Picking Up the Pieces
Page 72
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LIKE any other industry, road transport will find that the abrupt rejection of Britain's application to join the Common Market has been a traumatic experience, even if the full effect of the shock will not be felt for some time. Perhaps more than any other industry, hauliers have acted for years as if civilization ended at the white cliffs of Dover. Their interest lay in delivering or collecting goods at the docks. What happened to the traffic before or after was very little concern of theirs. Although in recent years one or two ferry services have ploughed a lorry route across the Channel, and express carriers in particular have begun to think in terms of negotiating door-to-door delivery anywhere on the Continent, the operators not directly concerned have taken little notice.
For some reason or other, membership of the European Free Trade Area seemed to present no challenge or inspiration to hauliers. Their attitude changed as soon as it looked likely that Britain would link up with the Six. Operators who previously had barely seemed aware that road transport existed anywhere else in the world became eager to learn about the licensing system in Holland, Germany, France and Italy, international standards for vehicle use and construction, drivers' hours and conditions on the Continent, and the best route to follow for Stuttgart, Diisseldorf, Milan and Turin.
SUDDENLY the International Road Transport Union seemed important, although its activities continued very much on the same lines as before. Hauliers listened with concentrated attention to a recondite exchange of views on the Common Market at the conference of the Road Haulage Association, preceded by an account of the transport provisions of the Treaty of Rome. The international committees and groups of the transport associations acquired a new glamour. It is tempting to think that there might even have been enthusiastic attendances if they had arranged language classes.
There might have been scope for such classes, even as an aid to translating the so-called translations. Throughout the road transport industry brows were furrowed in an attempt to grasp new concepts, or old concepts with new names, such as the fourchette, tariffication, liberaliza tion, harmonization, and so on The ability to talk learnedly about infrastructures and bilateral quotas earned many a good lunch or dinner. Given time, the experts might have managed to reduce the whole question to a satisfactory obscurity to which only they could have pretended to hold the key.
Will this unaccustomed interest in things European now disappear? Will operators retreat to their old isolation? To some extent this will happen as a result of the rebuff by General de Gaulle, and the likelihood that Britain will stay outside the Common Market for at leat a number of years. It is not in the nature of hauliers to look to a distant and uncertain future. Although they must keep a close watch on trends in industry, their main concern has been to provide for their customers an immediate service that meets as precisely as possible the needs of today.
Many recent projects have undoubtedly been stimulated by what seemed about to happen in Europe. Support for a Channel link, whether a bridge or a tunnel, became more intense when the stakes appeared to have increased. The FLO Government now has a good excuse if it wishes to shelve the idea. Roads to the Channel ports looked like being improved and augmented much more rapidly because of the extra traffic that union with Europe would bring. The attention of the Ministry of Transport could now be turned to other parts of the country, and especially the north, where lack of good roads is hampering industrial development.
Just over a year ago, the R.H.A. appointed a licensing study group, which may soon have finished its deliberations. Members may have had at the back of their minds the certainty that entry into the Common Market would be followed by drastic alterations in the licensing system to bring it into line with the system that was supposed to be evolving in Brussels. There are, of course, criticisms of the British licensing law in itself. One wonders whether, taken in isolation, they would be sufficient to induce operators to press for new legislation, or to make the Ministry take their proposals seriously.
Even without the additional complications that Britain's entry would have produced, the E.E.C. is having difficulties in working out the details of its transport policy. Several important developments in both goods and passenger transport are scheduled for this year. They are being held up by the failure of the E.E.C. Council to reach agreement. It may be that the Commission will have to take advantage of its powers to put the suggested programme into operation, and to override both the Council and the European Ministers of Transport. With the whole weight of the Treaty of Rome behind it, the pressure would seem to be overwhelming, but is still being held back. It is not easy to suppose that drastic changes would be accepted in British licensing law unless the pressure was equally strong, which seems most unlikely.
If I have given the impression that much of the work and thinking of operators over the past few years has been wasted, it is unintentional. The road transport industry has been forced to increase its range of vision and will be all the better for the exercise. International operators, who may have seen themse.lves as the spearhead of the drive to put British transport on the European map, have made closer contacts with Continental operators than they might have done without the possibility that Britain would join the Common Market. Encouraged by the sympathy they are bound to receive from many of their new friends, they will continue to play an invaluable part in keeping the bridgehead into Europe open until such time as it may again become possible for Britain to negotiate some closer link; economical, political, or both.
Trade with the Continent must continue to expand if possible, even if the customs barriers are not to come down. The Government may find that, in spite of its reluctance to do so in the past, it will have to give tax concessions to exporters. There is no reason why it should not supplement this policy by encouraging road operators to carry on the Continent. Hidden transport subsidies, which would not have been allowed within the E.E.C., can be given openly from outside. They might take the form of tax cuts, which would simultaneously help the motor industry in its own export drive. Within Britain itself, thrown back on its own resources, the need for a proper road system, and for a flexible transport industry to use the roads, becomes even more important.