There has been a resolution allowing cross Channel travel between the UK and France.
Resolution for rail, air and sea connections between France and the UK.
Truckers, French citizens, British nationals who live in France can travel with a recent negative test which can be a lateral flow test.
The Dutch authorities have removed their ban but require a negative PCR test - they won't accept a lateral flow test.
Trucks, Eurotunnel truck trains, and flights have begun to move.
Thank goodness some modicum of sanity has prevailed.
I love how this story on the BBCNews had interviews with truckers stuck in Dover and none of them looked or sounded English or French!
there are trucks from all over Europe that travel through Calais/Dover the shortest sea crossing from the continent to the UK, many originating in the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy ,Germany ,Spain , Poland as well as many other countries all bring in products made or grown in these countries so unlikely many will be English or French , could be a few Scottish ones moving fresh caught sea food to European countries .BTW what does a English or French Trucker look like.
Indeed, hardly any of the truck drivers are French or British. Mostly Polish, Romanian, etc, and rather desperate to deliver their load and get home for Christmas.
Here is an article from the Guardian describing the difficult conditions the stuck drivers are facing:
On the question of "French Drivers" - I am a bit of a nerd, and often, when on the motorways make a mental not of where large trucks are from - French trucks seem to make up a lesser proportion of the numbers that I expect - and there are large numbers from Poland, Roumania, Latvia, Estonia etc as well as the more obvious Dutch, German, Spanish and Italian vehicles
My comment above begins "I love"...
but the replies seem like I'm expecting Dover to account for itself - I said what I meant, that I love that the truckers are so representative of the UK's trade with Europe.
And the question of what French truckers look like is a great opportunity to revive your interest in the movie
"Le salaire de la peur" starring Yves Montand and Charles Vanel as truckers in a tense situation.
It was released in a censored version in the USA in 1954 as "The Wages of Fear",
with the parts that acknowledge the corrupt US exploitation of Latin America removed, Cold War concerns being the excuse for not following the original version directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, from novelist Georges Arnaud.
Criterion put out a restored version of Wages of Fear that puts back most of what was cut from the American version,
and it's well worth your time, not just so you can see what French truckers look like, but so that you can see what a filmmaker like Clouzot could do with a tight plot like the movie "Speed" but four decades earlier.
avi, do you think it is representative of the current lives of long distance hauliers?
Nigel, my impression is that drivers here in the USA are more worried about being replaced by autonomous systems than being blown up by their cargo. I don't know much about the situation for drivers in Europe - not even clear on whether they are unionized.
This Figaro article suggests that out of the 10,000 truck drivers who were blocked in southeast England, about 1,000 of them are French.
"Au Royaume-Uni, les routiers bloqués s'impatientent et laissent éclater leur colère" : https://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-eco/virus-les-chauffeurs-de-poids-lourds-quittant-le-royaume-uni-seront-soumis-a-test-covid-rapide-20201223
I'll try not to annoy the moderators this time, but I do think this needs to be explained in Epidemiological terms, rather than European politics. With the increasing number of variants being discovered , and the lack of knowledge about how effective the vaccines will be against existing and emerging virus subtypes, we might not have the light at the end of the tunnel that we had hoped for.
Yesterday, the British press were up in arms about travel bans to Europe because of the new variant Covid-19 now sweeping through the UK (And that, sadly, is not hyperbole). The suggestion is that Europe was trying to punish the UK over Brexit.
Now we have another new strain, from South Africa, and the UK has put a travel ban on all non UK residents returning from the country. Surprisingly, no newspaper is suggesting that Britain is punishing South Africa for anything.
Early reports about the South African strain are moderately worrying in that they are reporting very high "Viral Load" - number of particles in human secretions - as we know that high numbers of deaths among health care staff are tied to high levels of virus particles shed in ICU wards.
More changes could be in the works for travel, convenient or not, for some time to come. Hopefully there will be more “good” than “bad.”
