Britain must re-build its own UK transport infrastructure

Britain must re-build its own transport infrastructure

  Martin Wingfield@ Nick Griffin MEP

September 2010
  A number of constituents have written to Nick Griffin to express their deep concern at the amount of money being spent by the European Union on the Intelligent Transport System Initiative.

One gentleman from Blackburn wrote:
I doubt the motives for building this system, believing it to be a vehicle for a few large corporations to make a lot of money from road pricing.
I feel that some political institutions are out of public control, and even local councils act as if they are no longer the publics servants but bodies in their own right, and this is certainly true of the European Parliament.
How can you as MEPs restore a feeling of public control?
I fear we have created an automaton, over which I as a citizen, have no control!
Perhaps it time we should consider the Swiss system of democracy."
Responding on behalf of the MEP, Constituency Office manager Tina Wingfield wrote:
"Thank you for your email regarding the EU’s new legal framework for intelligent Transport systems.
"The consensus within the European Parliament is, unsurprisingly, that a common European approach is required to ensure that the transport systems used in each Member State of the European Union are mutually compatible.
"As you rightly point out, this consensus on uniformity on a grand scale reflects today’s dominant approach to politics and the organisation of public, social and economic life, which asserts that macro-organisation is always the best policy. Hence, we see control consistently taken away from small, localised bodies and transferred to ever-larger, cross-county and cross-border institutions.
"Such a policy framework takes no account of the wealth of experience which suggests that the further away you take the decision-making process from the people and communities it directly affects, the more likely it is that the outcomes decided upon will not reflect the will of local people nor their best interests. Again, it should perhaps come as no surprise that there is little notice taken in political life these days of common sense or collective wisdom.
"If common sense did prevail, responsibility for deciding the direction of Britain’s transport network would not rest with a mega-European bureaucracy comprised of 736 politicians representing the self-evidently disparate interests of 27 Member States and 500 million citizens. It simply isn’t feasible that such an institution could be capable of developing a transport strategy tailored to the particular long-term needs of the United Kingdom. The recurring financial contributions demanded from British taxpayers to simply maintain this obscenely bloated, resource sapping bureaucratic monstrosity could moreover, be so much more wisely spent if redirected towards investment in our own transport infrastructure.
"As a British National Party MEP, Mr Griffin believes that Britain should withdraw from the European Union and British independence and control over its national destiny restored. The British National Party will end the multibillion cash haemorrhage Britain loses to the EU in membership fees and invest the money instead in re-building British transport infrastructure.
"Unfettered by European regulation and policy directives, a British Nationalist Government will invest public money to fund transport upgrades and the contracts for such developments will be awarded to British companies, to the benefit of British workers. The disastrous privatisation process will be reversed; traffic congestion eased by controlling the immigration invasion which is swelling our population to unsustainable proportions; foreign freight vehicles charged to use Britain’s road network (which will discourage the importation of goods which could and should be produced in this country where possible); the price of fuel will be decreased by reducing the level of government taxation; and toll-free motorways will be maintained.
"If you would like to find out more about the British National Party’s views on transport policy and other issues - such as the call for constitutional change which will ensure that all powers properly capable of exercise at local level are devolved and county council government revived - please visit the Party’s website at www.bnp.org.uk ."