From Stay European
I must admit, these thoughts occurred to me too…
The haulage industry has been warning for months of coming food shortages caused by Brexit .
There is a shortfall of an estimated 100,000 HGV lorry drivers – most of them Europeans who decided to leave Britain over the last few years, or stopped including the UK on their cross-continental drives.
Now the gaps are starting to appear on the shelves. But the government and the media have suddenly found a new scapegoat: the ‘pingdemic’!
This ridiculous word describes workplace absences caused by the NHS Covid app ‘pinging’ people to self-isolate after being in the proximity of an infected person.
The word “Brexit” is mostly absent from these press stories. Some more serious media do acknowledge the Brexit-caused driver shortage as a “factor” in the problem – but it’s towards the bottom of the article.
Yet one look across the continent shows the lie. EU countries have the pandemic, they have apps, they have ‘pings’, and all the rest. But what they don’t have is empty shelves! They still have the cornucopias of fruit and veg that you may have seen posted on social media, where there have been hundreds of photos like this:
What supermarkets currently look like in the EU
Stay European
Once again we see the reckoning for the consequences of Brexit being postponed by the pandemic. But that cannot continue forever…
Many reports too of produce rotting in fields because there is no one to pick it.
Not good as this will cause the price of food to inflate. Which will push up the UK official inflation rate. (Seems unlikely the govt would be able to get away with removing food from the official basket of products used to calculate the official rate of inflation.)
This is bad news as if this makes the figures look out of control, then this may mean the £ rate will worsen ie be worth less in exchange for other currencies. Which is not good for anyone with UK-based income especially if their expenses are mainly in another currency. So 2 years from now…
OTOH Karen, the triple lock should increase the State pension exponentially to compensate (perhaps)…
Nah Graham as soon as salaries dipped in the UK right after Covid began, the financial services industry has been loudly telling the government to dismantle the triple lock. Or at least not apply it in any year it would be “too much”.
I am absolutely not kidding that’s what they have been doing.
so then, another Tory promise broken 
Not sure. i get the impression Rishi is sensible and not easily swayed. If we’re unlucky they will base it on a rolling 3 years.
But since the UK pension is pretty much the most miserable in the Western world even before you take into account that the UK is one of the most expensive countries to live in, and the triple lock was supposed to go a limited way towards remedying that and doing it over a very long period, to dismantle it would be as unfair as to dismantle other legislation intended to make things fairer especially as the UK pension is still so far behind.
I have never quite understood the need for a triple lock - other than it was a promise during an election campaign.
I can only understand the need to lock pensions to inflation/price index, as a pension is used to pay for things - I don’t see the need to lock it it earnings.
If the overall level of pension in UK is too low then raise it to an appropriate level then link it to inflation.
I can see that this may not necessarily be popular.
If you recall Mat, there was no mechanism before George Osborne introduced it in Cameron’s premiership and was a much lauded Tory promise.
It was done to avoid a similar thing like the few pence uplift to the OAP happening which Gordon Brown offered in his time in Downing Street.
As previously posted when we were told by the government to save for our retirement, there was a decent percentage return on interest rates.
Now everybody is hardly paying anything on their mortgages and pensioners are receiving very little on their savings.
That is why the triple lock has become more necessary for pensioners.
But isn’t it the case that your pension is to pay for food, heating, water etc - if these are picked up by inflation then linking pension to inflation would mean whatever you can buy now with your pension is what you would be able to buy in say 5 years.
oh, if were only that simple!
Pensioners are these days finding it more difficult to off-load or pay off their mortgages and therefore need to maintain their property. Not everyone can downsize so easily or release equity (they may have negative equity, for example) so it is often the choice of continuing to pay the mortgage or eating inappropriatly (or not at all!).
Pensions are to cover your cost of living, which is often more than inflation and the pension is only adjusted on an annual basis, by which time things have become very expensive again.
Here in France you need a car and insurance and a Mutuelle and this is really the basics.
Also, having already been very close to someone retired I can tell you the headline rate of inflation does not really reflect all the costs that inflate. Someone earning can keep up - as their salary can expand. But on a fixed income there is nowhere to go. And certain costs can start to squeeze out food, heating etc.
I’m thinking particularly of things like all things charged by government. Also any fees and charges made by local authorities. Any form of insurance. Particularly any mandatory insurance like car insurance. TV licences now taken away. More and more fees of all types being invented.
If you saw the despair at not being able to make ends meet, in elderly people who’ve largely lived frugal lives, and the miserable lives many have to lead with only the television for company or entertainment, on the UK state pension…
There has been some improvement but only for very recent years. Much older people are still on older much lower rates. The UK is still, by far, behind other countries in the developed world on a very very slow catchup path(if ever) and has a higher cost of living than most. With the slightest uptick of inflation or raft of more government fees the little gained so far could be lost.
I must have had a premonition (the above post was from 27 June) 
Yesterday, France reported 26,871 new cases and the UK reported 23,511. Bizarrely, the UK government are considering removing France from the “amber plus list” just as cases are rising. What kind of warped logic is that??!! I mean, it’s great news for anyone wanting to visit family in the UK but it makes no sense. They are making it up as they are going along. Idiots!!!
Izzy x
More a burnt sienna list than an amber plus one I would have thought. You need a colour chart to keep up with the guidances.
The application of the ‘amber-plus’ status to France was a typical UK government bungle Irene.
They said it was because of the beta variant, but in fact the incidence of this in France is extremely low - the UK looked at the figures that included the French territories in the tropics (just as they use the temperatures there to deny UK pensioners in France the winter fuel allowance, while those in the actually much warmer Spain receive it!).
Nor would I put too much weight on one day’s case figures - the previous day’s total in France was only 5,000, and it had been falling fast over the previous days too. Yesterday’s increase was probably simply a reporting delay - the 7-day average cases in France is still well below the UK’s.
Vaccinations in France are also likely to overtake the UK in the coming week, by the way.
Oh, where’s the great spreadsheet king ptf when you need him?
Whoever it was who fingered him to his employer… I hope you are really and deeply proud of yourself; you have denied this community of an extremely valuable source of data and unbiased commentary
Yes his charts were always interesting and informative. I miss him too 
I found this though. Geof is right about the 5,000 or so cases according to this but the trend seems to be upwards. France seems to be following the UK pattern so I imagine cases will fall soon.
And here’s the same site for the UK.
Izzy x