Why we have to renationalise the railways
By a rail worker
The left press has been good in its response to the scandal of rail safety. Socialists have given voice to the outrage felt by millions of people at the neglect and greed, which led to the Paddington rail collision. Privatisation stands exposed, as does New Labour’s cop-out: "Public Private Partnership" for the London Underground.
The Third Way is evidently a cul-de-sac from which Blair, Mandelson and friends cannot extricate themselves – or us – without turmoil and upheaval.
I am a Labour Party member, trade union representative and health and safety representative. The members I represent maintain the West Coast mainline from just north of Wigan to just north of Lancaster. Threats against our reps have become two-a-penny since rail maintenance was privatised in April 1996.
Safety checks
My bosses recently lost an Industrial Tribunal case after they tried to prevent me attending a Health and Safety course. They are also trying to prevent me carrying out 3-monthly safety inspections, despite warnings that they may be about to break the law. They have arbitrarily changed the way track patrols to detect faults are done, despite protests.
Southall, Paddington, Watford, Wansford Junction: just four "accidents" among many in recent years. So far the privatised companies have been lucky – even if the victims haven’t. But now the game is up.
Anyone with any decency or intelligence is now clear: privatisation compromises the safety of staff and travelling public.
At such a moment, Railtrack plc and its cronies in the 100-plus contracted companies are vulnerable. A recent Guardian poll showed 70 per cent of people wanting renationalisation. Yet Transport Minister Prescott seems to be allowing the cowboys to buy time until the outrage blows over.
Obviously Mr Prescott is serious about partnership (even if very few others are) with the likes of Jarvis, whose shares rose 29p in the wake of the Paddington crash – at the prospect of getting a lion’s share of the repair contract no doubt.
What credibility can honest members of the Labour Party and trade union movement retain in the face of such inertia – indeed we may even say of betrayal of confidence?
Companies like Tarmac, which got involved in the Tory rail sell-off in order to make a quick killing, have also got involved in a situation where they may contribute to real killings. This firm is not exactly a by-word for safety outside the railways.
Recent statistics show that it has had to pay out more in compensation because of workers killed or injured in its service than have other companies of the same type. This is not a record to inspire confidence from staff or passengers.
Rail’s crisis is not unique however. The RMT is still handling the terrible sea disaster which befell 44 of our members on the bulk carrier MV Derbyshire in the Thatcherite 1980s.
We must not lose "the big picture". The dogmatic drive for profit at any price proceeds apace worldwide.
Yet terrible as the disasters are, the transport crisis presents socialists, and especially Marxists, with one of our greatest ever opportunities. The privatisation of rail was in the 1980s an integral part of the Ridley strategy devised by monopoly capital in the late seventies.
Competition
The hidden agenda was to nullify or reduce any form of competition to the dominant international car and petroleum manufacturing industries. It is not for nothing that Mrs Thatcher trumpeted the "great car-owning economy". To her, the world had to be made safe for the car-petrol combines and their hangers-on.
Yet now road gridlock and air pollution are leading to global warming, and many other problems have paralysed this hidden agenda. Millions have got wise to it all. Thus the manifestly avoidable disasters on the railways as well as the carnage on the roads and at sea become weapons in our armories against our class enemies.
In Volume One of Capital Karl Marx puts his finger on the problems we still face today:
"Note 55: Reynolds Newspaper 21 Jan 1866: Every week this same paper brings a whole list of fresh railway catastrophes under the sensational heading of "Fearful and Fatal accidents" "Appalling Tragedies", etc."
And further "in London three railwaymen – a guard, an engine driver and a signal man are up before a coroner’s jury. A tremendous railway accident has despatched hundreds of passengers into the next world.
"The negligence of the railway workers is the cause of the misfortune. They declare with one voice before the jury that ten or twelve years before, their labour lasted only 8 hours a day.
"During the last five or six years, they say, it has been screwed up to 14,18,29 hours, and when the pressure of holiday travellers is especially severe when excursion trains are put on, their labour often lasts for 40 or 50 hours without a break. They are ordinary men, not Cyclops. At a certain point, their labour power ran out. Torpor seized them. Their brains stopped thinking, their eyes stopped seeing.
"The thoroughly ‘respectable British Juryman’ replied with a verdict that sent them to the Assizes on a charge of manslaughter; in a mild rider the jury expressed the pious hope that the capitalist railway magnates would in future be more extravagant in the necessary number of ‘labour powers’ and more ‘abstemious’, more ‘self-denying’, more ‘thrifty’ in the extortion of paid labour power".
Does this sound familiar? The "capitalist railway magnates" are back again today. They cut staff, connive at increasing hours worked, cut corners to meet ‘targets’ and impress their shareholders. And they do it with an ‘acceptable risk’ also – risk to others, not themselves.
It is our task now to stop them, forever. We workers must take everything from them – without compensation – and run things right for the benefit of everyone.