Some time into our fourth hour in a stationary car, the kids and I passed a happy five minutes zooming in on the traffic jams on the BBC website to see if we could see ourselves. We didn’t, but we saw the two vans taking humanitarian aid to Ukraine, which by this time were sitting alongside us staring at the dock. We watched an interview with the drivers from a while earlier – lovely guys. I wanted to wave at them, but the kids explained in quite a detailed way why that would be the worst thing ever to happen. Welcome to Dover, on the first weekend of the Easter holidays.
We’d been hit by the travellers’ curse: may you encounter conditions so extreme that you find yourself on the news.
When P&O Ferries summarily dismissed 800 workers, with a remote, recorded message, two weeks ago, the story stood for a while on a knife-edge: would it be a blip of outrage, turning swiftly to resignation and half-arsed, pointless sympathy? Or would it build into something more symphonic, a steady, harmonious crescendo, legion voices saying no, actually, capitalism has to do a bit better than: “You can be sacked at any time and replaced by people paid at a rate it would be impossible to live on”?
Businesses have had a pass for two years, when no decision could ever be their fault because of Covid. Before that, they had a pass for three years when they couldn’t even make any decisions because of Brexit. For the five years prior, businesses could do no wrong because they were “wealth creators”. Everyone else – the public sector, the worker, the non-worker, the average Joe – had to bow down to their mightiness. All we knew was how to spend money, and only they knew how to create it. There was something a bit pagan and mystical about this period, looking back on it. And before that, of course, there was the financial crash, when nothing could ever be a business’s fault, because the real villains were in finance.
P&O Ferries felt like a turning point, the moment when the baseline assumption shifted, from “They’re just doing their best, and where would we be without them?”, to “Hang on a second.” It sounds like a subtle shift, but it’s more like the trickle at the start of a dam breaking. We have a poster of an elegant 30s couple on a P&O cruise, and a friend defaced it with a Sharpie – I would have gone with “EAT THE RICH”, but she took the old-fashioned route of a cock and balls. Fair enough – it did the job. P&O Cruises, Mr Z pointed out, is actually a completely different operation, and should sue the ferries for the damage to its reputation. That’s when I knew we were in new territory. Nobody’s defaced my posters since the 90s; also, how does Mr Z know things like that?
The queues at Dover were the result of a perfect perfect storm, which is what happens when a number of factors that all make each other worse collide, but one of those factors is literally a storm. P&O Ferries are still not running; frictionless trade has still not materialised, post-Brexit, and you often have to go and chat to an HGV driver to figure out whether he’s stationary in traffic, stationary because he’s parked or stationary because he’s lost the will to live; poor weather conditions had affected a DFDS sailing, so everybody was running two hours late anyway. There was something weirdly relaxing about the chaos, every vehicle utterly still, all drivers alike in our knowledge that, whether the ferry went with or without us, or ever went, or indeed ever arrived, it could never be our fault. It was the kind of calm that only lasts until you run out of jaffa cakes. Then we all started honking (well, not me – I was in a hire car and I didn’t know where the horn was), but not in anger: it was more like a car-howl.
We had found ourselves on the news, all right, but only for a day; the fallout from P&O Ferries will be making news for a really long time.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
