GOODS TRANSPORT
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`Clarify the Re-n Threat'
if THE threat of nationalization looms
again—and for all the vagueness of this political threat, so far as it has been expressed during the last year, it is very real and the Association takes it very seriously ", said Mr. E. W. Russell, deputy secretary-general of the Road Haulage Association, during his speech at the Bristol sub-area annual dinner last Friday, adding that although the R.H.A. had issued no violent denunciation of what it suspected to be the aspirations of the Labour Party, this attitude of calm must not be mistaken for disinterest.
The Association hoped for clarification of Labour's transport policy, went on Mr. Russell. It wanted to know whether independent haulage firms would be " renationalized ", whether road and rail services would be " integrated " and what this term meant if it did not mean the former. It wanted to know what was meant by "taking the lid off B.R.S. " and how it would be carried out.
Mr. Russell said that the R.H.A. would want answers to these questions in the light of the fact that the public freight transport industry as a whole was finding practical and commercial solutions to transport problems. In these endeavours, independent road hauliers and the nationalized road and rail undertakings were acting jointly.
He continued: "These efforts will show that there is no point and no justification for the road haulage industry to be, for a second time, the victim of a political experiment, a political experiment which is not wanted by the public, which is anathema to the freight transport industry as a whole, which is not wanted by the traders whom it serves and which, we know from previous experience, is doomed to failure."