Editorial 10/05

October 15th, 2005 by JCB
Posted in Editorial | No Comments »

Editorial

The summer holiday period should be a time to unwind in preparation for the long autumn and winter. Unfortunately attacks on our profession continue with relentless monotony regardless of the season. With the EU Commissioners ignoring the widespread opposition to the Ports Directive, the UKMPA have supported EMPA in producing amendments to remove pilotage from the directive in case it is not rejected by the vote in December.  On the home front work has been ongoing in supporting Kristian Pedersen in his claim for unfair dismissal and the Belfast pilots who are fighting dramatic changes to their working agreement. Work on the PMSC and the incorporation of NOS for pilots is proceeding, but slower than had been hoped as a result of a deferment of the October meeting.

Just in case all this wasn’t providing enough areas to monitor, a new EU project has appeared. This project seems to be promoting an argument that pilots should be removed from ships because of the cost of delays to shipping incurred by ships having to reduce speed to pick the pilot up!  As yet this is an embryonic project picked up by EMPA and it would be nice to dismiss it as nonsense or an out of season April fool’s joke but sadly it is not beyond the realms of possibility of the anti- pilot lobby to dream up such a project and then to secure funding to promote it!

To conclude on a more cheerful note, The Congress of the Canadian Marine Pilots Association generated some good positive press for pilots as did an IMPA initiative by Geoff Taylor for pilots to take a journalist on a pilotage passage in support of the IMO World Maritime Day.

This resulted in my spending a very pleasant day with Michael Grey on the Thames and Gareth Rees with Richard Clayton from Fairplay magazine on the Solent. Whilst it is proving difficult to generate interest from the mainstream media, Richard Clayton concluded his article with “No news means professionalism at work: that’s good news.” It is the responsibility of all pilots to fight to keep it that way.