ITALIAN FARCE
Page 5
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
• Here we go again. First it was the farmers in France, then the senors in Spain. Now the Road Haulage Association is warning British operators to stay clear of Italy, where not only hauliers, but also Customs officers and even filling station attendants are threatening to disrupt road transport with a series of strikes.
The move is humiliating for the Italian government, which is in both the limelight and the firing line as current president of the EC. But it seems there is little that Rome or the authorities in Brussels can do to keep the borders open.
One can understand the anger of British hauliers when they see fiery Continentals seemingly free to take the law into their own hands every time their governments do something that arouses their wrath. The acquiescent Brit, they say, sits back and takes it, although the 1988 seamensi dispute can't have been any more fun for French, Italian or Spanish TIR truckers than it was for our drivers queuing back on Jubilee Way. One often hears about Britain's 'island mentality', and that our hauliers and businessmen are unprepared for 1992. In fact it is often our Continental partners, or at least some of them, who seem less ready to accept the sacrifices implicit in free international trade in a deregulated market.
The sooner liberalisation arrives, and the sooner the borders that these strikers seem bent on blocking disappear, the better it will be for Europe's hauliers as a whole.