Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Labour has gone back to 1983

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One day quite soon someone at a petrol pump is going to get a tyre iron wrapped around their head. It will almost certainly be the middle-aged male driver of a Land Rover Discovery — a flatulent showboating car driven almost exclusively by smug pigs — while he is busy filling up his 16 jerry cans with unleaded. It will take place in a city — there’s still quite a bit of petrol left in our towns, because townsfolk are not sociopaths — and the assailant will be a Ukip-voting working-class man in his early thirties called ‘Matt’. With any luck, the jury will acquit.

I do not know (and nor does anyone else, seemingly) the extent to which this current fuel crisis has been occasioned by a shortage of tanker drivers and hence fuel, or by the owner of the Land Rover Discovery and his idiot friends, who 18 months ago were pillaging Morrisons for every last roll of bog paper, bottle of hand sanitiser and — mysteriously — tinned tomatoes. Can’t beat a clean arse, clean hands, and tomatoes on toast for supper.

During the first lockdown last year we survived on little more than one third of the amount of fuel usually consumed, because nobody went anywhere. I wish people still didn’t go anywhere: it was much better then. One thing is for certain — the crisis has not been occasioned by Brexit, as the Land Rover man would undoubtedly aver. Brexitmerely gave us the freedom to decide to have a massive road haulage shortage: it was not actually part of the deal, nor was it an inevitable consequence of it. The ideal is indeed that those lorry-driving jobs in the end go to indigenous British people. But this will take time.

The road haulage firms need to become accustomed to paying a decent rate for the job, to start with.

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