Johnson actually wanted to celebrate with his Tories, instead the government is facing enormous challenges.
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Prime Minister Boris Johnson blows the wind in his face on the way to the party conference in Manchester.
Foto: Neil Hall (Keystone)
Sullen, Boris Johnson’s supporters trotted to the conference center in Manchester to rally around their prime minister. This party congress should have been a belated victory parade after the conservatives could only celebrate their electoral triumph in December 2019 last autumn because of the pandemic by zooming in.
After all, as promised, after the elections they brought Brexit over “once and for all”. This summer they had also assumed that there would be reason for new post-Covid-19 confidence – after the vaccination successes on the island, the end of all restrictions in July and a noticeable economic upturn in August. From the official opposition, with their not too charismatic Labor chairman Keir Starmer, Johnson believes he has little to fear to this day.
On Sunday, the latest polls predicted the Tories to have a clear lead over Labor. And yet the conservatives are currently in a difficult situation: In many shops there are gaps in the range of goods, and they are getting bigger and bigger. And heating and fuel costs are starting to skyrocket even faster. Above all, however, the long lines of cars that have formed at countless gas stations since the Thursday before last do not want to dissolve.
Panic buying and chaos
Because that Thousands of tank truck drivers are missingwhich forced the temporary closure of gas stations has led to panic buying and chaos. Despite the government’s assurances that everything will be sorted out “very quickly”, there is still an acute fear of fuel, especially in London and in the south-east of England.
On Monday the army is supposed to move out with 100 cars and drivers because they want to signal readiness for action in Downing Street. Much more meekly than before, individual ministers have admitted that it “could take a few weeks” to get the problem under control. Rod McKenzie of the Association of British Freight Forwarders even fears that one will have to wait a full year for real normalization.
Under these circumstances, the government has received angry reactions and has also granted 5,000 special visas for truck and tanker truck drivers from the EU. But you need “ten times” this number of visas – designed for a generous period of time, says McKenzie, the head of the freight transport association.
“You can’t pull truck drivers out of your hat.”
Sir Roger Gale, Tory MP
Prime Minister Johnson himself announced again on Sunday that British freight companies should no longer use cheaper foreign workers, but would have to train and employ British nationals post-Brexit. But you can’t pull truck drivers out of your hat, criticized Tory backbencher Sir Roger Gale.
His party colleague Tobias Ellwood, chairman of the defense committee in the lower house, groans in the same way: “Just waiting for everything to return to normal at some point is not a strategy.” Other Conservative MPs, especially those from the party right, are clinging to their hard Brexit for the time being. For them, as for Economics Minister Kwasi Kwarteng, the current bottlenecks are simply a painful “transition phase” on the way to a better time. Even they are aware, however, that this does not meet with much sympathy among the population – because the situation in the country is starting to get serious everywhere.
Because it’s not just the gasoline supply that is stagnating. Since Great Britain lacks a total of 100,000 van and truck drivers and, since the departure of the Europeans, thousands of workers in many areas, shops, supermarkets and restaurants, but also large parts of the agricultural sector, are affected. Some harvests could not be brought in this year. Pigs cannot be slaughtered because there is a lack of qualified butchers. Poultry is bred far less than before – including the number of for one british christmas essential turkeys has been drastically reduced.
Rising costs – less social assistance
At the same time, the Tories, who represent poorer areas, for example in the north of England, warn that there is pure panic among their voters because of the steep rise in prices and heating costs, coupled with a systematic reduction in social assistance, tax increases that have just been decided by the government and the end of the state Support for jobs threatened by the pandemic.
Hundreds of thousands of Britons could become unemployed as a result of these measures and millions could find themselves in serious financial difficulties, warn Conservative MPs from former Labor constituencies, which fell to the Tories in 2019 in the wake of the Brexit enthusiasm. Boris Johnson cannot forge big plans for a fairer Britain and at the same time “pull the money out of the pockets of the poorer communities in the north of England”, grumbles parliamentarian Jake Berry.
Dominic Cummings, last year Boris Johnson’s chief advisor and the gray eminence in government headquarters, is now in the same horn as the critics. “It is obvious,” he said at the opening of the party congress, “that the government has failed to take care of supply problems that we talked about in May 2020.”
Cummings advises his compatriots to stock up on time and fill the pantries – because “Boris”, his former boss, “certainly doesn’t understand what’s going on here.”
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