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Political Commentary
Page 132
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The Symbolic Coelacanth
OFF the coast of Madagascar recently native fishermen caught a specimen of the coelacanth, a rare creature surviving almost unchanged from a period now more than 300m. years distant. The latest apologists for the Ivory Tower might well accept the coelacanth as the symbol for the small independent road operator. Although not going so far as to suggest that he is quite as ancient a relic, they discuss him as if he weee an unaccountable and even fishlike anachronism.
A former member of the British Transport Commission, and subsequently the first chairman of the Iron and Steel Corporation, Mr. S. J. L. Hardie, in a pamphlet on "The Nationalized Industries," has expressed the belief that nationalization is "a continuous process of organic development spread over many years." If he were alone in holding this point of view, it might not be taken too seriously. The rest of the pamphlet makes it plain that, for Mr. Hardie, transport is synonymous with the railways.
The document is chiefly remarkable for its collection of errors and prejudices. He does not even get the name of the Road Haulage Executive correct. He states that road haulage and road passenger transport have "free and unfettered access to the roads." He condemns the C licence because it "imposes a drain on road transport services and is wasteful in that it results in constant journeys of empty lorries which have delivered their load and which, if they were integrated into the general transport system, could be reloaded for the return journey."
One might be content to regard Mr. Hardie's biological analogy as just another error were it not that it is taken up again and again by various sections of the Ivory Tower with the unison almost of a conducted chorus. One begins to imagine that nobody within the nationalized organization is allowed to express his views unless he first pays tribute to the dogma.
Lucid and Cogent
There is no obligation to make the tribute coherent or intelligible, and the licensed obscurity is all the more remarkable when the rest of the dissertation to which it is a prefix is both lucid and cogent. In a recent article on monopoly and competition in transport, which for the most part was an excellent exercise in logic, Mr. A. B. B. Valentine, of the London Transport Executive, felt constrained to begin with this contention: "If there is a case for monopoly in inland transport, then nationalization comes into the picture as a convenient means of forming the monopoly." It was not, he added, the only possible means.
What other possible means there could be of enforcing a monopoly Mr. Valentine does not say. There is no way of compelling thousands of operators to amalgamate except by legislation, and no political party would create a monopoly without at the same time putting it under State ownership or control.
An article on road haulage as a national service by Mr. G. W. Quick Smith, secretary of the R.H.E., begins with another questionable proposition. "It is strange that so much of the discussion on the transport problem has centred on the question of ownership. The most significant change that has taken place in road haulage D8 is not the change of ownership effected by the Transport Act, 1947, but the creation of a national system with a country-wide network of road haulage services." As Mr. Quick Smith goes on to argue that the country-wide network was made possible by the change of ownership, it is difficult to understand why he should seek to prove one less significant than the other.
Mr. George Sinclair, a member of the R.H.E., in introducing a paper read to the Institute of Transport, brings us back to the theory of evolution. "Pioneering as we have known it has disappeared, not at the wish of those responsible for the direction of transport, but because the pattern throughout the country has crystallized." In so far as this has any meaning at all, it may be regarded as supporting the contention that the day of the private operator is ended. It glosses over the fact that those private operators who have passed from the scene did so as the result of an Act of Parliament.
Dialectical Dilemma
The phrasing of the quotations given above is different in each case. Only the obscurity is common to them all. At the moment the dialectical dilemma must be the same for all spokesmen within the Ivory Tower. They have been disturbed before they are ready. "The R.H.E. is only at the beginning of its real task,': complains Mr. Quick Smith; and Mr. Valentine echoes: "The test of the monopoly theory is still to come." The curtain has gone up too early. It catches the actors without greasepaint and with certain of their garments missing. They have to extemporize while they collect their wits and their wardrobe.
It is all very well for Mr. Hardie to talk about "organic development" as if he is old Mother Nature in person. The phrase may apply to an industry which has become a monopoly before the Government takes it over. The compulsory formation of a monopoly such as that planned in the Transport Act, 1947, represents a complete break with •the past. If the process is regarded as natural and inevitable, the supporters of nationalization would have been better advised to wait until private enterprise had formed a monopoly, which could then have been taken over with the minimum of disturbance.
They have destroyed for themselves this approach to the problem. Mr. Valentine would find many people in agreement with him if he were able to suggest that, once a monopoly had been established, nationalization afforded a convenient means for regulating it. As it is, he is forced into the slightly absurd position of championing nationalization as the best method of turning a reluctant industry into a monopoly.
The Ivory Tower has a skeleton in the cupboard. The ghosts of the defunct hauliers have come back to haunt their liquidators. The best the• defenders of nationalization can do is to maintain that the skeleton is really a fossil, a relic of an extinct pioneer—in fact, there is reason to doubt whether he ever existed. The return of the haulier, like the appearance of a coelacanth in the 20th century, brings the skeleton to life. The struggle continues, and although the evolutionists continue to mutter, "What's done cannot be undone," like Lady Macbeth they arc talking in their sleep.