Euro fiasco
Page 44
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• I want to say well done to Mr Robinson of Griffin International Transport for the letter he wrote about the way we subsidise European hauliers (CM 10-16 Sept).
He said we're treated as second-class citizens. That's putting it mildly. In a recent Sound-off someone described how when he was at school his teacher wasn't impressed by the fact that his dad drove a truck but was happy to talk about his classmate's dad who ran a lathe in a factory.
I don't know what winds me up more, seeing foreign wagons using our road free when I have to pay tolls to use theirs (on top of our crazy levels of road tax), or hearing everyone and his brother moaning on about the damage trucks cause and ignoring the fact that without us and our trucks they'd all go hungry. You can't blame foreign operators for getting the best deal they can, and if we don't charge them for using roads we pay for, then the more fool us. But doesn't it make a joke of this "United Europe" rubbish, especially considering the way the Germans were only too glad to see the pound in trouble!
Every haulier who's getting through the recession in one piece has learnt that it's a dog-eat-dog market.
Commercial Motor's editor is regularly telling us to stop rates cutting, which is easy to say if your job doesn't depend on winning the work, but if we can't stop cutting each other's throats in the UK, how can you expect the lads on the other side of the water to play fair after the single market comes in? Didn't the French truckers' blockade teach us anything? I say it's time to stop trying so hard to be nice to everyone and apologising for being a trucker.
The next time someone starts telling you how trucks ruin the environment tell them to try and get their supermarket shelves stocked by choo-choo train and canal barge. And as for our "friends" in Europe, we should tell them to pay their share of our road building costs or stay on their own side of the Channel.
G Marchbank Swindon, Wilts.