Hold back, Mr Turner tells Mrs C
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• Many of the sections of the Transport Bill concerned with commercial road vehicles could easily be postponed without in any way interfering with the Government's plans for transport as a whole, said Mr. P. H. R. Turner, chairman of the Road Haulage Association, at the annual dinner of the Association's Southampton sub-area in Southampton on Friday.
Stressing that in politics the RHA was neutral, Mr. Turner said that if any party or any Government had introduced such a monstrosity of a Bill as the present one, they would have thrown all their resources into the fight against it. Hauliers were probably doing a good turn to the Government, and particularly to the Minister of Transport, by their efforts to save her from the consequences of her own folly.
The worst aspect of this piece of legislation was the way in which it tried to do everything at once. He could see no good reason for this; the Minister's talk of the way in which the various items of the Bill were linked with each other seemed little better than cant.
Mr. Turner went on: "If Mrs. Castle wishes to play the good fairy to the railways, she can hardly go much farther. She no doubt believes not only that she is taking from them all their financial worries, but is setting up a highly efficient nationalized transport organization. If she really believes that, why does she not trust to her own judgment and give the new organization time to show us what it can do? Why must she simultaneously play the bad fairy and impose all kinds of restrictions, taxes and other financial burdens on road transport?
"If the new Freight Corporation succeeds it will never be able to claim that it has done so on its own merits. The dice have been loaded too heavily in its favour. We have been aware of this for some time, and so have our customers in trade and industry. I believe that the point is now coming home to the general public.
"Mrs. Castle knows that no amount of juggling with parliamentary time will make it possible to give proper consideration to a Bill covering so wide a field. It would do a lot of good and no possible harm if she were to chop the Transport Bill in half. There are three parts in particular, those concerned with road goods licensing, new taxes and drivers' hours, which could with advantage be dealt with in a completely separate Bill. There is no sort of urgency about any of them."