When in Rome
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Sooner or later the tachograph issue has got to be resolved, but the latest European "offer" reduces the negotiations to "flea market" level (CM iast week). How the fitting of a tachograph can be related to the 450km (280-mile) regulations is not only obscure but baffling. If the distance was arrived at originally in the interests of safety, do today's Eurocrats now consider that a tachograph will make a driver safer at greater distances? This is what their proposal suggests. If the original object of the tachograph regulation was to assist impoverished rail systems by limiting the scope of road transport, will a tachograph make the vehicles any less productive over greater distances? Of course not.
The answer appears to be so simple, yet by its very simplicity it seems to have been ignored. Why cannot it be made compulsory for only those vehicles operating to or through countries where tachographs are required by law to be fitted with the instrument? This "when in Rome" principle is no different from us expecting our European partners to operate within our weights and dimensions when in Brithin. What they do at home is their own affair.
This simple solution surely has the merit that it would go a long way to meet the opposition of trade associations and unions, It would cut many more months of stonewall confrontations in Europe and take one item from the Commission's mile-high pending file. It would also put the UK and the Republic of Ireland back on the right side of the European Law.