Weekly Worker 368 Thursday January 25 2001

Rail nationalisation campaign

Take control

Continuing controversy over the railways and their general state of ill repair presents a perfect opportunity for the Socialist Alliance to put forward a programme for public transport.

The disaster at Hatfield has plunged the railways into total disarray - not only Railtrack, but the train operating companies (TOCs) as well. The passenger services are getting worse and worse, as anybody who regularly uses the railways will testify.

The TOCs running passenger services are now altering their timetables to suit the chaotic situation. They are extending running times, and when the train arrives at its destination, out comes the announcement that passengers have just had a wonderful journey and arrived early.

You may well have sat in the aisle or remained standing throughout the journey, but that is obviously considered of secondary importance. “Customers” should be grateful just for having completed their journey. We have recently been informed that Railtrack will pay compensation in the region of £500 million to the TOCs, and a considerably smaller amount to passengers.

This, we are told, will plunge Railtrack into serious debt, estimated to be somewhere in the region of £3 to 5 billion over the next two to three years.

The three main rail unions are beginning to work together, which is a positive development. RMT, Aslef and the TSSA have started planning forthcoming campaigns against the privatisation of the London Underground system.

This presents an ideal opportunity for the Socialist Alliance to extend the SA project beyond the confines of the electoral field. Not only should we see the different left groups organising their supporters together under the alliance banner in each of the unions, but also forming a single SA group across all three.

Such an approach should not of course be restricted to the rail industry. It should pave the way for similar projects across the different unions and, more to the point, different industries. The recent election of the left candidate, Mark Serwotka, to the post of general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union illustrates that an SA fraction in every union, bringing together all socialists, could begin to have a serious impact, especially if such fractions seek to win those around it from a narrow, single-union viewpoint towards developing a broader political vision. However, with the rail unions more likely than most to be in the forefront of action in the near future - and with considerable public support - the SA executive committee has agreed to make a start here in the first instance. A meeting of all SA railworkers and activists will be announced soon.

One of the key aims of the Mick Rix-Bob Crow wing of the trade union bureaucracy is to bring the railways back under ‘public ownership’ through pressurising the Labour government.

The Socialist Alliance should counterpose to this a policy of nationalisation under the control of workers and passengers. Indeed there is no reason why workers should not take militant action to impose measures of their own control right now.

It would be wrong for the alliance to propagate illusions in a ‘golden age’ of British Rail. Instead it must fight for what is necessary, and that means fighting for a socialist future. We should not only be fighting to win activists on the railways to unite across sectional divisions, but to the SA project itself, which is providing the only viable socialist opposition to the Labour government.

We should ensure that the January 27 day of action is a great success. We should call on all railworkers to join the planned strike action by tubeworkers. There should be an industry-wide stoppage. Passenger groups should be encouraged to take an active role in support of the railworkers and thereafter the running of the railways by workers and passengers.

There should be no question of placing any faith in the Labour government. It is correct to demand that Blair takes action to ensure rail safety and a decent rail service through renationalisation. But the conscious self-activity of the working class is the key, married with taking our offensive onto the political stage by voting for and backing the Socialist Alliance in the forthcoming general election.

This Saturday is an opportunity not just for the Socialist Alliance to be seen out and about with our petitions, but also to put the case and agitate for a solution to the rail crisis in the interests of the working class. We should make use of the widely expressed sentiment for renationalisation, not by tailing the RMT-Aslef bureaucracy, but by championing the idea that the working class itself must take control of the railways.

Derek Goodliffe
RMT grades executive and Eastern Region Socialist Alliance (personal capacity)

Ours or theirs?

This Saturday sees Socialist Al liance-initiated demonstrations in favour of renationalisation of the rail industry, and against privatisation of the London tube.

Rail privatisation has been widely perceived as a disaster in two respects: firstly in terms of safety - underlined by the horrendous crashes at Southall, Ladbroke Grove and most recently Hatfield; and secondly in terms of reliability - the chances of arriving on time, especially since Hatfield, have been considerably reduced. Not surprisingly then, demands for nationalisation have gained a resonance among wide sections of the British population.

Even such reactionary luminaries as Lynda Lee Potter, editor of the Daily Mail, has been calling for the railways to be renationalised, worrying about the effects of the current chaos on the profitability of British industry.

Shamelessly, and in a manner that would insult the intelligence of the average grasshopper, William Hague’s Tory Party, as part of its preparation for the general election, has been pasting up posters which scream, “You’ve paid the tax - so where are the trains?” - feebly attempting to pin responsibility on the Blair government for a privatisation that was the brainchild of the Tories themselves.

Of course, the Conservatives are not themselves calling for nationalisation. But the fact that elements of the formerly ultra-on-message Tory media are prepared to advocate the idea testifies to the mood which has convinced significant sections of the ruling class that privatisation has become a liability from their own standpoint.

The Blair government, in the meantime, is standing firm against renationalisation, moaning about the cost of compensating the shareholders of Railtrack and the train operating companies - with a figure of £5 billion being bandied around.

All this means that the genuine left needs to be particularly careful to ensure that the independent interests of the working class are championed on this issue, and that we do not get sidetracked into supporting a renationalisation campaign that merely benefits the ruling class.

There is the obvious question of the old, discredited nationalisations of the past - part of a Keynesian economic model of piecemeal reform of capitalism that was the trademark of ‘old Labour’. Such schemes were always limited in terms of economic resources to what the ruling class considered suited national interests - ie, capital - and were completely controlled by state-appointed bureaucrats.

Two other interlinked questions - that of compensation, and that of workers’ control - are at the heart of the independent interests of the working class in this matter.

The Blair government’s plaintive pleas that nationalisation would cost the government a packet is simply a reflection of its 100% pro-capitalist nature.

The government’s bourgeois opponents on this question also operate within the same framework - the only difference between them is an accounting forecast - they calculate that the chaos of privatisation will in the end cost the bosses more than the cost of the government buying up the rail industry.

As revolutionaries, we have a rather different position - we say that the cost of bringing the railways back into state ownership should be paid by the capitalists, not by the working class. Compensation to investors in the privatised rail industry should be given out only on the basis of proven hardship.

We cannot simply say that there should be no compensation. After all the Thatcher privatisations involved conning a considerable number of ordinary workers into investing as small shareholders in these industries. In addition a number of occupational pension funds that provide benefits for large sections of workers, past and present, are heavily entangled financially with many privatised industries, including no doubt rail. But there should be no compensation to the fat cat bosses who have ripped off workers, small investors and commuters alike - rather we are in favour of the necessary renationalisation of rail involving a frontal attack on their property rights.

The question of compensation goes hand in hand with the question of workers’ control. Workers’ control is defined as the working class, both through its trade union organisations within the industry, and in the broader sense in that the working class also are the main users of the passenger railway system, exercising direct control over the railways. This means the right of unions and commuters’ organisations to veto any management decision that goes against the interests of workers: eg, to stop such practices as the running of trains without adequate safety provisions, the tailoring of safety provision to the requirements of shareholders’ dividends (which is what has so far prevented the state-of-the-art Automatic Train Protection fail-safe system being used in Britain), rip-off fare rises aimed at boosting share dividends, or other such abuses.

In fact, there is no need to simply wait for the bourgeoisie to renation-alise the rail industry in order to impose a worker-commuter veto: a start can be made now, by the rail unions committing themselves to industrial action (which would be widely popular with commuters) to force the rail bosses to comply with these kinds of demands. Ultimately, for members of the working class, who both run the trains and use them, the question of public ownership of the railways, and of the transport infrastructure as a whole, is a question of real democracy, which can only be achieved to the full under working class political rule.

For democracy is not simply the power to elect one or another pro-capitalist politician to preside over the narrow sphere of ‘politics’ that is the purview of modern parliamentary institutions, while the real control of society is exercised by capital and its never satiated drive for self-expansion - individual owners, managers, banks, etc are merely its personification or well rewarded servants.

Democracy can only be truly realised when the mass of ordinary working people collectively and democratically control and plan their own social and economic destiny, and that can only mean democratic control of the economy, of the means of production, and the infrastructure, transport, health, and the rest.

The programme of workers’ and commuters’ control is the socialist alternative to the equally anti-working class programmes of old Labour (pro-capitalist nationalisation schemes to bail out the bosses at the expense of the working class), and Thatcherite privatisation, resulting in ownership by spivs and crooked fat cats.

Ian Donovan