gallois wrote:
But France only took issue with Australia and the USA over that until Boris Johnson told France to “Get over it”
Actually, France delivered a very severe insult by not recalling their UK ambassador, implying (actually coming straight out with it!) that the UK was merely a vassal of the USA. That’s a much bigger diplomatic slap than recalling the USA and Australian ambassadors :-)
(And if I were French, I would have done the same :-))
gallois wrote:
Brexit and the UK are rarely spoken about. It is accepted that Brexit has happened, even if most people might think you have shot yourselves in the foot. We accept that the UK is not coming back any time soon and realise that it would be political suicide to do so. We do want to get back to some sort of normality but accept that that would be within the EU rules as a whole.
Yes agree – much the same view here. Brexit was a big news thing until it happened, but now its not really a story anymore – most doing business in UK have either adapted or looked elsewhere. The world moves on. Only these occational stories like with the fuel shortage really mentions brexit. Natually brexit is a much bigger thing in UK because the implications (good and bad) are much bigger there.
Neil wrote:
This is a problem in many industries; paying for training only for staff to leave the day after they get their qualification is hard to take, and small companies could not afford to do this.
I expect recouping training costs from an employee that left before some reasonable duration would be legal, if you write it in the contract from the beginning?
gallois wrote:
IMO it is only the British media that obsesses non stop about Brexit. It is in British headlines in one paper or another every day. Its no wonder that Brits get the impression that the EU are always trying to do the UK down. Whereas in France that could not be further from the truth.
Same thing in Sweden. I don’t regularly follow media from other countries (perhaps I should, but that’s a different question) but in Swedish newspapers there is hardly ever anything mentioned about Brexit anymore.
Brexit and the UK are rarely spoken about. It is accepted that Brexit has happened, even if most people might think you have shot yourselves in the foot. We accept that the UK is not coming back any time soon and realise that it would be political suicide to do so. We do want to get back to some sort of normality but accept that that would be within the EU rules as a whole.
Exactly!
lionel wrote:
I expect recouping training costs from an employee that left before some reasonable duration would be legal, if you write it in the contract from the beginning?
Certainly possible, ask an airline!
The whole ‘fuel shortage’ thing is remarkably transparent. Any country in the world would have a ‘shortage’ of fuel (or any commodity) if the population engaged in panic buying to the tune of 500% of normal demand sustained for a number of days. Modern supply chains of all sorts only work if demand stays within its usual (highly predictable) range.
Every industry wants a special concession or bail-out to protect their profit margins from the extra expense that Brexit will bring. In the case of transport – which is influenced and led by the big supermarkets – they want (and expect) the government to take steps that’ll allow them to continue paying Eastern European wages within much of their supply chain.
Interestingly, driving fuel tankers requires additional qualifications beyond the usual HGV licence and the information I have is that it has never been dominated by Eastern Europeans. It is however, the easiest part of the supply chain to bring to its knees via panic buying. It would seem to be a proxy battleground for a wider flexing of muscles in transport and logistics sector.
Leaving aside the wider Brexit debate, it is probably no bad thing in the long run to wean a country off cheap imported labour.
Leaving aside the wider Brexit debate, it is probably no bad thing in the long run to wean a country off cheap imported labour.
Labor, goods, services. It makes no difference. Labor has traditionally always been free in a global perspective. People have always moved to places where they could get a job. Seldom has this been well paid jobs.
It’s the opposite that has never worked. Trying to stop people from moving around getting jobs, has always ended in disaster.
This doesn’t mean that some always try to exploit certain situations by making life miserable for others, but that’s a different thing altogether.
@gallois, yes I agree with a lot of what you wrote.
gallois wrote:
. IMO politicians shouldn’t be allowed to write opinion columns in newspapers especially while they are serving MPs eg Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and many others still write columns I believe in the Telegraph.
I was not aware of that. Yea, that usually is not done and it is not a good idea.
While it was always obvious that papers have biases (remember the old Dave Allen Sketch about British Newspapers, which applied is true anywhere) I think the main point is that the media have really moved away from reporting news towards pure sensationalism with the clear aim of generating clicks and therefore income. The connection between advertizing clicks and the degradation of not only media but often enough internet content is staggering.
One bit which I wish online papers would disable right now are the totally useless comment sections. They are used 90% by frustrated and angry people with much too much time on their hands and the content is so totally primitive and beyond the pale that I strongly doubt any form of usefullness. If they want to slam, rant and rave there are more appropriate ways of letting them do that in newsgroups or fora, none of which have the outreach of newspapers.
In recent months the Anti Covid crowd has regularly hijacked those comment sections and made them unreadable, often even inciting violence or spreading rubbish. They also represent a totally distorted picture of the general population’s views and opinions, but I would think they tend to influence those with a given distrust towards anyone even further.
vic wrote:
Demand of gasoline 500 percent up – ridiculous. Where would all that fuel go in a few days suddenly ? You can store some at home but you would not want to buy a lot more once you got 50 liters in reserve ?? So where does all that sudden demand go then ? You´d have to drive 500 percent more to empty the tank and then wait in the station line again ?? It is not just the fuel in short supply but a lot of other goods in stores with problems from transport capacities – from January 2021 in fact, not a recent trouble. Vic
Well it’s quite obvious that demand is up by a considerable amount. Normally there is never any queue for petrol or diesel, and earlier this week there were considerable queues all day at just about every filling station. People do not queue at filling stations that have run out, and five times the usual demand is in the right ballpark. The fuel does not run out in a few days, it runs out (at that filling station) later that same day because the underground tanks are not that big and are, in the normal course of things, filled by tanker quite often – at least once per week. So the filling station makes a call to ask if the delivery scheduled for Wednesday can come two days early, and of course it cannot because every filling station is asking for the same thing. It’s a just-in-time delivery model that has little or no ability to deal with demand increasing from the (highly predictable) norm.
As to where it goes, two things. Firstly you have people like me, who fill their tank and forget about it until the range drops below 50 miles or the warning light comes on, then we fill up again next chance we get. These people are apparently all coming in to top up ‘just in case’ before their tanks are down to the usual level. Secondly you have people (usually those who have to watch their cash flow more carefully) who put £20-£30 worth in at a similar time each week or according to some other schedule of their own devising, but the point is they operate nearly all the time on the lower half of the tank’s capacity – they never usually fill it right up. Now they are filling right up. So what’s happening is half the customers are coming more frequently than normal, and the other half are buying much more than normal. This was a surprise to me, but the guy representing independent petrol retailers said that, in normal times, the average delivery per customer is only £25 – less than 20 litres at current prices. These last few days the average delivery is more like £50, he said.
The excess demand cannot sustain for more than a few days of course, because people run out of somewhere to put it. Not like the loo roll panic buying, where you can just fill your house with it.
