Tory Plan to Rip up Rail Network

Scan page 14

The truth about Tory policies for the railv is revealed by a recently leaked document from their Centre for Policy Studies. Noel

WHEN Terry Duffy and EN Terry Duffy and Sid Weighell prostrated Weighell prostrated themselves before Thatcher and at the same time deposited a large boot into the teeth of the ASLEF executive, little did they realise that they had become mere pawns in a gigantic manoeuvre to dismember the railway system Socialist Organiser has obtained a recent report produced by Thatcher's 'think tank" - the Centre for Policy Studies - that argues for the complete ripping up of all rail track and a transformation of these lines into roads. This Fould result in 200,000 railway workers, not counting those in dependent industries, being dumped on the dole.

'Truth about Transport" is an amazing document, not just because it reveals the monumental stupidity of the TUC leaders supporting BR against ASLEF, but because, as we shall see, it is motivated by a pathological hatred of the labour movement and of all the gains it has made since 1945.

The Centre for Policy Studies should be taken very seriously. Set up in the early seventies by Sir Keith Joseph, it exercises far greater sway over strategic governmental policy making than many Whitehall departments.

Indeed, Enterprize Zones, the Prior /Tebbit legislation and the present denationalisation programme - to name but the most prominent - have all been incubated in this germ factory of Tory prejudice.

With the desired object of destroying "empires of inefficiency"? supposedly represented by nationalised industry they have provided Thatcher with the ammunition to launch an onslaught against working class organisations not seen since the Combination Acts of the early 19th century.

Alfred Sherman, Director of the Centre, told The 2 3 30 cio 1 2 1972 went down in history as the year of the miners. 1982 may well go down as the year of the railway workers.

The first eight months have seen British Rail shedding jobs at the rate of 1,000 a month. The struggle of the NUR over the 5% increase, the battle to defend the engineering workshops, and the fight of ASLEF against flexible rostering and in defence of the eight-hour day, have placed railworkers in the forefront of the fight against the Tories.

iston Depe Guardian recently -•British Rail mirrors British society. Anachronistic, wasteful, shabby, epileptic, it not only has resisted change but inhibited analysis of the causes for its shortcomings.

'Successive governments have postponed rootand-branch appraisal of the rail problem and instead thrown large amounts of money at it, tens of millions in subsidies and writeaffo "

MIDLANDS People's March for Jobs. September 15 to '18: a five-pronged march from Stoke, Derby, Rugby, Hereford, and Shrewsbury, converging on Birmingham.

Coordinator: Sid Platt, NALGO, 7th Floor, Tower Block, Centre City, 7 Hill St, Birmingham BS 4JD (021 643 6084).

Throughout these struggles, the Tories have said that the "rolling programme of investment in electrification and modernisation in the industry must be tied to increases in productivity." Accepting this line in full, and attempting to thwart effective industrial action from their members at every turn, the right wing in the movement have been nothing but an echochamber for Tory propaganda.

On the fight against flexible rostering Terry In an absurd inversion of the power structure of capitalist Britain, the Tory strategists now pose as "radicals" whose modernisation plans are blocked by the 'bureaucratic vested interests of the labour movement. Whether it's the health workers, council refuse collectors or rail workers they are all living it up in "citadels of overmanning, draining • away the country's resources."

Alfred Sherman forgets Trade Union Working Group in the UK. Subscription £5 for three months, from STUWG, c/o Acorn House, 314-320 Grays Inn Road, London WC1 (837 9464)

POLISH SOLIDARITY Contact addresses.

Solidarnosc Trade Union Working Group, Acorn House, 314/320 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1X 8DP.

Tel: 01-837 9464.

Glasgow Polish Solidarity Campaign. Ian McCalman, 18 Mossgiel Rd. Glasgow G43. 041-632 1839.

Edinburgh PSC. C/o Edinburgh burgh Trades Council, 12 Picardy Place.

Oxford Labour Committee on Poland, 468 Banbury Road, Oxford. 0865 58238.

Coventry PSC. John Fisher, c/o ASTMS, 26 Queens Rd., Coventry.

Labour Poland Solidarity Fund, c/o Cooperative Bank, 110 Leman St., London EI.

STOP SIZEWELL B - national rally/conference against the Pressurised Water Reactor. Saturday November 6, Central Hall, Westminster.

Called by Anti-Nuclear Campaign. Duffy, the Albert Einstein of the AUEW, dazzled his members with "We're saving 10,000 engineering jobs by supporting the BR Board on this issue. It's the only way we will get new investment into the industry." . The article below, based on alarming new evidence, demonstrates that the Tories have no intentions of developing the railways. On the contrary, their goal - strike or no strike - is the closure of the whole rail system. of course that tens of billions of pension funds are invested abroad and also that the vast bulk of decisions about the allocation of UK capital have been concentrated in a four mile zone in the City of London.

A better yardstick for "radicalism" is whether or not you are in favour of expropriating the financiers and exploiters who have traditionally controlled, and are today responsible through Brixton to TUL conference in Brighton.

September 4 to 8. Sponsors include: Jayaben " Desai, Anwar Ditta, Nasira Begum, Tony Benn, Ted Knight, Ken Livingstone, Paul Boateng.

Details 01-274 3951.

CHILE/El Salvador festival:

Thursday-Saturday September 24-26. Three days of music, poetry, theatre, exhibitions, films, seminars and workshops, at Manning Hall, University of London Union, Malet St, London WCI.

Details: El Salvador Solidarity Campaign, 01-359 2270.

BIRMINGHAM Labour Committee on Ireland social Friday August 13, 8pm in 12, at the Mermaid, Stratford Rd, Birmingham, with Michael Fox and the Black Velvet Band. Entry €1.20 (60p unwaged).

NORTH London Irish Solidarity Committec: showing of the film The Patriot Game' , Friday September 3.

7.30, Holborn Central Library, Theobalds Rd. Admission 50p. CPS founder Keith Joseph for the plight of a tottering British capitalism.

In justifying the destruction of British Rail, and in which the assets would be sold off to private enterprise, the report makes a number of farcical assertions.

Firstly, that the railwa s grew primarily as a result of the greed of northern iron manufacturers for quick profits last century. This class of parvenus lacked the foresight of the southern financiers and in the process they retarded the development of the motor vehicle (which would have developed decades before the train [!]), and hence have lumbered us with an archaic transport system ever since.

Moreover, BR has been defended by successive Labour governments the past principally because Labour politicians played with toy train sets as boys - hence their romantic attachment to the . railways! By the same bizarre pseudo-freudian logic, maybe we could explain the carnage in the Falklands by referring to John Nott's antics with tin soldiers at Eton.

Secondly, some advanced capitalist states, the USA for example, have virtually gotten rich on railways, using road and air instead for moving passenger and freight traffic. The argument is that these forms of transit do not entail financing a large infrastructure (signalling, track maintenance) like FIGHT THE TORIES, NOT THE SOCIALISTS!

Labour movement confer ence, sponsored by several CLPs, the Bakers' executive, and the LPYS National Committee.

September 11 at Wembley Conference Centre. Delegates' credentials £1 from 1 Mentmore Terrace, London E8 3PN.

ISRAEL hands off Lebanon! Solidarity with the Palestinian people! Recognise the PLO! Down with Zionism! Labour Committee on Palestine picket of El Al, Regent St, London: Saturday August 14, 12 noon to 2pm. PALESTINE solidarity: exhibition of photographs at Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park, Sunday August 15, 12 noon to 8pm.

PALESTINE Solidarity social to raise funds for medical aid for Lebanon. Sunday August 29, Bloomsbury Theatre.

COVENTRY Palestine Solidarity Campaign demonstration: Saturday August 21 1pm from Edgewick Park. Speakers to include PLO rep and a Jewish socialist.

Hibbert reports.

BR chief Peter Parker In practice, however, only the USA has gone in this direction. France and West Germany are spending more on railways. And we should remember that the USA also has an almost non-existent social welfare system.

Thirdly, the report states that BR and its "monopolistic unions" have become a self-sufficient bastion of privilege and power for trade union and Labour politicians.

Get rid of this bureaucratic machine and the road is open for creating an efficient market economy.

Furthermore, the most ludicrous assertion of all is that there are more deaths and accidents in relation to train travel than there are on the roads. This mind-boggling "fact" is achieved by dividing the number of accidents in each type of transport by the number of trains (on the one hand) and road vehicles (on the other)!

The fact that the Tories are willing to go to this ridiculous extent to justify making a profit shows how capitalism distorts even the most basic of human senses.

Actually, 225,000 people (as many as the population of Derby) have died in road accidents since 1945, with 3.5 million people seriously injured! Transfer existing passenger and freight traffic (including nuclear waste) from rail to road and these figures are bound to escalate dramatically.

Only three years ago a petrol tanker exploded on a Spanish road next to a beach of holidaymakers, incinerating thirty people.

Millions of Britons are in deadly danger in town centres from such accidents.

Hull, for example, has the highest density of inflammable tankers passing through its streets of any town in the country -one every ten minutes -and violent explosions through road accidents are possible at any time.

But of course if you live in Sunbury-on-Thames you have nothing to worry about.

In contrast to the Tories, a genuine socialist government would plan the expansion of the railways. It would encourage the vast bulk of freight to go by Even in capitalist France, metro systems in cities like Paris and Lille are self-financing enterprises through taxing the local employers. There is no reason why this should not happen in the UK.

Why do the Tories wish to get rid of British Rail?

Get rid of BR and you open up the profitable passenger/freight business

to the private coach and

haulier firms, virtually all of whom provide finance to the Tory party. Safety standards would go out of the window, profits would go up (and there is no guarantee that they would either stay in the country or be ploughed back into industry).

Just as importantly for the Tories, abolition of BR, would capture yet another piece of the public sector for the "profit motive" whilst destroying a powerful battalion • of the labour movement. -the NUR and ASLEF - at the same time.

Furthermore, these right wing fanatics make no real distinction between British Rail as a nationalised industry and the labour movement.

For the Tories the Board is an objective achievement of the reforming. Labour government of 1945 and therefore something to be destroyed.

So what is the Tory for BR?

In public, they say that 'investment must be predicated on reductions of overmanning and new productivity agreements" (i.e. flexible rostering). Yet we should note that they have yet to put any new money into the industry.

We would argue therefore on the basis of the policy outlined in 'Truth about Transport" that the Tories have no intention of renovating Britain's rail network but are bent on a policy of piece-meal closure.

This places the antics of the TUC Finances and General Purposes Committee in sabotaging ASLEF in a distinctly sharper light. Quite simply the Tories led Duffy, Weighell, Murray and Chapple along the garden path like the proverbial donkeys are led along Blackpool beach.

Indeed now that the flexible rostering issue has been "solved" , the BR Board have placed compulsory redundancies in the workshops, which if added to the 4,500 jobs axe proposal announced last week amount to the same workforce loss as the original plans to close Horwich in Lanes and Shildon in the North East.

A national campaign in defence of the whole industry needs to be launched that embraces all the issues, from the eight hour day to the national wage review and the defence of jobs. The Tories target is a total dismantling of the network.

This needs to be made clear to all members, officials and Labour MPs connected with the industry. Meetings should be called - whether in the workplace, the union offices, or the House of Commons bar - to prepare the basis for a national struggle to defend the livelihoods of 250,000 workers and their families.

At the end of the day of course, it will be only through uniting the whole movement, spearheded by a new Triple Alliance of railworkers, miners and engineers that the predatory attacks of the mad axewoman and her underlings on the BR Board will be stopped.