Life on the frontier

摘要

I remember, many years ago, listening to a government transport minister telling an assembly of ship owners at their annual dinner how much he and his colleagues liked the shipping industry He was trying rather too hard to impress, but the reason he gave for this affection was that "the shipping industry never gave the government any trouble". In short, he liked shipping, because while there were problems with rail, road and air, he never had to think about ships. I felt like chucking a plate at him, but this invisibility of the shipping industry, and the way it is expected to solve its own problems, comes down to us through the years. Take the problems of Indian Ocean piracy when it first arose. Not just initially, and for many, many months, with ships being captured, governments sat on their hands, the only advice being to "keep a good lookout" and about the extreme inadvisability of employing armed guards, with not so subtle messages about how wrong it would be to pay ransoms. Eventually, warships were deployed, but by that time the shipping industry was largely defending itself.