Minister Priti Patel that the only solution in the short term was to bring European truck drivers back. Details of the new system will be announced today, but Downing Street has specified that this is a temporary measure and that admissions will be strictly limited in both numbers and time.
To mitigate the embarrassment of the sudden change in strategy, the Government will also insist on another series of measures that it had already announced but which so far have not yielded the desired result, such as more qualification exams, an accelerated route for the truck driver’s license and more hours allowed to drive.
There are no immediate solutions, according to Logistics UK, as it takes about nine months of training for a truck driver. Another and more fundamental problem is that there are not enough British citizens willing to be a truck driver.
The government knows this, because there was a precedent. British farmers had warned that without European workers their asparagus, strawberries and other prized crops would literally rot in the fields because there was no one to harvest them.
The failure of “Pick for Britain”
The authorities have launched the “Pick for Britain” campaign to persuade genuine British citizens to go to the fields to “collect for the homeland”. Less than 8 thousand responded to the call, one tenth of the troops needed. The campaign was tacitly suspended, and the government was forced to authorize the granting of 30,000 seasonal visas – three times the previous year – to import labor from the EU.