We face a winter of discontent
We are most certainly heading for a Brexit winter of discontent with the first chill winds of shortages a mere foretaste of the big freeze to come.
In the last couple of weeks we have seen a fuel crisis, an energy crisis, we’ve even had a threat to fizzy drinks and the beer supply with a crisis in our CO2 supplies. Things got so bad that we even had retailers telling us we only had 10 days to save Christmas.
Compounding this is an economic crisis coming the way of Scotland’s hardest pressed families with the withdrawal of the £20 Universal Credit uplift, sky high energy prices and the promise of a regressive national insurance hike to pay for a broken social care sector in England.
We in the SNP often say that Westminster doesn’t work for Scotland but there is a real sense that it is now broken beyond repair.
All of this lies at the door of a crazy, destructive hard Brexit that Scotland didn’t vote for and imposed on us against our national collective will.
The ending of freedom of movement has been nothing other than a disaster resulting in the supply of European workers drying up and UK businesses being denied a reliable and invaluable source of labour.
The thing is that this Tory government knew that this would happen. They know that because they were repeatedly told about the consequences of pulling the immigration drawbridge up.
Belatedly, in typical Tory fashion, they will now release 10,500 temporary visas for HGV drivers and the poultry industry in a vain exercise of the stable door closing long after the Brexit horse has well and truly bolted.
Why anybody in Eastern Europe would want to come to‘save’our Christmas only to be kicked out again in the new year when they have been repeatedly been made to feel unwelcome is totally beyond me.
What we need is an arrangement that allows Scottish businesses the opportunity to recruit across a continent. To be part of the biggest trading block in the world.
The EU wasn’t perfect but it spared us from this chaos.
And it works both ways. Our young people are now marooned on Brexit island being denied the opportunity my generation had to live and work across a continent.
Exporters can’t sell their products, farmers and fishers face new regulations and bureaucracy and even musicians can’t tour anymore.
Scotland isn’t full up. We actually face a demographic crisis which will see an increasingly older population reliant on an even smaller number of those of a working age to supply the labour we require.
Brexit will go down as the biggest singular episode of self harm ever inflicted on a nation and we never even voted for it.