Manchester, England, Oct. 6 (U.S.): Empty gas pumps, labor shortages, and gaps in store shelves. It is a disturbing autumn in Britain, if not a winter of discontent.
But this week, Boris Johnson is in place. The prime minister shut his problems outside during the annual Conservative Party conference, speaking to the supporting crowd, taking selfies and bobbing on a bike inside a vast Manchester conference centre, The Associated Press reports.
Johnson wrapped up the four-day conference on Wednesday with a speech promising that Britain will emerge from Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic as a stronger, more dynamic country – even if the path is a bit rocky.
“There is no alternative,” Johnson said on Tuesday, adopting a phrase used by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a leading figure for Conservatives. “The UK (has to become) – and we can do a lot better by becoming – an economy with higher wages and higher productivity.”
Britain has gone through a turbulent period since the last in-person party meeting two years ago. Then Johnson pledged to “finish Brexit” and take the UK out of the European Union after years of wrangling over the terms of the exit.
That promise won Johnson a massive parliamentary majority in December 2019. He led Britain out of the European Union last year, ending the UK’s smooth economic integration with a trading bloc of nearly half a billion people. Britain has also been affected by the Corona virus pandemic, which has killed more than 136,000 people in the United Kingdom, the highest toll in Europe after Russia.
The pandemic, which has put much of the economy on a standstill, and Brexit, which has made it difficult for EU citizens to work in the UK, have thrown the economy out of sync.
Although not as terrible as Britain’s famous “winter of discontent” in 1978-79, when thousands of striking workers disrupted essential services, a crisis that eventually led to Thatcher’s election, the country experienced the most widespread economic turmoil in years.
A shortage of truck drivers, partly due to a backlog of testing and partly an emigration of European workers, has complicated British supply chains. This has left supermarkets with some empty shelves and fast food chains without chicken fuel and gas pumps.
After more than a week of fuel supply problems, this week the government called up the army, getting dozens of soldiers to drive tanker trucks. It also says it will issue up to 5,500 short-term visas to foreign truck drivers to come to the UK
Other parts of the struggling economy say they don’t get the same quick action. Pig farmers protested outside the Conference of Governors, saying a shortage of butchers meant thousands of pigs could be slaughtered on farms, ending up in landfills rather than the food chain.
Johnson says companies will have to beat it down by raising wages and improving wages and conditions to get British workers to fill job vacancies. He said too many sectors of the British economy depended on Eastern European workers willing to do tough jobs for low wages, and vowed that the UK would not return “to the old, failed model of relying mainly on low wages and low-skilled labour.”
While Johnson argues that EU membership has lowered UK wages – a claim many economists contest – he has downplayed the role of Brexit in the country’s current economic woes, noting that the US and China also suffer from a shortage of truck drivers. Critics say these countries also do not suffer from the gaps in supermarket shelves that Britain does.
Johnson said supply chain problems are just “the stresses and strains you’d expect from a giant wake-up” as Britain recovers from the most severe pandemic economic downturn of any major economy. The unemployment rate is less than 5%, although this month’s end of a program to pay millions of registered workers may increase that number.
Many conservatives worry that the winter could take a toll on voter money from higher prices, higher energy costs from the global rise in natural gas prices and reduced welfare benefits.
Starting on Wednesday, the government is withdrawing 20 Egyptian pounds ($27) per week for the welfare support that has helped more than 4 million families make ends meet during the pandemic. The government says the increase has always been intended to be temporary, but anti-poverty and opposition groups and some conservatives are calling for it to be kept.
Danny Sriskandragah, chief executive of Oxfam GB, said many of the people who depend on the benefit, known as global credit, are low-wage workers.
“It cannot be right to throw out a lifeline that analysis shows will push an additional half a million people into poverty, including 200,000 children,” he said.
The pressure on living standards could make it difficult for Johnson to achieve his main goal of “upgrading” the UK by spreading economic opportunity outside southern England, where most business and investment are based. This promise helped him win working-class votes in areas that had long been strongholds of the centre-left Labor Party.
Voters will ultimately judge whether the conservatives have kept their promises. But for now, with most polls giving the party a lead over a frustrated Labour, delegates in Manchester were as excited as their famous and irrepressible leader.
Pack meeting rooms and sip warm white wine at sweaty receptions, as if the most famous lockdowns, masks and social distancing that have plagued Britain were a bad dream. The delegates were younger, more diverse, and less controlled by the wealthy population of southern England than they had been for years.
“You wouldn’t have seen this until 10 or 15 years ago, as the North turns with such crowds in support of the Conservative Party,” said Max Darby, a delegate who was born in Scunthorpe, northern England. “I think Boris should do something right if people like me are more than happy – in fact proud – to vote Conservative.”
RAE