Thread by @misterrisk1

I was talking to a friend yesterday who is the national site manager for a very large supplier of animal feed stock. 12 sites across the country providing feed for pigs, cows and chicken. He was saying that in the last 6 months the supply chains for raw mterials have steadily..🧵

...been getting worse to the extent that they are now having meetings twice a day to decide what to produce depending on what they can actually get their hands on. The farmers can't get their stock off the farms because of driver shortages and staff shortages at the...

...slaughterhouses. So they're losing money. The feed companies like his can't pass on raw material costs because the farmers just can't absorb it. They can't always deliver whats needed anyway because of raw material shortages due to international supply chain issues. He said...

...that there is no end in sight to the chaos and no prospect of improvement. I knew things were bad, but talking to someone involved at the sharp end, i never realised things were quite as precarious. I also talked to a friend who tries to manage school place provision in a...

...large metropolitan city. Again, chaos, created by the academy system. The academies basically have freedom over the number of places they provide. But its all done independently. Its then left to councils to manage provision of places across the whole of the city, despite...

...having no control over what each school provides (there is just one council provided secondary school left out of a total of 46). The result is predictable. A complete geographic mismatch of places to pupils and a polarisation of standard of schooling between affluent and...

...poor parts of the city.

I then talked to another friend that supplies equipment to the energy industry. And a 3rd time its chaos. Our energy industry is so low on resilience that the coal fired power stations they keep on claiming to be mothballing are regularly being...

...brought back on line as we get close to outstripping national demand. Whenever this happens his company gets called on to supply replacement parts/machinery (coal belts etc) to the power stations. Coincidentally he also lives next to an old coal line that is a rail link...

...between Immingham docks and the power stations on the river Trent. Its now unused but still maintained to accomodate these bursts of activity when we need to import coal. At which point trains run through the night.

3 random conversations with 3 totally unconnected people...

...working in 3 random industries. The one thing in common. Nothing works as it should and isn't doing so because in all 3 areas, government policy has been driven by political ideology. Either privatisation or Brexit. And we all lose. #takebackBritain

Ends.