• COMMENT LOOKING BACK.
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• If Charles Dickens had been writing the novel of 1986 in January, he might have called it Great Expectations. If he was writing the book in December, he probably would have had to plagiarise John Milton, and called it Paradise Lost.
In vehicle operation, we have not been delivered the promised harmonisation of weights with Europe, although we have got a nearly-in-step-with-Europe set of reefer dimensions. We haven't been given the promised cabotage, but we have been given a set of drivers' hours regulations which, far from simplifying the confusion which went before, has only made things worse. We haven't been delivered the promised 40% increase in international permits, but we have been given a smaller allocation than any other industrialised member of the EEC.
We also have a nighttime lorry ban in the nation's most populous and congested city; but we haven't seen a single successful prosecution for infringement of it, which tends to suggest that its sole success has been in the amount of paperwork it generated.
On the PSV side, the long-promised deregulation of bus services has finally arrived. Its coming should have removed the uncertainty which has surrounded the bus market for the past couple of years, but it hasn't. At least the predicted chaos has not been as bad as it could have been, and in many areas competition has begun to blend with realism.
While Sid and his mates at British Gas have been hogging the headlines, a far more significant privatisation has been quietly rolling along, as the National Bus Company has been split up and sold off in piecemeal fashion. That, at least, seems to have been successful in its early stages.
The paucity of good news on the operational side has been matched on the manufacturing side. While the Iveco Ford deal has guaranteed at least a short-term future for Ford's Langley plant and its Cargo product, government vaccilation on an order which made the Nimrod mess seem like a model of clear-headed organisation has left far more question marks than answers alongside the Leyland name.
Whatever the desirability of keeping Land Rover as a British name, the weakness of purpose which saw the scuppering of the GM/Leyland deal undoubtedly led to the far more serious disappearance of Bedford from the heavy commercials scene. The massive loss of employment at Bedford (even allowing for the wastage that would have followed a Bedford/Leyland merger) was a heavy price to pay for keeping Union Jacks on the shares register. It can only be hoped that the government does not meddle with Leyland's future so mindlessly in 1987.
A list like that makes it seem that we have, in the words of Spike Milligan, been "walking backwards for Christmas" in 1986. Despite all the efforts of the outsiders, however, the road transport sector and its support industries have got through 1986 with reputations fairly intact, and have done enough good to deserve a better 1987. Have a prosperous New Year.