Indictment of the Government Endorsed
Page 25
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Coming from a Member of the Royal Commission on Transport of 1928 and President of Associated Road Operators, This Article is Particularly Authoritative
By Major H. E. Crawfurd, A.F C.
/T is written in one of the sacred books of old that there is a time to speak and a time to remain silent. Mr. Mackenzie Junner has decided that the time has arrived to speak, and in The Commercial Motor of November 22 he spoke, or rather wrote, with no uncertain voice. He is right.
We are now reaping some of the fruits of what I once called the criminal folly of those who have for the past decade directed the policy of this country in matters concerning the transport of men and goods. To enumerate those fruits would not be in the national interest. Nor is it necessary ; they lie exposed.
This country, in the time of its supreme trial, is being hampered, harassed and hindered in a hundred different directions because the most modern and efficient form of transport has been for years strangled and restricted by deliberate political and bureaucratic action.
Mr. Junner, in 'his article, set out the various ways in which this has been done. There is no need for me to repeat what he has said. But I wish to corroborate him in this respect, that ample warning of the folly of the course that has been pursued has been given again and again. The Commercial Motor has never waned in its efforts to draw public attention to the dangers involved in the repression of road transport. I can claim that year by year, in the presence of successive Ministers of Transport, the same has been done at the annual luncheons of the A.R.O., beginning with an historic speech by Mr. R. W. Sewill some six or seven years ago.
Why have these things happened? In the answer to that question there is a moral of much wider application than to the road industry.
The reason lies partly in the strength of vested interests. When the Government of the country intervenes actively by legislation in the economic life of the people it is always possible that interested parties, by getting the ear of Ministers, may prostitute the machinery of government to their own ends. This has happened, and, Cabinet Ministers have unconsciously confessed it.
How Bureaucracy Gains Its Power Again, in the one-sided condition of Parliamentary life during the past decade, when any measure presented by the Government to the House of Commons was sure to be accepted just because it was a Government measure, Ministers, secure in the knowledge that Parliamentary criticism would be powerless, have left the preparation of Bills to the Departments. And the Departments have not been slow to take advantage of their opportunity. When a bureaucracy is given, in effect, executive as well as administrative functions, it is inevitable that bureaucracy will take to itself wider powers to control the activities of the ordinary citizen.
There is no better example of this than the Road and Rail Traffic Act of 1933. It is so loosely worded that a great part of the decisions now made under it are based on case law, built up on judgments made by the various tribunals set up under that Act, made possible by the vague phraseology of the Act itself. If some of the language used in giving judgments could have been foreseen, it is inconceivable that even the subservient Parliaments of the pre-war years would have allowed the Act to pass in its present form. That this is so is proved by the fact that assurances given by the then Minister of Transport when the Bill was under discussion have been completely falsified by events. It would almost seem that the wording of the Act was left vague deliberately, so that it could be smuggled through an unsuspecting Parliament and then used to enforce a pre-determined policy of deliberate restriction.
In other directions the same baneful and growing power of the bureaucracy has had disas trous results on. national welfare. No industry has had more experience of Departmental and bureaucratic control during the past 20 years than the coal trade. With that control at its height, last winter, the severest we have known for a generation, the households of this country were starved of the coal they needed to keep them warm. Not because there was any shortage of control, but solely because inept bureaucratic interference had intervened between the producer and the • consumer. The growing shortage of milk and butter, of which we have been warned, is directly due to the same cause.
Premier's Promise to Restore Liberty In the House of Commons on November 21, Mr. Churchill, the first Prime Minister who has really represented the people for 25 years, said that "Parliament stands custodian of our surrendered liberties, and its most sacred duty will be to restore them in their fullness when victory has crowned our exertions and our perseverance.
Let us remember these words, and remember, too, that other liberties, including the liberty to serve our fellow men in our own craft to the best of our ability and in the way they deSire, have been filched from us in recent years. We have travelled a long way too far in the direction of that arbitrary control of other people's lives, which is represented, in its logical end, by the very political systems the whole of the British Empire is now banded together to fight.
Mr. Junner's accusations are all amply justified, and the last of them is not the least. It is time for the road industry, through its leaders, to make plain the loss to the country resulting from the years of restriction, the services it can render in peace as well as in war, and the conditions of free, untrammelled development under whidh alone those services can be given in full measure.
'there is no space here to detail what these conditions should be, but I can summarize them. In short, we, of the road-transport industry, desire that we shall no longer be regarded by the law as potential criminals whose activities should be watched at every tutu and restrained whenever possible.
We can, and we would, give to all our fellow citizens in the transport of themselves and their goods, a service which for comfort, ease, efficiency, safety, rapidity, convenience and economy surpasses all others. We assert our right, with due safeguards for the safety and convenience of other. users of the roads, to be allowed to give that service, not in accordance with the arbitrary decisions of some bureaucrat, but to the extent, and in the way, it is desired and welcomed by those who are prepared to pay for it.