Brexit Britain: growing pains?
Thank you, Britain, said Peter Tiede in The Times. With your petrol queues, empty supermarket shelves and chronic labour shortages, you’ve allowed all of us on the Continent to feel much better about the state of our own countries, and to “experience a delicious schadenfreude”. After all that talk of how Britain was “taking back control”, by leaving the EU and casting off the shackles of Brussels bureaucracy, now we see the reality. Having shut the door on industrious EU migrants – who “are now working for us and keeping our shelves full and petrol stations fully stocked” – Britain is discovering how hard it is to keep the country running efficiently without them. Germany’s likely new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, remarked last week that Britain only had itself to blame for its current predicament – and he’s surely right. “I hate to say it, but we did warn you this might happen.”
Brexit is a bit like moving house: it’s “a hassle at first, but you are upgrading”. That’s what Michael Gove told business leaders a year ago, said Helen Thomas in the FT. But right now, it doesn’t feel much like an upgrade; it just feels like we’ve “moved to a place where no Christmas turkeys are available and there’s an empty petrol station around the corner”. Although the shortages are obviously not all attributable to Brexit, said Mark Landler in The New York Times, a strong link is undeniable. It’s no coincidence that Northern Ireland, the one part of the UK that has an open border with the EU, has been unaffected by the petrol panic and the recent shortage in supplies of carbon dioxide.
The “international schadenfreude” over Britain’s problems is “galling”, said Allister Heath in The Daily Telegraph. Because we’ve dared to assert our independence, anti-Brexit commentators are highlighting every setback and doing their best to link it to our withdrawal from the EU. Never mind that Italy’s energy prices are higher than ours; that France’s hospitality industry is also struggling with staff shortages; that our lorry driver shortage (widely shared) has far more to do with British truckers quitting the industry than foreign drivers leaving. But the Government has played into the hands of these opportunist critics by failing to handle matters competently. Why, for instance, has it still not sorted out the DVLA, which is sitting on tens of thousands of unprocessed HGV licence applications? It will need to buck up fast. One of the “many advantages of Brexit” is that it enables proper accountability. “The chaos can no longer be blamed on Brussels’s policies or European judges or anybody else. The buck stops at No. 10.”