Labour Still Flat Out For Renationalization
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FROM OUR INDUSTRIAL CORRESPONDENT
ACLAIM that the whole system of licensing road transport vehicles was in urgent need of a drastic overhaul was made at the Labour Party Conference at Blackpool last week. It came from Mr. James Callaghan, M.P. for Card;ff South-East and a member of the party's national executive committee. He was replying, for the executive, to a debate on the Government's White Paper, "Reorganization of the Nationalized Transport Undertakings."
Unanimously the conference passed a resolution deploring the proposals, since they precluded the possibility of an integrated and co-ordinated transport system, which they believed to be essential to the economy of the country.
Mr. Callaghan gave ari assurance, on behalf. of the executive, that they would fight the Government's proposals because they recognized that they did not begin to meet the transport needs of the country.
He said that the basic question was: "What is to be the relationship between road and rail? " The Government had never faced this question.
He then referred to the growth of C licences. When British Road Services was being dismantled by the Churchill Government, it was said that. once the industry was denationalized, industrialists , would turn back to sending their goods by rail.
When British Road Services was finally mangled, Mr. Callaghan continued, the number of C licences was 300,000. Today there were 1250.000 C licences, and the Government still persisted that it was this public section that was driving people to carry their own goods.
"It is nothing of the sort, and we know it," Mr. Callaghan declared.
Exam:ne Whole Problem The whole problem of the licensing of road haulage vehicles had got to be drastically examined with a view to substantial reform.
But all Mr. Marples, the Minister of Transport, planned to do was to get rid of the British Transport Commission, All experience showed that every other country was turning to some co-ordinated transport while we were " atomizing " it, Whatever else entry into the Common Market would do, every other European Government had abandoned competition and was turning to integration of its transport system.
Mr. Jack Simons, president of the Association of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, referred to the growing congestion on the roads and the fear that the position would continue to deteriorate. They accepted that there was a need for greater capital expenditure on the roads, to go on concurrently with railway modernization.
In a debate on "Signposts for the Sixties," Labour's latest exposition of its policies, the party conference reaffirmed once more its intention of renationalizing road transport when Labour returns to power