Last chance to vote for haulage
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• In Commercial Motor 19-25 March Brian Weatherley ran the rule over the general election campaigns. As usual his article was full of common sense; it's the first thing I read every week.
However, he missed the most important point of all: the state of the economy.
In over 40 years I have not seen anything like the present situation. It has just been announced that business failures are up by 50% on the same period last year which was, of course, a record year.
Because of the nature of the business, hauliers are very much on the receiving end. We know that there is a worldwide recession, but ours has been made far worse in recent years.
Even the recent Budget, in which the Government planned to borrow billions of pounds, was very risky. It would appear that a lot of this money will be going to pay the bills with little or nothing to encourage an upturn in manufacturing industries.
Without this upturn all of us, not just the haulage industry, will suffer. I prefer not to take too much notice of what comes out of Fleet Street — after all it is owned and managed to a large extent by politically biased groups — preferring to listen to what parliamentary select committees have to say about the general state of the country.
The difficulty here is that a lot of the press are only interested in reporting the parts of these reports which will suit their political masters.
It is very sad to see genuine hauliers going to the wall through no fault of their own. At least the election will give us a chance to do something about it — perhaps for many of us our last chance. Henry Gee Swadlincote, Derbys.