Keep On Trucking
By Luke Haines
It's
never really fair to make sweeping statements about entire groups of
people, but god dammit, Americans are bad at geography.
I
sympathise - I'm pretty inept with the subject myself - but I'm inept
for a British person. Or a European. I used to be European, but more on
that later.
What this means in practical terms
is that I can't, for example, find Wyoming on a map even though it's
enormous. I would be guessing at the locations of most major American
cities. I don't know where Beijing is, within the broad area of "China."
I have only a vague notion of where various African nations are.
Crucially,
however, I have at least HEARD of all of these places and can circle a
vague section of the map. I know Wyoming doesn't have much of a
seafaring tradition, for example, and I'm confident that South Africa
isn't in the North of that hulking megacontinent in the middle of the
globe.
Americans, meanwhile, often have only a
shaky grasp of their own borders, let alone anyone else's. Late night
shows and hack writers such as myself often make hay of this fact, such
as in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/
I
bring all of this up because, when talking to Americans, most people
from other countries tend to throw in the towel in the hopes of
shortening a pointless conversation. So when I tell people I'm from the
UK, there are levels of small talk to negotiate. First of all, yes, I'm
British, which most people assume means I have a classy accent and drink
tea because they assume "British" is interchangeable with "English," to
the frustration of anyone from Scotland or Wales and certain areas of
Northern Ireland. But taking as read that I'm English, the next hurdle
is that I'm from Bristol, at which point people make a polite guess and
say "Is that near London?"
In American terms,
yes, because Britain is small and by American measurements, most places
are "near" most other places. The old addage holds true that Americans
think a hundred years is a long time and Europeans think that a hundred
miles is a long way. But in British terms, no, Bristol isn't near London
- it's about a hundred and twenty miles, which we'd consider a long
trip. However, in order to save time, most people from anywhere that
isn't London will say "Sure, it's near London" because there's no point
in getting a white board and a pen and trying to explain a map to people
who are really just making conversation. I would imagine most French
people do the same thing and say that they live somewhere "near Paris"
if the question comes up, that most Italians will lie that they live
"near Rome," and most Spaniards would be astounded if the average
American knew what their capital city was in the first place.*
With all of that out of the way, I'm from Bristol. Yeah, sure, it's near London.
Bristol
is a medium-sized city that you'd recognise, if anything, from the
Black Lives Matter protest when we dumped a statue of William Colston,
one of the founding fathers of slavery, into the harbour. What's surreal
for me is that I used to work in a bar right next to where that
happened. If I was still there I could literally have watched them do it
whilst pouring someone a beer.
I worked in the building circled in red. Colston went in where the blue arrow is.
This morning, I got up to the news that about fifty yards from
where the Colston statue met its ignominious and deserved end, something
else unexpected had ended up in the harbour.
I'll reveal all a little later, but first, inevitably, some background on why it's Brexit's fault.
Since
the 2016 vote in which the UK decided to leave the European Union,
things have been best described as "less than ideal." A vote which was
largely founded on the racist concept of "sending immigrants back where
they came from so they can't take our jobs" hit something of a snag when
all the immigrants went back where they came from and thereby stopped
doing their jobs.
This was only compounded by
the fact that the Brexit vote largely succeeded due to people who were
of retirement age, and therefore unwilling to do any jobs at all, let
alone the newly-empty and thankless ones normally occupied by immigrant
labour.
At the time of writing, a
non-exhaustive list tells us that the UK is worryingly short of nurses,
care workers, scaffolders, carpenters, abattoir workers, fruit pickers
and truck drivers. This is bad news for anyone who eats food or is
mortal. We have nobody to pick food, package meat, or tend to the sick
in the middle of a pandemic, and even if we did have people who could
pick and package our food, there is nobody to drive it to the stores
where the public can get at it. We also had a panic about fuel,
recently, because although we had plenty of gasoline, we once again had
nobody qualified to drive fuel tankers to the pumps.
If
you ever wondered why Jimmy Hoffa thought he was untouchable as the
leader of the teamster's union, it's because a modern country quickly
falls apart when things stop being delivered. The UK has never had much
of a trucking union, much less a Hoffa figure, but now that most of our
European drivers have fussily decided to stop driving goods onto a
racist, unwelcoming island riddled with coronavirus, we're seeing the same problems that a teamsters union would threaten the government with for leverage.
In
any other country, the government might step in with a competent plan,
but our current administrations is essentially a collection of cronies
and yes-men clustered around a blithering idiot, so we're left with
numerous "plans" without any sign of the "competent" part.
First
off, we tried legal loopholes. Due to some sort of record keeping
glitch in the 90s, German citizens who passed their regular driving test
were also listed as being cleared to drive a truck. The British
government then offered anyone who had such a license (regardless of
actual truck driving experience) the chance to come to the UK and work
as a delivery driver. But only for three months.
I don't know what the German for "are you fucking kidding?" is, but that was the gist of the response.**
Not
to be defeated, the UK government also tried widening the net. We
offered temporary visas to any other truck-licensed European workers who
could plug the gaps in our freight network. Essentially, we announced as
a nation in 2016 that the EU could go fuck itself, then spent four
years electing increasingly racist and jingoistic governments to ram
that message home, and then we politely asked European citizens if
they'd like to come and help us out of the hole we'd dug. Again, on a
short term basis, because we don't like foreigners. But if any of those
foreigners could pitch in for a few months, we'd really appreciate it.
The worthless, continental bastards.
Last
week it was announced that the figures were in on how many people had
taken the government up on their grudging and petulant offer. Whilst a
government spokesman said the respondents were in "double figures," this
was a desperate ploy to avoid admitting that the actual answer was
"twenty." For reference, we're estimated to need at least seventy thousand drivers before we're back on solid ground.
At this point, you should ask yourself what the stupidest solution imaginable would be.
If you said "just let anyone drive a truck," then thanks for reading, Mr. Prime Minister.
It
was announced that the test required to become a truck driver was going
to be made easier, in the hopes that people who can nearly drive an
eighteen wheeler safely will manage not to plow twenty tons of speeding
death into bus stops or shopping malls or oncoming traffic. Anyone who
suggests this is a terrible idea is merely suffering from a lack of
patriotic fervour. And also Covid. Because we're all suffering from Covid, or will be by the time you read this.
Between
increasing food shortages and the roads becoming some sort of amateur
demolition derby, all on the whims of our idiot government, t's not easy
living in the UK at the moment, regardless of which city.
Which reminds me. This happened in Bristol harbour this morning:
Nobody is entirely certain how this happened, but I'm sure many of you, like me, have an educated guess.
*It's Mexico.
**Trick question, the Germans have no word for "kidding."
About the author:
Luke Haines is a British writer based in Wales. You may see more of his work at: lukehaines85.medium.com
His opinions are his own.
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