In praise of cargo ships!

The Guardian Leader this morning gives a tribute to Britain's history as a sea-faring nation and the value that marine shipping still brings to the UK. I couldn't agree more! As a huge fan of cargo ship travel (as evidenced by my various musings on the subject here)

I've cut and pasted the full text of the Leader below, or you can read it in situ on the Guardian site here.

A glimpse of the sea that surrounds us is no more than an hour or so away, wherever you are on this island. Our language is littered with the flotsam of a nautical legacy. But as the cranes and warehouses near the centres of coastal cities gave way to riverside apartments, the nation's awareness of its dependence on the sea ebbed away like the tide. Britain no longer really thinks of itself as a maritime nation. But it still is. Downstream, and largely out of sight, at ports such as Tilbury, huge container ships and cargo vessels load exports and unload imports, day and night. These leviathans of the deep deliver enormous economies of scale - 10p to ship a bottle of whisky to Japan and 70p to ship a DVD player back the other way; shipping is also the greenest way to do it, when the alternative is flying. As North Sea fuel supplies run down, great tankers of oil and gas from the Middle East are becoming vital to keeping the lights on - last week the first tanker arrived at Milford Haven's huge new liquefied gas terminal. The recession is hitting the shipping industry hard, like everything else. But worldwide a million seafarers ply their trade across the oceans to deliver five billion tons of trade; and the British fleet has grown markedly since the government introduced a new tax regime in 2000, and is now the 9th largest in the world. Nautical colleges are getting busier too. With London still the maritime capital for insurance and the marketplace for joining up cargoes with ships, the sea is still a good little earner for Britain.