Gas pumps are empty, workers are few, and store shelves are bare. In Britain, it’s been an autumn of annoyance, though not quite a winter of discontent.
Boris Johnson, on the other hand, is in his element this week. During the Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester, the prime minister has kept his issues outside, addressing to cheering crowds, posing for pictures, and clowning around on a bicycle.
Johnson wrapped up the four-day conference on Wednesday with a speech pledging that, despite the bumps in the road, Britain will emerge stronger and more dynamic as a result of Brexit and the coronavirus outbreak.
“There is no alternative,” Johnson remarked on Tuesday, borrowing a phrase from former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. “The United Kingdom must (become) a higher-wage, higher-productivity economy, and we can do much, much better by doing so.”
Since the party’s last face-to-face meeting two years ago, Britain has been through a volatile period. Then, after years of fighting over withdrawal terms, Johnson promised to “get Brexit done” and take the United Kingdom out of the European Union.
Johnson secured a large legislative majority in December 2019 because of this promise. Last year, he led Britain out of the EU, putting an end to the United Kingdom’s seamless economic integration with a trading union of about 500 million people. Britain has also been hit by a coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 136,000 individuals in the UK, the largest death toll in Europe after Russia.
The pandemic, which halted most of the economy, and Brexit, which made it more difficult for EU residents to work in the United Kingdom, conspired to knock the economy off the edge.
While not as bad as Britain’s famed “Winter of Discontent” in 1978-79, when thousands of striking employees paralyzed key services, resulting in Thatcher’s election, the UK has experienced the most widespread economic upheaval in years.
A scarcity of truck drivers has hindered British supply systems, partly due to a testing backlog and partly due to an outflow of European workers. As a result, stores have some bare shelves, fast-food restaurants are out of chicken, and petrol stations are out of fuel.
After more than a week of fuel shortages, the administration enlisted the army’s help this week, assigning scores of troops to drive tanker trucks. It also claims to be issuing up to 5,500 short-term visas for foreign truckers to visit the United Kingdom.
Other economically troubled areas claim they aren’t getting the same level of attention. Pig farmers demonstrated outside the Conservative Party convention, claiming that a lack of abattoir butchers meant thousands of pigs will have to be butchered on farms, ending up in landfills rather than the food chain.
Meryl Ward, a pig farmer from central England, called the government’s refusal to provide visas to a limited number of qualified European butchers to help ease the crisis “total nonsense.”
She remarked, “It’s a complete and utter waste.”
To entice British employees to take the vacant jobs, Johnson says employers will have to toughen it out by raising wages, enhancing pay, and improving working conditions. He said that too many sectors of the British economy rely on Eastern European workers ready to work long hours for low pay, and swore that the United Kingdom would not return to the “old, failing model” of relying on low-wage, low-skilled labor.
While Johnson claims that EU membership lowered wages in the United Kingdom — a position that many economists dispute — he has minimized Brexit’s influence in the country’s present economic troubles, pointing out that the United States and China both have truck driver shortages. Critics argue that those countries do not have the same gaps on grocery shelves as the United Kingdom.
As Britain recovers from a 2008 economic recession that was the worst of any major economy, Johnson said supply-chain issues are just the “stresses and strains you’d expect from a giant waking up.” Unemployment is around 5%, however, the expiration of a program that paid the wages of millions of furloughed workers this month could raise that figure.
Many Conservatives are concerned that rising prices, surging energy costs from a global spike in natural gas prices, and cuts to welfare payments will hurt voters’ wallets this winter.
The government is removing a 20 pound ($27) per week welfare supplement that helped more than 4 million people make ends meet during the pandemic beginning on Wednesday. Although the administration claims that the rise was always supposed to be temporary, anti-poverty organizations, the opposition, and several Conservatives are pressing for it to be kept.
Many people who rely on the benefit, known as Universal Credit, are low-paid workers, according to Danny Sriskandarajah, chief executive of Oxfam GB.
He stated, “It can’t be acceptable to take away a lifeline that, according to data, will push half a million more people into poverty, including 200,000 children.”
The compression on living standards may make it more difficult for Johnson to achieve his major ambition of “leveling up” the United Kingdom by expanding economic opportunities outside the south, where most business and investment is concentrated. That promise helped him attract working-class votes in places where the center-left Labour Party had long held sway.
Ultimately, voters will decide if the Conservatives have kept their promises. But, for the time being, with most polls showing the party ahead of a demoralized Labour, delegates in Manchester were as upbeat as their notoriously unstoppable leader.
As if Britain’s pandemic-plagued months of lockdowns, masks, and social isolation were a terrible dream, they jammed meeting halls and sipped tepid white wine at hot receptions. The delegates were clearly younger, more varied, and less dominated by wealthier southern English citizens than in previous years.
“You wouldn’t have seen the north turning out in such large numbers to support the Conservative Party even 10, 15 years ago,” said Max Darby, a delegate from the northern English town of Scunthorpe. “I believe Boris is doing something right if individuals like me are willing, if not proud, to vote Conservative.”
