French riposte
Page 37
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• You expressed the view that the French government allowed the recent road blockades by French truck drivers (CM 30 July-5 Aug). This is an ill-informed and biased comment, typical of the ignorant British attitude concerning anywhere outside your little island.
Look at the situation closer. Firstly, it was the farmers who took to the roads with their tractors for a week to protest over government farming aid cuts. At the end of that protest, the truck drivers, against the advice of the unions and defying police orders to unblock the roads, launched a nationwide protest against the new penalty-point system.
Neither the French government nor the authorities "allowed" it to happen: it happened by a force of solidarity among the truck drivers of France.
I do not defend their actions. As an LGV instructor with the largest transport training company in France, I too was stopped from doing my job for two weeks.
The idea of a penalty-points system is a good one, considering the safety factor. However, although the French truck drivers were perhaps wrong in their actions, doesn't it show you — the British transport industry, the hauliers and owner-drivers who time and time again get your faces rubbed in the dirt by your government — that with co-operation among yourselves, action gets you noticed and often achieves a result?
Okay, the French didn't get a result this time, but at least the truckers stuck together to register their protest and show their solidarity.
So maybe it's time to take a lesson from the French — or the Irish who recently rallied together to get paid; or the Spanish who took similar action.
As for the companies which continued to send trucks over to France when it was clear nothing was getting through the blockade, and which are now crying for compensation, maybe the lesson learnt from their greediness and foolishness in expecting to be let through is a good one.
Before you claim that the British wouldn't hold others to ransom and that your government wouldn't allow it to happen, don't forget the damaging dockers strike of 1984.
Allez Britain, reveiller vans! J Campion France,