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Good to see @Marthakearney on @BBCr4today taking @pritipatel to task over the numbers of lorries in Dover - now 1,500 in Stack (M20) and Manston airfield combined - rather more than 170 that @BorisJohnson said yesterday, baffling haulage groups /1
She won't say whether lorry drivers will have to take a PCR test (long-winded, requires RNA extraction etc. 24-48hrs) rather than much faster (and less sensitive) lateral flow test. Short Strait will struggle to operates with PCR tests. You'd need one yesterday for tomorrow! /2
Because of the delays that have empty lorries already stuck in the queues, in an earlier interview British Retail Consortium @the_brc Andrew Opie said fresh food shortages would occur within days because lorries couldn't get back to Spain etc to reload /3
Haulage experts like @RHADuncanB are always at pains to explain that the lorries at Dover (and GB-IE, for that matter) are flowing in a continuous cycle. More than 85% are from EU countries. So if you block one side, or artery the whole system starts to grind to a halt/4
This episode has been a bit of a teaching moment, exposing the canard that the UK can unilaterally "take back control of its borders". It can't. Borders are membranes. Traffic flows in both directions. Actions by one side impact the other - as French move has demonstrated. /5
The UK government attempts to diminish the importance of the Short Strait (Dover Calais) is slightly baffling - I guess it maybe calms people down, stops panic buying, but reality is there is no escaping that 70+% of UK fresh produce is from EU in winter/6
So @pritipatel saying that we can use airfreight instead, doesn't really take much account of the relative volumes that come in by road across the Short Strait and by air, or the relative costs /7
When Grant Shapps @grantshapps was playing with the numbers yesterday - simply not comparing like with like in terms of containers entering the UK, one haulier I know replied with a single word "Nonsense". /8
I think the government, when it tries to mask realities like this, really does think it is being clever, when really it risks taking everyone for fools - which arguably why the #COVID19 comms have been so utterly disastrous. /9
Better to trust people with the facts, because once you start to distort them habitually - as we've seen with #Brexit - you get trapped in a fallacious narrative of your own making. That might work for a while, but ultimately it makes a soggy foundation for government. ENDS
