'A monster which nobody knows how to stop and which is unaccountable.'
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6 0 ur members of Parliament have busied themselves for too long, at our cost and for no obvious benefit, giving away powers that they never owned. They were elected to govern our country from London and were never invited, or empowered, to hand those powers to others.
Consider for a moment your concern when you arrive home late one night to hear your favourite child minder report that your offspring has been naughty and they have all received a good smacking —you might be pleased, you might be worried, you would have a view but you did leave the minder in charge. Consider now, on returning home, that you found a note from your favourite minder saying that they had decided to leave and place the care of your kith and kin into the hands of a friend whom you had never heard of and never met before.
You would be angry, you would be mad. Your minder had never had that power "of passing power" from you. You would never trust your favourite child minder ever again. Mistrust of politicians is about par for the course and the very least that they deserve, but when we all wake up and find that in almost all matters, including transport, we really are no longer our own masters we will be furious.
Readers of CM, open your eyes! The editorials that you so often see before you lead inextricably in the direction to which I am pointing. You may already hate the output from Westminster, but you will despise what comes from Brussels much, much more—and there is no control.
Reading this transport magazine one must conclude that the row over Jacques Delors' replacement ought to be of essential interest to the readers.
Those of us who worry about such things, educated via your editorials as we all are, should be coming to the realisation that all of the regulations which affect us are now originating from the Brussels bureaucratic machine, and we have very little, if any input. This thing, the EU, is out of control— a monster which nobody knows how to stop and which is unaccountable.
At a recent meeting with the Health and Safety Executive in London I was discussing tanker regulations: ADR and the Road Tanker and Packaging Regulations 1992. The HSE is contributing to these regulations on behalf of the DOT with the rest of the EC—a long and unaccountable link if ever I saw one. I was impressed by a remark from one of the HSE officials in response to all my questions of "Why?", when he replied: "We are not our own masters."
Well, I knew that we were no longer our own masters in so many areas—especially transport—but it was refreshing to hear my worst fears now confirmed from within.
• If you want to sound off about a road transport issue write to features editor Patric Cunnane.