The only bit that might be dominated by Eastern Europeans is the super long haul trips from Europe that Brexit is significantly reducing...
I do agree that claims about how Britons couldn't get careers in lorry driving due to massive influxes of foreigners probably helped influence the result, but such claims would have been as fundamentally dishonest as the claims about leaving funding the NHS.
Long term this kind of thing will lead to new jobs and decent wages that force technological innovation because businesses and the politicians they employ can't push costs down by importing cheap labour. Or, as the Guardian would probably predict, Britain will run out of food and people will starve.
Which do you think is more likely?
It would make me happy to be wrong but I envision even more inequality as a result of brexit. I just don't see it playing out in any way that would result in an objectively better quality of life for working people. Ironic how I, a highly paid immigrant, am concerned for their future.
It's certainly possible but since inequality has risen since 1979[1], which correlates rather well with the UK's membership of the EU it might be hard to convince Brexit voters that they've made a mistake on that, especially at this early stage. I'm sure someone will be tempted to pipe up with "evil Tories!" or "Thatcher" but they'll have to contend with all the quotes from staunch Labour politicians against the EU (in whatever guise it was in at the time), let alone explaining how joining the project coincided with the slow down of the post war narrowing of inequality and did nothing to stop it increasing later.
> I just don't see it playing out in any way that would result in an objectively better quality of life for working people
Don't forget the sovereignty bit, one of the reasons the remain argument failed to resonate with so many was because it focused purely on economics (partly because of the weakness of that for remainers, partly because it reflects interests). Given what you say, that inequality continues to rise just as it was previously then to regain sovereignty will be a big win.
[1] https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed
Maybe the English need to develop a taste for whelks.
In the last couple of weeks? While the entire world is closed due to Corona?
Same as high paying manufacturing jobs in Detroit.
* There is demand for the trip to happen.
* The truck exists
* The driver exists
* It is legal for the trip to happen
* So why isn't there a market clearing wage at which the trip happens?
Hence this will produce high inflation on imported goods, especially on basic necessities.
Hence this will make the average British poor citizen.. poorer.
You see this in agriculture too, where owners will sometimes let crops rot in the fields rather than risk setting a precedent for higher wages for pickers.
Preparation for (unspecified) 'treaty' or 'no-treaty' or what?
Can you imagine how much of a pain it would be for a truck driver to keep up 10+ licenses and for the logistics people to plan things when only some drivers can go to only some countries?
Also, if the required knowledge is the same, why is getting UK license so much more of a hassle than in other countries?
The high paying jobs won’t come back without class struggle. Just because the periphery of the EU was pillaged to such an extreme doesn’t mean the working class in the centre wasn’t exploited too.
Which is probably, in part, why Brexit happened. Think about it - this is a career that used to provide fairly well-paid jobs to British people, but EU rules around access to our trucking market meant that wages were driven down so much that the only people who can do that work are Eastern Europeans based in countries with much lower cost of living. And the response of the British elite, including our press, was to insist that this didn't happen, that working class people were just brainwashed into blaming the EU because they were too stupid to realise it was their own damn fault they didn't have jobs. There's comments along those lines in almost every HN discussion of Brexit, including the other one that's on the front page right now.