I Googled that a bit and couldn't find any news about the shortages in EU, except for the claim by Shapps.

There were some articles about structural shortages, like the situation is not ideal and in 5 years it would get worse kind of articles.

Any links demonstrating that market shelves are empty and fuel cannot be delivered to the gas stations across EU?

Market shelves empty no, but that's due to panic buying caused by media reports more than actual shortages. As for HGV driver shortages in Europe, here's one discussion from an industry insider:

https://trans.info/en/there-s-a-europe-wide-hgv-driver-short...

The idea it's to do with Brexit is a red herring. There's a certain section of society that tries to blame absolutely everything on Brexit in a kneejerk fashion, regardless of reality. Border rules changed on Jan 1st and problems are hitting now because they're actually mostly driven by lockdown and the damage it did to supply chains. One of those components that lockdowns disrupted was approval of new HGV drivers. There's a backlog of 40,000 HGV driving tests the government just stopped doing during lockdowns. Well, lots of drivers are retiring, so if you throttle the supply at the same time as destroying the goods economy you're going to get a big shortfall. That's inevitable.

Are you sure it’s panic buying? I have been seeing it for weeks now. The gasoline shortage might be panic buying but the other ones have been happening for way too long to be due to sudden increase on demand.

Why Europeans don’t panic? Are they too chill?

Look at charts of road haulage. The drop and rebound due to lockdowns was far larger and more sudden than the 2008 financial crash. There are disruptions and shortages in the USA too. There's definitely been a huge surge in demand (back to normal levels).

As for the rest of Europe, I don't know but I suspect they didn't shut down HGV driver approvals in the same way or didn't do so everywhere. The British government got led into very hard and long lockdowns compared to many countries and did a lot of stupid things. NHS has massive unfixable backlogs too, same cause. You can't shut down "non essential" business for long periods and not have big problems as a consequence.

Edit: why panic fuel buying. Political game playing by lorry bosses, apparently:

"The Road Haulage Association (RHA), which attended a Zoom call hosted by the Cabinet Office to discuss driver shortages, has been accused of prompting the weekend’s panic-buying in order to further its own political agenda.

The RHA has been campaigning for months for cheap foreign labour to be allowed back into the country to make up a shortfall of lorry drivers which it has “massively exaggerated”, sources say.

One senior Government source said that the RHA “owes an apology to the British people” for the weekend chaos."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/09/26/haulage-body...

i.e. the idea Brexit is to blame is sort of half inverted truth: lots of powerful people stand to lose out from increasing wages for the working class and aren't above manipulating the public to try and stop that happening. And it works. Bojo just approved 5000 visas.

See, the benefit of being in a large market is that you have large buffer when something goes bad in one part of it.

That’s definitely a Brexit issue, because of UK being out of the single market the shock in the UK cannot be absorbed by the other countries in the EU.

If Spain did the same mistakes, there would not be shortages in Spain when everything is fine in France. Without any central governmental intervention, the sudden demand would be absorbed naturally through the rest of the EU.

That’s why UK has issues everywhere but not only in, let’s say Leeds. Because UK cities are in the same market, they absorbed sudden demand as a whole up until the whole market dried up.

I agree that shortages are caused by government intervention. In this case both limiting new driver approvals, and also limiting imports of cheap labour. Although I am a supporter of Brexit, it is indeed nonetheless a form of market manipulation like any tariffs or border controls are.

Nonetheless, there is hardly a matter of principle here. The EU imposes very strict tariffs, border controls and various forms of market manipulation within its territory. There is a difference of scale, but not a huge one. The proximate issue here is that the social class of people who stand to lose out from Brexit saw an opportunity to both (a) stiff the workers leading to (b) more money whilst (c) scoring an ideological goal over their opponents, hence telling the press there were going to be imminent huge fuel shortages despite no actual change in the trucking situation ... thus neatly creating the problem they were warning about.

Yes, that's what happens when you are out of the club but still want to use the facilities. It's called not being member of the EU. Welcome to club of not-in-EU. Want to sell stuff to EU? You need to prove that's it's up to the standards since you no longer commit to be aligned to EU standards and that's why you need the paperwork. This is valid not just for selling stuff but for anything that UK diverges from EU.

I guess for the foreseeable future UK will continue to blame all of its problems on EU, like 40 years old dude claiming that it's his parents fault since they didn't let him take dance classes. It's all his parents fault that he tries to meet the ends when living in a rundown neighbourhood instead of being world famous and rich dancer. Damn parents, it's totally not because of partying instead of studying.

What "facilities" and what "club"? The EU is not a club and does not have "facilities" - we're talking about people and governments here.

You seem to be replying to arguments I didn't make. I haven't mentioned selling stuff to the EU anywhere nor does this topic have anything to do with that.

Brexit is excellent because the EU is a terrible political/constitutional project, but that has nothing to do with petrol stations or truckers. Indeed Brexit supporters aren't blaming the EU for this because it'd be a non-sequitur, it's the other way around: people loyal to EU ideology are blaming Brexit for it, without evidence actually and in ways that appear to be quite manipulative (e.g. deliberately lying to provoke a run on petrol then blaming that on Brexit).

BTW the attitude you display here is exactly one of the reasons leaving the EU was so important. I've never once encountered an EU fan who displays a friendly and cooperative attitude, or an understanding of why people voted to leave. It's always immense bitterness, stupid analogies and insults.

The club thing is a metaphor, not even an analogy. Essentially it means, there are different rules for doing things in the EU for people and companies that are from it or from the outside and UK is now from outside and as a result will need to deal with the stuff for outsiders. Why there are different rules? Because within the EU we have agreed on how things should work, with the outsiders we don't have such an agreement therefore they can do whatever they like as long as the stuff that comes to EU or affects EU citizens directly needs to happen according to the standards we decided to.

As a result, this will bring you the opportunity to do your own thing like all the outsiders out there, like produce and eat chlorinated chicken, put asbestos in kids toys if that's your thing but you will be required to prove that you are sending the un-chlorinated ones to EU. That's why you have checks and paperworks at the border, it's not to piss you off. Anything that's happening currently is the logical outcome of Brexit, it's not a conspiracy to make life hard for the British. We love UK and the British culture, that's why we are so sour about this "We are better than the EU" thingy. Seriously, besides some jokes and snarky comments, no one wishes bad things to the British people.

Anyway, so since you left, when do you expect to meet the friendly, cooperative people who don't insult you for expecting unreasonable things?

Again you seem to be responding to arguments nobody is making, or at least not in this thread.

Where has anyone said "Britain is better than the EU"? Nowhere, that I can see.

When did anyone express incomprehension at the existence of border controls? Not here.

Has anyone said they want to put asbestos in children's toys? No, that's some sort of straw man.

It does provide an interesting A/B opportunity. You have all these countries in one economic union, and one that was in it for a long time, and now there's an opportunity to compare the depth of crises.

We're also having trouble finding drivers here in the US, but we're also ground zero for the app delivery gig thing and that's probably giving the worse-paid truck drivers options. I know there's been an explosion of app delivery services across Europe. Could that be a contributing factor?

There are driver shortages in Australia too, where people over 70 who've retired have to come back to work.

I don't really care for Brexit but its interesting how there have also been shortages of items at supermarkets in places that the same logic can't be applied. None for fuel though. But it's not always as clean cut.

I am living in Germany and have not heard about any driver shortage here, but have read about the shortage in the UK.

>very large and even larger shortages in other EU countries like Poland

This is news to people in Poland, unless he was talking about March 2020.

Of course there are shortages in jobs with bad working conditions and low pay in other EU countries too - but, due to the continued access to workers from poor EU countries who are willing to do these jobs, these shortages are not nearly as bad as in the UK. So of course it's Brexit related!

Working conditions are way better for drivers in the EU. They have rest stops with restrooms, for instance, so they don’t have to do their business on the roadside. The UK government is just showing how out of touch and incompetent it is if it thinks there will be any takers.

A bigger problem is the horrendous backlog in licence applications at DVLA that means new drivers cannot start working.

Finally, the IR35 tax treatment of many drivers means they would actually lose money by driving.