RHETORICAL QUESTION MARK
Page 60
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ALREADY the White Paper on Freight has produced a fine crop of abusive phrases from road operators. It has been proclaimed that Mrs. Barbara Castle's proposals will lead to chaos, disaster, ruin and worse.
The Minister must have expected a colourful response. It is a naive and almost ludicrous idea on her part to emulate King Canute and suppose that the railways can be preserved by commanding the tide of road transport to roll back. Users as well as providers of transport were bound to complain that their interests were being sacrificed to no good purpose.
They would do their best to put their case to the public. In such circumstances a touch of hyperbole is indispensable. The public will respond only if the issue is presented forcibly, simply and clearly.
This cannot be done without some exaggeration which is further justified by the Minister's obvious strategy of playing down those aspects where opposition is likely. Unless the persons affected were prepared to make their protest heard the White Paper would be generally accepted and the subsequent Bill pass into law almost unnoticed.
Disaster
What operators must now guard against is becoming prisoners of their own rhetoric. For a few of them Mrs. Castle's plan may indeed spell disaster. Its implementation will lead to economic difficulties and loss of efficiency. But it will not mean the end of the road transport world.
Apparently some operators would not agree with this assessment. They have worked themselves up to the pitch of passion which demands, for example, that the Press should give their plight priority, that generous space and time should be booked in newspapers and on television and even that the road transport associations and unions should organize a massive stay-athome day when no commercial vehicle would turn a wheel.
Human nature cannot be changed so easily. The public is as indifferent to road transport as it is to any other industry. The only possible chance of arousing its sympathy would be if the White Paper clearly announced the intention to put operators out of business. Even in these circumstances it might be difficult to make people care.
Mrs. Castle does her best to convey the impression that no individual operator will be too badly affected. The volume of traffic transferred from road to rail, the argument runs, will be small and the operator who loses it should be able to make it up in a year or two. Stringent precautions will be taken to see that the railways are able to handle the traffic efficiently before they take it over.
The White Paper has praise rather than blame for hauliers. The Minister has gone as near as she can to agreeing that they are doing their job well and that she will be happy for them to continue that way provided they are not interfering with her plans for the railways.
In this respect she is doing no more than her duty. Hauliers are in a sense her constituents. It is her responsibility to look after their interests whether or not they vote for her party. They have the right to complain directly to her if they suffer as a result of her policies.
Even when their businesses were nationalized in the years following the war hauliers received compensation. It was not what they wanted, nor in most cases on a scale they considered fair, but it underlined the principle of Ministerial responsibility.
No reference is made to compensation in the White Paper. The point is one on which Mrs. Castle may well find herself vulnerable. If a haulier has to go out of business because he has been refused a quantity licence he has a strong case for saying that Parliament is to blame and that Parliament must do something about it.
There are other differences between the present situation and what happened after the war. The Act of 1947 provided for nationalization on a grand scale, to such an extent that most people thought—and in fact still firmly believe—that the whole road haulage industry was to be taken over.
Disillusion
Even at that early date disillusion with nationalization had set in. Public sympathy was automatically with what was almost a clinical example of the under dog, the small haulier about to lose his small and efficient business to the huge and amorphous British Transport Commission.
In these circumstances the haulier could do no wrong. The more fuss he made, the more people warmed to him. He could accuse his persecutors of copying the methods of Stalin and Hitler, of stifling the liberty of the subject, of destroying a flourishing industry in pursuance of an alien dogma, and so on.
Even the untutored roughness of the haulier's approach helped his cause. It was evidence of the common touch in contrast to the slick, over-smooth propaganda from the BTC. Hauliers were forgiven and even congratulated for conduct which in another context might have been condemned as vulgar or over-exaggerated.
Sound beginning
It would be a bad mistake by operators if they were to fight the new war with the weapons of the old. They must adapt their campaign to the situation as it is now. .A sound beginning has been made with strong protests which have been given reasonably wide publicity and have made a good initial impression.
From now on the task may become harder. Mrs. Castle, in the White Paper, has also made her case and it is all the more powerful for its apparent lack of vindictiveness.
Those members of the public who chose to listen to it are given to understand that she is tackling the problem of the railways by siphoning off a good deal of the heavy traffic which congests the roads; that the hauliers who remain will be tied to stricter standards of safety than hitherto; and that they will also have to pay for the extra wear and tear caused by their heavier vehicles.
No amount of bluster will demolish this formidable if specious rampart of argument which appeals skilfully to all the current prejudices about road transport.
To the motorist—and almost everybody is a motorist—the immediate benefit is clear. He will not be put off by abuse which classifies Mrs. Castle as a dictatrix, a sadist, a female Torquemada and even a Socialist. He will demand the evidence.
Before they proceed much further road operators must analyse the White Paper and set out its harmful effects with as many examples as possible. Once this is done they will have the ammunition which is essential to their campaign. Without supporting material their slogans will not so much be deafening as fall on deaf ears.