'Plague of Thins'
Page 50
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The director-general of the Freight Transport Association, Mr Hugh Featherstone, is reported ICM October 91 as having referred to the TML as "a huge confidence trick plagued by transport managers on themselves". The one small qualification which might properly be applied to this is: "plagued by a certain sector of transport managers upon themselves".
It is not necessary, I think, here to recapitulate all the argument that has rightly been made on the counts that the TML is ill-conceived and would be absurd in practice. Suffice to say that in all probability the major support for the TML will have come from those very quarters which have tended in the past to give professionalism in transport a poor image, although I hasten to add that some most sincere people also have given support to the proposal.
My object in having one final fling at this topic is to highlight not the anomalies, but the impropriety, of the TML.
The 1968 Act gives Licensing Authorities all necessary power to take crippling legal sanction against corporations and private firms failing to comply with its provisions. To extend this power to make possible punitive action against an individual and subordinate employee is as unnecessary as it is immoral.
Contrary to its intention, the TML would contain the paradoxical effect of extending, with statutory assistance, the area of non-accountability which is a predominant feature of present-day executive responsibility in government, in the nationalized industries and, probably to a lesser extent, in certain sectors of private industry.
I hope we have heard the last of that iniquitous absurdity, the TML.
RONALD HARLEY, Ashby-de-la-Zouch.