SIMON SAYS

Old Git Moaning

by Simon Hastelow

This month's moan from this 'old git' was originally going to be about me hating fully loaded off road trucks that never go anywhere, with a particular focus on roof tents which are mounted a truck all year round.

Then we had the fuel-supply fiasco, so I decided to link the two together.

There’s a very neatly tricked-out Discovery II that I see regularly in my town, usually during the morning or evening commute, sitting in the same urban traffic as me, miles away from the nearest off-road routes, and a whole world away from the toughterrain wilderness this particular truck is built for.

As much as I love looking at modified trucks - and appreciate the work and preparation that goes into them - there’s something a bit daft about lugging around a roof tent, heavy duty roof rack, externally mounted sand-ladders, rear door mounted 5-litre jerrycan, hi-lift jack, a couple of Zarges aluminium storage boxes and a Brai bbq rack. Particularly when this particular D2 sits on 33” Cooper tyres and has lifted suspension.

It seems all the more ridiculous when you consider that it is used as a daily driver.

Now, I know I can’t complain, each to their own. We are all free to do what we want with the vehicles we own, but, just looking at the economics of it all, this guy must be increasing his travel costs exponentially, for little reason. He might as well drive an old army tank!

This particular D2 is on its own, there are a few others nearby too. Where I live in Essex there are a higher than average number of imported US pickups with their 5, 6 or even 7 litre engines burbling along the A-roads. None of them are decorated to blend in, Dayglo Orange seemingly the favourite paint colour of choice, possibly to match their girlfriend’s fake tan.

How does this link in to the fuel supply crisis?

This surely gave us all a massive reality check that we are over-dependent on refined oil for transport. There was and is no shortage of fuel. There was no looming disaster that was threatening to shut off the pumps, all that happened is that one company, BP, announced it was closing some forecourts due to a shortage of HGV delivery drivers.

I’ll get into the specifics of all this shortly, but my immediate thought was that the guy with the tricked up D2 might struggle to get to work for more than a week, even if his tank, and the additional 5-litre jerrycan were full at the start of it.

How often would he normally fill up?

Weekly, twice-weekly? It has got to cross his mind that he would burn less derv if he wasn’t lugging around half a ton of extra dead weight on 33” MTs, and if he had access to a more frugal vehicle, why wasn’t he using it already?

For me, I can’t imagine the thrill of sitting in a Discovery in nose-to-tail traffic on a daily basis would ever overcome the thought of covering the cost to power it. A few years ago I bought a Fiat Panda as a runabout after I worked out that the car was essentially free to use, after calculating how much it would save instead of me driving my Discovery or Defender - £99 per month, no deposit and 50mpg was too much of a bargain to turn down! I was spending roughly £300 per month on diesel at the time, and the Panda saved me way more than it cost to buy.

But back to the fuel ‘crisis’...

The cynic in me would suggest that the Haulage Industry is feeling the pinch after a small army of foreign drivers quit the UK post-Brexit. The industry has been campaigning for HGV drivers to be given exemption or special visas to fill the estimated 100,000 driver vacancies in the UK.

I’m not going to spout off about ‘another Brexit foul up’ simply because there are currently 600,000 registered HGV drivers in the UK, but only half of them are working in haulage. So there are plenty of drivers available, they’re just not interested.

Importing European drivers allowed the haulage industry to keep the wages of HGV drivers artificially low, and now that they are not available, rather than improve the pay and conditions for drivers they bleat on about needing cheap foreign labour.

So it is possibly not too far fetched to imagine that this was all part of the plan when BP contacted the BBC to tell them they were closing 50 forecourts.due to driver shortages. This fed into the BBC’s eager and blinkered desire to create another ‘Brexit Doom’ story, and they just ran with it.

Forecourts have closed before, and it is not an unfamiliar site to see a garage coned off or the pumps covered. The 50 sites that BP closed represents half of one percent of the total. The remaining 8,400 forecourts were unaffected.

So why the panic?

The media stoked the panic buying scenario, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, all designed to force the government to address the HGV shortage.

I’m not usually a conspiracy theorist but this one just sounds a bit off to me. (Tin-foil hats optional!)