Labour respect the will of Brexit voters - but not the Scottish people

Nobody in the SNP– and very few in Scotland – has high expectations of Boris Johnson and his cronies but even I have been shocked by the repeated and astonishingly high levels of incompetence we have witnessed of late.

The HGV driver shortage may not be exclusively down to Brexit but the fact that no EU country is struggling to fill its shelves or get fuel to the forecourts tells you all you really need to know.

I’ve never driven a lorry, but I imagine it is a difficult and lonely job. With poor levels of pay when weighted against the amount of time spent away from home, it is unsurprising that there aren’t scores of young people lining up to train in this field.

Haulage companies in my own constituency tell me that for quite some time they have had an ageing workforce and that the industry was heavily reliant on EU drivers. It wasn’t just me they told this to, they told the Tory government, repeatedly, for years.

Boris Johnson had plenty of warning about this and a leader of even moderate competence would have prepared some sort of contingency. But this Vote Leave government would rather see empty shelves and key workers unable to fill their cars than admit that maybe, just maybe, foreign workers aren’t all bad. Now in the midst of the crisis with a shortage of 100,000 drivers, Priti Patel’s (above) answer is 5000 three-month visas plus a task force to ensure they are all gone by Christmas.

I’m sure you remember the images of drivers stuck in lorry parks last Christmas with no food or water and having to relieve themselves by the side of the road. And if we remember it, I am certain those drivers remember. Why on earth would they want to put themselves through that again to help out a country that told them they weren’t welcome in the first place?

It’s at times like this that some sort of mechanism that allows people to move freely from one area to another for employment, wherever their skills were required, would come in handy. Unfortunately, instead of the four freedoms of the EU we are going to have to lumber from crisis to crisis with bureaucratic sticking plasters at the ready.

I honestly thought that with a fuel crisis, an energy crisis and a labour crisis we would finally see the official opposition in Westminster become an actual opposition. If ever the scene was set it was now.

Disappointingly, but unsurprisingly, the takeaway from the Labour conference was that they wouldn’t support freedom of movement and a shadow secretary was forced to resign for supporting a rise in the minimum wage.

I won’t even get into some of the other utterly bizarre aspects of leader Keir Starmer’s (above) speech that ranged from saying the Scottish and Welsh wouldn’t hoard their blood thus don’t want independence, to talking about alternative words for tool. I’m sure the readers of this newspaper could help him out there.

Labour are still so crippled by the mere mention of the word Brexit that for quite some time now the SNP have been the official opposition in all but name. I’ve even had Labour MPs saying this to me.

On the one hand, I can understand their reluctance to blame the UK’s current woes on something that many of the voters they wish to win back are so wedded to. But on the other hand, I can’t forgive such a dereliction of duty in the face of one of the worst governments I have seen in my lifetime.

They may claim to be respecting the wishes of those people who voted for Brexit, fair enough, but if that’s the case then why not extend that courtesy to the people of Scotland who returned a resounding majority of MSPs in favour of a second independence referendum?

Both the Tories and Labour have immigration policies that will strangle industries in Scotland and their Brexit stance cuts us off from our biggest trading partners.

There is no doubt that investment in our own workforce is needed but many of the workers we lost because of the hostile environment were employed in roles that it takes years to train for. Or they were in industries that our ageing population just can’t backfill.

There is no quick fix if we are to remain in splendid isolation in the world.

It is HGV drivers making the news today but we are already seeing shortages in health and social care workers, hospitality, agriculture and many more. The only way we can set immigration policy that works for Scotland is to do so as an outward-looking, internationalist and independent nation.

We must not let the opportunity to convince those who don’t yet support independence, pass us by. Let’s be talking to friends, family, neighbours, workmates about why we’re in this situation so that when the referendum comes, we have a country ready to vote Yes and get us out of this mess once and for all.