'We can all see how important lorries are to the life of this country'
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'0 ur small country has a large
population and is unable to produce enough food to feed itself. Therefore we have to import many tons of food each day. To do this we need lorries. To have enough money to buy the food we have to send goods abroad to sell— another reason for lorries.
In this land we do not have enough raw materials to make the goods we export so we have to import them—more lorries needed. We can all see how important lorries are to the life of our country. When our lorries go abroad they have to compete with foreign ones. This is hard for them to do because they have to pay a high tax at home and they have to pay more taxes and tolls for the foreign roads. Soon our lorries will have to pay motorway tolls here, too. The foreign drivers pay a lower tax at home and don't yet have to pay anything for the use of our roads. This seems unfair.
We can't make other governments change their rules but we should persuade our Government to tax foreign lorries to use all our roads, then it would be fairer. If everything stays unfair the British lorries might get squeezed out. Then we would only have foreign lorries on our roads.
This would be bad because a lot more people would not have jobs and Britain will get poorer and other countries richer. I wrote a letter to Mr Major about this and had a reply from the Department of Transport but they have not done anything about it so I think they don't see the problem. If I can understand the problem when I am 11, then I think the civil servants should understand it because they are supposed to give the Government good advice. I think something is wrong. /