Sir Dan sums up
Page 45
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SIR DANIEL PETTIT was mildly pessimistic in his summing up. Little had changed, he felt, industry was at the mercy of the same pressures, the recipes for the Eighties remained largely the same, and at a time when professional transport managers prospered, the entrepreneurial operator declined.
Since the fifteenth century, the Eighties and Nineties had been years of breakthrough (for example William Wordsworth said of the years 1780-90: "Blessed was it in that dawn to be alive.") But Sir Daniel was a little nervous of our ability in the UK to respond to this kind of challenge in the coming two decades.
As regards energy he felt we were near the eye of the storm. The fossil/fuelled lorry was entrenched in our thinking like the mail coach of the nineteenth century. Aerodynamic improvements, and the better engines the FMC had heard about were, he suspected, short-term palliatives.
Who was ready for the tachograph? Anyway, microcircuitry could make it obsolete by 1985.
Unions were prejudiced and managers confused, wondering if some miracle would take us out of the EEC, but economic and cultural development in Europe was, in his opinion, the area of great potential. The Continent needed a transport infrastructure with a superb system of roads.
As regards environmental issues, operators were reluctant to face the challenge if it cost money.
And where was the imaginative breakthrough in industrial relations? David Buckle's address was stimulating but depressing: the same issues were beii contested, where we shot be trying to develop an op society.
There should be a joi venture to create a ne society in the UK, a coun. with no large numbers under-privileged like the eat workers in West GI many, the North Africans France and any number deprived ethnic groups e gaged in menial work in United States.