Johnson's Brexit Plan for Lorry Drivers Goes Wrong

hi my name is phil i like talking about politics in this video i'd like to discuss the barriers to the government's plans to ease the brexit lorry driver shortage including but not limited to the threat of strike action for hgv driving test examiners but first if you'd like to be notified of daily news and politics please subscribe to the channel and click the bell notification icon so we have a bit of an hgv shortage in britain here quite a severe one actually you may have heard me mention it once or twice before the situation is so bad that even the government have to accept that it exists never mind that they were warned about exactly this scenario five years ago the problem with these brexiteers is they won't accept the consequences of their policies until they have become reality even when they become reality if they think not enough people know about it they still deny it so by the time they have to feel that they need to do something it's already very very late and therefore what you need to do has to have overnight success but if it can't you end up in a mess like if they'd accepted these consequences when they were inevitable but still for the future they may have been able to do something they certainly have had more time to think about it properly but given that their plans for dealing with it now not exactly filling the industry with confidence i mean maybe we'd still have ended up where we are now there was an article in the east anglia bylines which suggests that despite the government's plans to deal with this such as they are which i'll go over they seem to be in a state of blind panic they are reported um someone in government has reported to have said that the director of public affairs in the road haulage association rod mckenzie was responsible for the problems he was the guy who's warning about it for years but apparently he's responsible and they're going to deal with him later people in control of a situation do not need to make threats of spiteful malice but the tory papers keep telling us that boris johnson has it under control he's going to save christmas and as comedy writer james felton observed on twitter remember the death toll the last time johnson saved christmas so what are johnson's plans for hgv drivers and how are they shaping up well the first of course was to focus on the number of potential drivers who couldn't sit their test due to the panic you know the panic the pandemic and uh you know getting these guys qualified is that most wonderful of solutions as well it's non-partisan everyone agrees that it would be brilliant if we had a whole queue of british residents taking up these vacant positions absolutely marvelous i would still suggest that you need to consider the impact of throwing a huge number of inexperienced people uh into a job like this people have only just passed their test obviously you always have people just passing their tests but in manageable numbers because like any other skills job you pass your test that's not that's not it your skills build up over the course of your career we're routinely told about all the tricky maneuvers that lorrie drivers have to perform when delivering say to supermarkets including reversing a skill that the government wished to remove from their tests altogether but if we could do something about the 20 000 potential drivers whose testing was disrupted by the pandemic brilliant so how do we do that obviously you need to be able to test more people per week than would be the case normally i mean that's obvious you catch up by going faster but a testing regime didn't have slack in it before the pandemic you know we didn't have examiners who had a very light you know i'll do the morning today you do the afternoon you know putting your feet up for half a day just on the off chance that some emergency would occur which means that at some point in the future they'd need to ram through loads of tests in a very short period of time so the government's plan is to just get examiners to do more examinations per day when they already do a lot you know just like they told lorry drivers are the solutions obviously to get the existing lorry drivers to just drive more hours when they're already tired more hours i mean not just stupid but cruel because if a tired driver causes a serious incident it's them who goes to prison not the transport minister who forced them to become exhausted and what's more i'm sure every lorry driver is conscious of this and surely a policy like this is more likely to repel people from the profession than attract them to it i mean how do these government meetings even go now we're desperately sure lorry drivers i know why don't we exhaust the few we have so that they leave the they profession leave the profession what are they going to do for money they all need money they're not getting paid enough to go out of work for a while well you know there's loads of other job shortages where the pay is about the same now and they don't have to their health risk going to prison and they also get to see their friends and family every day did that conversation never take place but anyway examiners so it seems examiners think that having to run through tests quickly in order to fit more into the day to schedule to begin the 11th of october next month they think that might impact on the well-being of the examiners themselves as well as compromise public safety fancy that they feel that they are already pushing it as it is the bottom line is that their main union the public and commercial services union balloted their members on action now it had an 80 turnout so a lot of members took the issue seriously and 92 people 92 sorry voted in favor of action including strike action if necessary so no arguing about the majority there 92 percent of 80 turnout is just shy of 74 of all members feeling that strongly so that's a significant majority of everyone so you would imagine that this puts a bit of a pause on the government's plans after all if examiners go on strike the government won't be getting their eight tests a day will they they'll be getting none i imagine they'll be getting the daily express and others to attack the examiners as enemy of the people or spiteful remainers but all that may do is just invite the public to see the arguments against endangering their lives right yesterday very timely i was driving into scunthorpe yesterday and there was a big smash on the other side of the motorway not lorry related somehow with dry roads and perfect visibility two cars collided you know all i saw was one car upside down in perfect driving conditions and the other one having to be manhandled off the off the carriageway but the the point is there were there were lorries there a lot of them going nowhere now i don't know whether anyone was badly hurt there what i do know is it was miles of tails back that's a lot of lorries not delivering their loads and this was a car imagine a lorry being unskillfully driven in an atmosphere of tight deadlines by someone who's only just started the job because the people entering the profession right now must be under huge pressure they're part of an insufficient fleet and every second counts it's like the government are trying to recreate scenes like the one i saw yesterday but on a more serious scale not that the government are bothered like perhaps ministers don't even think there's much difference between a lorry and a car oh it's got pedals in the wheel yeah yeah a bit higher up it's bigger of course but it says the same basics you know they should get grant chaps to try and reverse one into a loading bay observers standing well back of course so the plan to run through tests too quickly has hit a snag there they're planned to offer only short-term visas i've already gone over but you know just to emphasize what i've previously said we're getting more and more reports of eu lorry drivers going on radio shows and explaining look there's no point in or coming to britain you know in the eu they get more respect better pay less paperwork less hassle you know just just driving around the eu is is better on every level than coming to britain what's the advantage of coming to britain there are literally no advantages for them so unless we find a few eu lorry drivers where maybe they're mad for fish and chips i mean i bet you can't get any decent fish and chips in france so unless that is the case we're not going to see those visas being snapped up by people living next to us so that means further afield which means drivers who are not familiar with the way our roads work all the laws that govern them so you can't just get a driver from india stick them in a cab and have them drive around britain they need to go through a test so it takes time to get these drivers through the theory and practical tests necessary to drive on british roads and here's the thing they need to do that at the same time as we're trying to catch up on the domestic drivers we already have wanting to do their tests and where the government are trying to ram the number of tests per day done but the examiners are dead against it and and you know even without that consideration i'm told that it could take you know two to three months to get this done you get a driver from india you got vr got a visa feared no problem yet come over we'll sort the paperwork out you need to do these theory and practical tests probably take two or three months two or three months the visas last for three months do we see the problem here do we see the problem the only other plan the government have is to make tests easier well you know if they won't do more tests today and you know we can't get dry so what we should do is just make the test shorter let's cut out all that nonsense like reversing classic case of boris johnson isn't it the consequences are obvious he doesn't care about that look at his political career he's been mayor of london and he's now prime minister in terms of a political career that's stunning isn't it in terms of what he wanted to do he's achieved it but how did he achieve it did he carry out great work did he solve great problems did he deal with great crises no did nothing actually created crises made things worse but he convinced people that he was brilliant i had all this mindless optimism yeah i mean the problem is now got labour going oh we need some mindless optimism as well you know all the cock-ups just happened to coincide with him being in charge you know they were all someone else's fault apparently so why wouldn't he pursue the same tactics johnson isn't interested in solutions only persuading people that he has solutions so he says something that makes sense to some people and then when it goes wrong it inevitably fails he just blames someone else and comes up with his next solution well i had this solution it's brilliant but i cocked it up so now i'm i'm so pretty i've come with another solution and it's adding for an item goes on forever but those are my thoughts let me know yours on the comments below if you found the video interesting don't forget to click the like button if you'd like to support the channel further please also click the patreon link for details and until next time i'll see you later

Channel: A Different Bias

Views: 120,945

Rating: 4.9614801 out of 5

Keywords: brexit lorry driver shortage, brexit hgv driver shortage, lorry driver tests, boris johnson lorry driver shortage, brexit news, brexit explained, brexit latest, hgv examiners vote to strike, boris johnson, uk politics, a different bias

Id: ynYAobkroWE

Length: 10min 44sec (644 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021

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[u/Rogthgar]

This idea of ramming through new drivers by making tests easier reminds me of Top Gear... both when they took the mickey out of Egyptian driving tests being passed if you could back and fourth two feet... and that time they first got into a lorry each and despite all their driving experiences had a race where none could get the trucks moving, a trailer detached, one badly scraped one of the others and another caught fire... imagine someone of that level of experience being told to go to the middle of a city to deliver something in the first week behind the wheel...

[u/WastingMyLifeToday]

Video description:

Part of our brexit government's plan for the lorry driver shortage is to ram more tests through each day. Examiners feel that this compromises their health and public safety, and have voted by a huge number for industrial action against this plan. Just another of the government's plans that doesn't improve the situation, might actually make it worse, and ignores the root cause of the problem - brexit.

Length: 10m43s

[u/SkyZealousideal4988]

So, more of the same...