‘We Tried To Tell You' For The Rest Of Europe, Undoubted Culprit Is Brexit

Government ministers may insist it is wrong to blame Brexit for Britain’s fuel, food, and labor shortages, but for the rest of Europe – and beyond – there is only one reason why the UK’s crisis is so much worse than anywhere else’s.

- Jon Henley

“One is tempted to tell the British: ‘You have only yourselves to blame,’” said Gabi Kostorz on ARD’s Tagesthemen, a leading German news show. “We tried to talk you out of it, but you decided otherwise. Now you have to face the consequences.”

Der Spiegel agreed, saying the UK had left the EU “to ‘regain control’” but now, when the promised post-pandemic economic upswing should be beginning, seemed to be experiencing “the exact opposite: an unprecedented loss of control”.

Perhaps the sharpest outside view of Britain’s woes came, however, in a New Yorker cartoon. “The shortages are all British made and British owned,” Boris Johnson is shown as saying. “And that’s something we can be incredibly proud of.”

Britain was suffering more than most from global supply chain problems mainly because EU workers had left and strict Brexit immigration rules meant no more could now come in, Der Spiegel said, creating labor shortages “everywhere where the work is hard, dirty and poorly paid”.

Economically isolated, the country faces d “an autumn of discontent for which Brexit is not the only reason, but a key one”, it said. “The government, however, insists none of this has anything to do with leaving the EU, sticking defiantly to its Brexit success story – even if its statements are getting more and more bizarre.”

ARD’s Kostorz concurred. Oddly, she said, for the British government Brexit “is just not among the possible causes. It’s ‘don’t mention the B word’.” For ministers, “responsibility lies anywhere but with themselves”.