Is the petrol crisis good for the government?

Coffee House Shots

The Spectator

News, Politics, Government, Daily News

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2021

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A shortage of HGV drivers has led to empty petrol pumps and talk that supermarket shelves could be empty come Christmas. Delivery firms want the government to ease immigration rules to fill the gap, but, aside from allowing a small number of emergency visas, they have refused to step in. Why? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This podcast is sponsored by Canacord Genuity Wealth Management.
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0:26.2	Hello and welcome to Coffee House shotsots, the spectator's daily politics podcast. I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by James Forsyford Fraser Nelson. On Sunday, Tory activists and MPs are
0:32.5	likely to descend on Conservative Party conference and in theup, we are facing a fuel crisis and a labour
0:38.4	shortage crisis. Today, the business secretary, Crozi Quartang, has given an interview where he
0:43.1	has hit at employers seeking to keep wages down through the use of cheap immigrant labour. Fraser,
0:49.5	in his interview of Conservative home, it touched on something you write about in your
0:52.9	telegraph column today. What is this new argument we're hearing from ministers?
0:57.7	Right now, we're in a crisis which has got its uses for the Conservatives, and there's a
1:02.4	power of struggle at the heart of this crisis. The businesses and the CBI are saying to the government,
1:07.7	look, you need to let in more migrant labor. We cannot fill this
1:11.7	gap. There are tens of thousands of vacancies for truck drivers. There are 16,000 vacancies in
1:17.9	meat processing. You need to let in more migrant labor. To which the government is responding,
1:22.8	no, you guys need to pay more money. It's not that Brits don't want the job. They don't want the job
1:28.8	right now at the very low salary levels. You're advertising them. And now this comes down to one of
1:34.2	the arguments about Brexit. It was argued by those who wanted to leave that the EU was keeping low
1:41.4	wages down, not so much the minimum wage, but say if you're a skilled
1:45.8	labourer, if you're an electrician, if you're a sous chef, if you're a driver, then you, what was
1:51.0	once a well-paid job in comparative to other jobs had become less so, and that was because of all
1:55.5	the competition from EU workers. If that were reduced, when the wages would go up. Nonsense,
2:00.6	the main campaign said
	...

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