The United Kingdom is currently ... a mess.
But this isn't about whether or not the prime minister held an illegal
Christmas party, breaking lockdown rules, or the other scandals that Boris Johnson's facing.
I'm talking about something much, much bigger:
a set of problems so systemic that they go beyond party politics
and could affect the future of the United Kingdom.
One week supermarket shelves are empty, the next there are fights at gas stations
as the fuel runs dry.
Benefits are being cut, taxes are going up,
wages have stagnated for more than a decade,
and the COVID death toll is rising.
On top of that, there's growing momentum for Scotland,
and maybe even Northern Ireland, to leave this mess behind and break away from the UK.
So why does it feel like the UK is falling apart?
And what's caused this crisis?
In October 2021, Britain's fuel crisis was so bad
that the government sent the army out to make deliveries to gas stations.
A shortage of truck drivers had led to long lines for fuel.
At the same time, and for the same reason,
some supermarket shelves started looking very empty.
Meanwhile, farms were slaughtering their pigs
because slaughterhouses had run out of workers.
For months, employers had been warning about a labor shortage.
But why was the UK suddenly short-staffed?
To answer that, we've got to go back to 2016
and a vote that shocked the world.
The British people have spoken, and the answer is
we’re out.
On June 23rd, 2016,
the UK narrowly voted for Brexit: to withdraw from the European Union.
It was sold as a way to get “independence,” save millions of pounds
and gain full control of the UK's borders.
But what Brexit meant in practice was leaving a political
and economic union that the UK had helped build for the last 50 years.
One of the EU's biggest achievements was that every citizen
had the freedom to travel, live and work wherever they wanted.
So that meant a Brit could decide to move to sunny Spain
without needing permission from anyone.
And a Romanian could get a job in Britain just as easily.
Brexit ended that relationship and exposed
just how much the UK had relied on foreign workers for the low-paid,
essential work that had kept the country going.
Alexandra Bulat is from an organization
that speaks up on behalf of EU citizens in the UK.
If we look at driver shortages, if we look at social care,
if we look at agriculture, for instance, those are all sectors
where, quite historically, there was a high percentage of migrant workers,
especially people from from the European Union,
especially in the jobs that are lower paid.
Before the UK left the EU, around 25% of workers from 10 Eastern European EU states
worked in so-called “low-skilled” jobs,
compared to just 9% of UK-born workers.
But that's all changed, and there's been an exodus of EU workers.
Prices are going up.
The quality of living is decreasing for many, many workers.
And I think some people, at least people that I spoke to,
did realize they could have
in some other countries, in the EU or outside the EU, a better quality of life
and perhaps less of a worry about, you know, their future status
in terms of immigration.
The post-Brexit immigration rules mean that
when a Polish truck driver leaves the UK, it's much harder to replace them
with a new Polish truck driver.
Brexit campaigners hoped that British workers would come forward to fill the gaps,
but that hasn’t happened in large enough numbers.
And COVID added to the problem,
delaying 40,000 truck driving tests, according to the government.
For the EU workers that the UK depended on, Brexit might have been the final straw.
Because even before Brexit, UK governments had played to right-wing xenophobia
for more than a decade.
In 2007, Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown promised “British jobs for British workers.”
Five years later, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government
launched a policy called the “hostile environment,”
which was a tactic to encourage immigrants to leave by making life difficult for them.
And the anti-foreigner message was one of the key tactics of Brexit campaigners,
sometimes dog whistle-y, sometimes openly racist.
European embassies in London registered 60 suspected hate crimes
in the three months after the Brexit vote, almost all targeting Eastern Europeans.
So look, the hostile environment policy, Brexit and hate crimes,
all of these things helped push key workers out of Britain
and push Britain into a crisis.
In terms of the psychological impact that Brexit
did make quite a few, you know, quite a lot I would say,
EU migrants not feel as welcome as they felt before.
Yes, I think there is a concern about hate crimes,
but also broader racism and xenophobia in society.
And Alexandra says it's only now that there are shortages
that the UK is starting to realize the value of the workers it’s lost.
Migrants are not just commodities and taxpayers,
they're part of our communities, they’re families and neighbors,
and we need to rethink this whole discourse around what kind of work we value.
While migrants suffered from xenophobic narratives and the government's hostile policies,
they weren't the only group to be outcast.
There was a sustained political and media attack on people living in poverty,
a group that makes up about 20% of the UK population.
The most vulnerable were labeled “benefit scroungers.”
In other words, people who live off government handouts and don’t want to work.
The reality, though, is a little different.
Of those eligible for an unemployment check,
less than a third of them claim it.
But the benefit scroungers narrative set the stage for a cut in state benefits.
One in seven children are going hungry.
One in 10 adults are going hungry as well.
Now, the social security payments for those on low incomes is called
Universal Credit, and this government is now cutting Universal Credit
by £1,000 [$1,350 per year].
For this government to now cut those payments further to lead to more hungry children
is absolutely disgraceful.
In 2021, UK energy prices rose by 12%.
For 3 million people, many of whom depend on state benefits,
that may mean having to choose between heating their homes or buying food.
There definitely is a cost-of-living crisis in the UK.
So look, we're seeing bills are rising. We're expecting inflation to hit 5% by next spring.
A typical family of four
could expect their bills to rise by about £1,700 [$2,300].
Those on low incomes in particular, they're facing what is going to be a cold,
dark and hungry winter ahead.
But don't think that this is all because of Brexit.
This crisis has been building for more than a decade.
When the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government
took power from the Labour Party in 2010,
it said “austerity” was the only way to recover
from the 2008 financial crisis.
Even before the pandemic, austerity left the UK economy
$130 billion smaller than it would have been without it.
And average wages have stayed pretty much flat since 2008.
But COVID set household incomes back even further.
It's thought they won't get back to pre-pandemic levels
until at least 2023.
It's difficult to quantify the exact impact
that Brexit is having. It's making things far more expensive.
It's making it more difficult to trade across borders.
Shipping costs are 25% more to this country.
That gives you a good idea of how much more expensive Brexit is
making things in this country.
It's about quarter more than we would expect if we were still inside the European Union.
And while benefits are being cut and prices are rising,
taxes on working people are going up.
If this government wanted to raise the money,
it could have done so from the wealthiest people.
It instead chose to raise taxes on working people.
Increasingly what we’re seeing in this country is how well you do
isn’t really about how hard you work, but it's how much you own,
or, if you're young, it’s how rich your parents are.
But Brexit could have a more permanent impact on the UK,
one that would be irreversible:
A majority in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to stay in the EU,
but they were forced to leave because England and Wales, which have the majority
of the UK's population, voted to leave.
It didn't really matter, at the end of the day,
what people in Scotland voted for. It sort of undermines Scotland's
status as a nation within the United Kingdom.
Add to that the shortages in stores and the cost of living going up.
And is it any wonder that some in Scotland and Northern Ireland are talking
about leaving the United Kingdom and trying to rejoin the EU?
On paper, that would seem to save the UK a lot of money.
Northern Ireland and Scotland are two of the nine UK regions that ran a fiscal deficit in 2019.
But if Scotland and Northern Ireland break away,
it would mean losing more than 10% of the UK's population
and half of the four constituent nations of the United Kingdom.
The Scottish National Party,
which was founded to fight for independence from the UK,
lost an independence referendum in 2014,
but now it’s pushing for a new one.
Of the 650 seats in the House of Commons,
59 of them represent Scottish constituencies.
And the SNP holds more than 75%
of those Scottish seats.
And that's not just because of the independence movement,
but also because of its social democratic policies.
The SNP's growth has been at the expense of both the Conservative and Labour parties
in Scotland, parties which both fought loudly against independence in 2014.
And if Scotland leaves, where does that leave Northern Ireland,
another part of the UK where there's open talk of breaking away?
Until a century ago, the whole of Ireland was part of the UK.
An independence movement changed that, and on Dec. 6, 1921,
the Irish Free State was declared.
But the six counties of Northern Ireland remained part of the UK.
What followed were decades of fighting in Northern Ireland
between Republicans who wanted to reunify Ireland
and Unionists who wanted to remain part of the UK.
It wasn't until 1998 that a peace deal
finally ended most of the fighting.
During the conflict, known as the Troubles,
the border between Northern Ireland
and the Republic of Ireland was heavily fortified
with barbed wire, fences and military checkpoints.
Those physical barriers were a target for armed groups
that wanted a united Ireland.
Customs checks between Northern Ireland and the Republic continued
until 1993, when the European single market was created.
That removed most internal border checks on goods within what would
become known as the European Union.
The UK’s only land border with the EU is in Northern Ireland.
So Brexit risks rebuilding those fences that the European single market
and then the peace deal tore down,
and reigniting a conflict that has been dormant for more than 20 years.
So if the UK's handling of Brexit puts communities in Northern Ireland at risk,
could they decide they're safer as part of the Republic of Ireland?
Being part of the European Union meant that it was easy for people in Northern Ireland
to be British or to be Irish, or to be Irish in a particular
Unionist type of way.
And Brexit has made those things much more difficult to reconcile.
And COVID has also made differences
between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland very visible.
Each of the four nations in the UK handles its own health policy,
and they've sometimes taken different paths.
So yes, the prime minister is dealing with a number of political crises right now,
and he's receiving a lot of criticism from his own party and the public.
But the crisis that the UK is going through is so much bigger.
And it's one that we may be dealing with the fallout from
for many years to come.