Free the Ports

Reports of trade unionists rioting, usually means that something right is being done. So I was surprised to see that the latest trouble was caused by a proposed EU directive. Surely they couldn’t being doing something right could they? Apparently not.

Faced with a simple problem — how to enhance competition in ports services — the Eurocrats have done what comes naturally to bureaucrats. Instead of deregulating, they seek to regulate and every significant port in Europe would find its business controlled by an EU ports regulator under the ports directive.

The stupidity of the directive is that Ports are not some natural monopoly where true competition is difficult, so they do not need a regulator. Unfortunately, most of Europe’s ports are state owned and that is where the inefficiencies come from. What we need is privatisation not regulation. This idea is supported by Ashley Mote MEP

"This directive will undermine that confidence and those standards because it interferes with freely negotiated commercial contracts. It will impose controls that are neither necessary nor desirable. It seeks to solve problems in state-run ports that simply don't exist in Britain."

Typical of statist European countries to force their solutions onto all of us, when the free market approach taken by the UK solves all of their problems without the drawbacks of their chosen solution.