Seeing UK fuel shortages being blamed on a shortage of truck drivers - itself being blamed on their crap lives - woke me up last night remembering a situation I saw in the mid-late 90s.
I used to do occasional work for a UK magazine-publishing company. They were big and well-known. One of their magazines was for independent truck drivers. Unglamorous but with a well-read news section. Nice mag to work on from a printing and compositing perspective.
Background:
In the old world of print magazines, pages containing longer features and supplements, etc, are printed first and early. Pages containing news are printed at the last possible moment so they will be as up to date as possible. They are then bound to the previously printed sections (usually) still waiting at the printers and shipped out.
This has implications. The print slot for each section – and therefore each page – is planned and scheduled well ahead of actual printing. Color printers are expensive to run and so printers are ‘time-shared’. Publishers contract for their printing slots and stick to agreed times and terms. Penalty clauses incentivise observance (usually).
A problem that used to arise – albeit rarely – was that something would happen that would lead to ¾ of the magazine being printed and ready for binding with the final ¼. But something would delay or change the status of one part of the remaining ¼. When this happens, page numbering, run-ons, and various binding resources laid on for the print run can be thrown out of kilter. Everyone wants to stay friendly and profitable so everyone works together when that happens.
The Anecdote:
In this case, the news section had employed a freelancer to do an investigative piece on why so many British truck drivers on the fruit & veg run from Spain were being caught at Dover Docks (mainly) with one or two kilos of cannabis stashed amid the melons. Usually caught because Customs & Excise at Dover HMRC had been tipped off.
There was little gain for the risk, as the two to three year prison sentences confirmed. IIRC there were nine middle-aged family guys in prison with about 16 somewhere in the prosecution pipeline. A charity working for them had given the journo evidence that at the time they were caught, the drivers were mainly contracted to one of two northern British import companies. The two companies shared some company directors.
The logic of the situation suggested the loads were bait, designed to bog down Dover HMRC with the tasks of stripping down the trucks looking for more haul, doing driver interviews, photography and paperwork (which – bear in mind – has to be prosecution quality) and thinning the inspection resources available for the remaining trucks coming off the ferry. Allowing a huge load to come through behind...
This notion also has implications: which are that someone, somewhere within the port facilities - possibly on the French side of the English Channel - was managing the embarkation order – and therefore the disembarkation order – to ensure the bait truck was in front of the real load.
The presence of the same names among the directors of the importing companies did not seem to have been investigated at prosecution time. This too has implications.
Libel is one England’s few ‘Guilty until proven innocent’ offences. You can’t hold a mini-trial in the pages of a magazine. So the problems we were all grappling with were the legals: legals for what to print in the magazine and legals between printer and publisher about the delays. Key discussion at the meeting I attended was with the news team whose options were to produce a publishable story that didn’t end in libel court. Or find something else to fill the looming empty page. And by when…?
Discussing it over lunch, the journo told us he had asked HMRC about the evidence and had been given an interview with the head of HMRC Customs & Excise South-East district. This was unusual. Usually the press office just issues a statement and washes their silken public sector hands of it. Even more unusual – said the journo – was that it was just him and the big guy. No PR people present to manage any difficulties during the meeting.
The journo told us he presented his folder of evidence to the HMRC big guy, let him look through it, and eventually asked if HMRC had looked at the importing companies and their directors. He said the big guy then slipped his hand under the cover of the folder and closed it, saying:
“The case is closed.”
The journo reminded him nine guys were in prison.
“The case is closed,” HMRC big guy said.
With that the meeting was over.
The journo told us that as he went home he thought:
1. The HMRC big guy had known all along.
2. The reason journo got the odd meeting was the HMRC big guy wanted to see how the available evidence looked when processed by a member of the public.
Journo was cursing himself he hadn’t challenged the HMRC big guy about this and was asking for time to challenge HMRC for not sniffing out the importers. The news team also wanted to add a “Tips and advice” box reminding contract truckers to pull the Companies House records of their employers before contracting a load. Legals said: “No way, not safe”. They ran the story with HMRC’s “The case is closed” as the final quote in the hope it would let their trucker-readers know that things were awry in a big way.
I remember this because by fluke, I used to be neighbours with a guy who trained a lot of Customs & Excise in HMRC’s South-East district. As it happened I had lost touch with him at the time but I thought if we meet up some time I will gently ask what he made of the situation. Years later he contacted me out of the blue and I was working my way around to asking for his thoughts about it when he went silent. The next I heard was that he was dead. He had an incredibly rare blood group that meant they couldn’t treat him when he caught some bacterial infection that is harmless to the rest of us.
So, I lost my chance to ask him what he thought. He was a good guy who I’m sure trained a lot of good guys so I’ll name him – Pete Clarke. I would love to have asked him what he and his trainees thought about those events.
This event made a lot more sense ten years later when headlines like this began to appear:
UN horrified by surge in opium trade in Helmand
Afghanistan's Helmand province being under British control, the 48% reported increase in opium production was a surprise. However, it fits with a pattern of increased cultivation/production following the imposition of Western values on Afghanistan:
Source
That magazine had another smuggling story about drivers finding beef products hidden in loads heading to Gibralter for a very, very well-known British retailer. This during the Mad Cow British beef ban, when carrying British beef in Europe could get you fines, and I think, loss of truck. Lots of forbearance by the printers while Legal sorted that one out!
Anyway, that's my contribution to the list of reasons you wouldn't want to be a truck driver in the UK.