On Saturday A symbol of Britain’s Brexit catastrophe

IF any town is symbolic of Britain’s Brexit catastrophe it is Dover. After years of being treated as a car park amid chaos around the port, the final insult came this week when hundreds of locals were sacked on the spot by P&O Ferries, to be replaced by foreign workers.

The ferry firm is blaming the £100m it has lost in the last year – a result, of course, not only of the pandemic but also of the no-deal Brexit’s chaotic effect on UK exports and imports.

One of the first to condemn the mass sackings was former South East MEP Nigel Farage who tweeted: “It is a disgrace that cheap foreign workers will replace 800 sacked P&O Ferries staff. Brexit was about putting our people first.”

Yet there was no sign of Mr Farage in Dover yesterday to soothe the brows of the 62% of people there who believed his UKIP rhetoric and voted Leave. Surely, by now, they must be wondering how they were sold such a pup.

The ferry company’s management appear almost as deluded as Putin in their belief that what they are doing is for the greater good.

But they also seem uncomfortably confident that they will get away with it. And my fear is that they will.

There has been a lot of outrage expressed by politicians that P&O hasn’t abided by the UK’s employment laws, but will the firm face the consequences?

Armed Forces Minister James Heappey admitted in an interview with Radio 4 yesterday: “The Government anger will mean very little to those who have been sacked. I do feel very sorry for those people.

“I do think P&O have behaved disgracefully and I wish that P&O had given the Government and the unions more opportunity to engage with them to try to save those jobs.

“Ultimately, it is not something the Government can stop P&O from doing.”

The Government’s anger will indeed be meaningless for the people of Dover, who rely on the port for work and for whom the Herald Of Free Enterprise disaster of 1987 is not forgotten.

Many of the crew who lost their jobs this week will undoubtedly have family or friends whose loved ones perished on the P&O-owned ship.

Much effort was made across the shipping industry to ensure the same thing never happened again and promises made that the local community would never be betrayed.

But now the local workforce is no longer required and there are real – and genuine – concerns that swapping entire ferry crews for low-paid agency workers is an accident waiting to happen.

Mark Dickinson, general secretary of maritime union Nautilus International, said it was “an intensely worrying situation” as the number of ships passing across the Channel was like “walking across a six-lane motorway at rush hour”. He said: “We’ve written to the Maritime Coastguard Agency and we hope and we pray that they will do their job”.

It seems unlikely the coastguard have the resources to intervene and while P&O has broken UK employment law in a way that leaves all UK workers’ rights in jeopardy, it’s also unlikely to face action from the Government. It will be be left to the maritime trade unions to take legal action over the company’s failure to carry out proper consultation.

That could result in 800 unfair dismissal claims bringing the employment tribunal service to a grinding halt, yet that is the only way the workers can pursue justice.

But if P&O is allowed to get away with one of the most shameful acts in the history of British industrial relations, it will be down to the public and British businesses to punish them.

While the firm insists that it needs to make cuts in order to continue servicing its customers and provide healthy competition with its competitors, there are plenty of other ways to get both freight and people across the Channel.

Presumably the company will soon be offering some bargain fares that many will be tempted by. But if there were ever a time for a good old British boycott, it is now.

This is one of the most shameful acts in the history of British industrial relations

P&O Ferries have made 800 staff redundant