Media has little in the way of memory and the rest of us struggle to remember much of what happened more than a week ago.  And so, the narratives we use in an attempt to make sense of the rapidly changing world we are living in, tend to revolve around short-term tribal talking points.  Take, for example, the narrative about Britain having a shortage of lorry drivers.  It tends to be a very short narrative: Britain left the European Union, European lorry drivers went home, Britain has a lorry driver shortage.  Ergo “Brexit Bad!”  Unfortunately, there are more holes than a Swiss cheese in this narrative.  To begin with, driver shortages Across Europe were observable to anyone paying attention more than a decade ago:

“The study provides a concise overview of the road freight transport sector, in the light of the structural issue of qualified driver shortage. In particular, this study analyses the multiplicity of factors affecting labour supply and demand, by taking into due consideration also the impacts of the current EU legislation and the effects of the present economic downturn.”

Since 2009 was before the 2016 Brexit referendum, the 2009 lorry driver shortage could not logically have been the result of Brexit.  Moreover, lorry driver shortages across Europe were sufficient that a Franco-German inspired change of regulation – the so-called “Macron Package” (which requires drivers to use hotels overnight and to return home every eight weeks) – was introduced to halt the impact of cheap and unregulated Eastern European drivers on the road haulage industry of Western Europe; this was not a solely British problem.

The driver shortage doesn’t end there though.  According to the International Road Transport Union (IRU), driver shortages are a truly global problem which governments and media have turned a blind eye to for years…

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