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(Recasts headline and lead)
By Andrew Boyers
HEMEL HEMPSTEAD, England, Oct 4 (Reuters) - British military
personnel in combat fatigues arrived on Monday at a BP
refinery after the government ordered the army to help deliver
fuel to help compensate for an acute shortage of truckers, a
Reuters reporter said.
Britain's supply chains for everything from pork, petrol and
poultry to medicines and milk have been strained to breaking
point by shortages of labour in the wake of the Brexit and COVID
crises.
Panic buying of fuel amid the shortage of truckers triggered
chaotic scenes across major cities last week with queues of
drivers stacked up. Some have had fist fights over the pumps
while others hoarded fuel in old water bottles.
"As an extra precaution, we've put the extra drivers on,"
Prime Minister Boris Johnson's finance minister, Rishi Sunak,
told LBC radio.
"The situation has been improving now for I think over a
week every day ... it is getting better and as demand settles
back to more normal levels the strong expectation is things will
resolve themselves."
British ministers have repeatedly denied that the fuel
crisis has anything to do with Brexit and have cast the trucker
shortage as a global problem, though other European neighbours
have not experienced queues at gas stations.
"The HGV drivers is not a UK issue, it's a Europe wide issue
and beyond," Sunak said. "I want people to know that we are
doing everything we can to mitigate some of those challenges,
where we can make a difference."
Amid the gas station crisis, farmers have repeatedly warned
that a shortage of butchers and abattoir workers could force a
cull of more than 100,000 pigs backed up on farms.
(Reporting by Andrew Boyers, writing Guy Faulconbridge; editing
by Michael Holden)
