Agencies
HEMEL HEMPSTEAD, England, Oct. 4 — British military combat fatigues personnel walked in at a BP refinery Monday after government ordered army to help deliver fuel to help compensate for an acute shortage of truckers.
Britain’s supply chains for everything from pork, petrol and poultry to medicines and milk have been strained to breaking point by shortages of labour in the wake of the Brexit and COVID crises.
Panic buying of fuel amid the shortage of truckers triggered chaotic scenes across major cities last week with queues of drivers stacked up. Some have had fist fights over the pumps while others hoarded fuel in old water bottles.
“As an extra precaution, we’ve put the extra drivers on,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s finance minister, Rishi Sunak, told LBC radio.
“The situation has been improving now for I think over a week every day … it is getting better and as demand settles back to more normal levels the strong expectation is things will resolve themselves.”
British ministers have repeatedly denied that the fuel crisis has anything to do with Brexit and have cast the trucker shortage as a global problem, though other European neighbours have not experienced queues at gas stations.
“The HGV drivers is not a UK issue, it’s a Europe wide issue and beyond,” Sunak said. “I want people to know that we are doing everything we can to mitigate some of those challenges, where we can make a difference.”
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