(09-26-2021, 07:11 PM)RiverNotch Wrote: Ain't that what happened to stables?
Er... not exactly.
A quick dive in DuckDuckGo seems to indicate two points of failure here.
(1) UK truck drivers are mistreated in quite a few ways (at least compared to US truckers) which is only one of several reasons there's a shortage of drivers. Others relate to Brexit (no European drivers, they're penalized in various ways which are also fairly complex). And they're underpaid, and recently they seem to be organizing with suspicions that this is a work-to-rule or other slowdown plot. Quite a mess. In the US drivers were declared "critical" for COVID since they had to supply everyone else who stayed self-quarantined; in the UK the govt instead shut down all facilities including truck stops ("laybys") and driver certification the govt itself demands.
(I did some long-distance driving in the US during COVID - rest stops were kept open and, mostly, much cleaner than before... reeking of disinfectant, for one thing.)
(2) The refinery in question is being socked with a huge tax (VAT) bill which had been allowed to accumulate during COVID but must now be paid... at a time when sales are still low so they don't have current revenue to pay it and sales are crashing due to the drivers' plot. This is one of those delightful British pickles, like the one where at the end of WW1 the aircraft companies that had got the country through the war were slapped with gigantic tax bills for their trouble. That's how Sopwith became Hawker: Sopwith went bankrupt and the staff moved down the street under a new name.
It's said success has many fathers but failure is an orphan. In this case, it's failure with a massive family tree.
P.S. Mass conversion to electric cars is like fusion power - always 10-20 years in the future no matter how much money is thrown at it (in the case of electric cars, the hope-interval is as little as 5 years to some politicians). Trust me on this: we'll have autopiloted cars (and trucks) before we have either majority-electric.
