Lots of stories and tweets about shortages of food, and whether this is all about Brexit, covid, or a combination. In the last week I've seen one local supermarket overflowing and one with bare shelves. But the latter, a truly dreadful Tesco, often has those. So what's happening?
Sorry if you've heard this one before, but if you're running hugely complex modern supply chains, and throw in major changes to trade relations and labour market at the same time as a pandemic then some disruption is pretty likely. But generally we don't seem to have shortages.
Away from the excitable worlds of extreme remain and leave, seemingly only different in what happens after the country entirely collapses, lies the dull reality of global giants maintaining their supply chains as best they can around political change. Harder post Brexit, but...
The global trend is towards politicians thinking they can run supply chains better than the companies that have been doing that for many years. The UK is part of that, Brexit threw up obstacles, but the EU and US will have their own versions.
Brexit as a shock to the UK economic system means inevitable disruption in various ways, we've seen some, we'll see more. That will have a GDP hit as well, that's all fairly uncontroversial except to the partisan. That's what we need to discuss.
Meanwhile UK supply chains will mostly hold. At higher cost. And lower choice. And with more vulnerability when there are other shocks like pingdemic. But we really could do with governments and others understanding modern economies better. /end theguardian.com/world/2021/jul…
/ with apologies to those who wanted an easy 'blame Brexit' 'blame covid restrictions' 'blame foreigners' 'blame remainers' 'blame Russia' 'blame the government' etc narrative /
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