14.10.1999

Workers’ control

Ladbroke Grove disaster

The rail disaster just outside Paddington station has shaken industry and the Blair government itself. As a result the privatisation of air traffic control and the London underground are now officially on hold.

Although thankfully the fatality figures are being scaled down from the initial 100 plus to under 40, they still represent the unacceptable human cost paid by railworkers and the travelling public for the dogmatic privatisation of the railways pushed through at breakneck speed in the dying days of the Major government. The result of privatisation has not been better services or less expensive fares, but administrative chaos, penny-pinching, lax safety and a string of former British Rail officials who are now capitalist multi-millionaires.

The fact that the Ladbroke Grove crash involved Great Western Trains, part of the First Bus Group, only two years after the Southall crash just a couple of miles down the line, has created an upsurge of public anger. Then GWT were charged with manslaughter and only just escaped prosecution through legal trickery. They were however fined £1.5million, the biggest sum imposed on a company under the Health and Safety Act.

The Southall inquiry was given evidence of a catalogue of breeches of safety procedures by GWT. How, for example, in the interests of keeping its aged fleet of high speed trains running, crucial safety equipment in the driver’s cab was isolated due to defects. It has also heard how the company removed - along with other train operators - the requirement to have a second driver in trains running in excess of 110 mph. The company admitted that it had pressurised the Southall driver to take out the train with the Automatic Warning System (AWS) isolated and the Automatic Train Protection system (ATP) switched off. Both these devices would have prevented the driver missing the warning signals - and avoided the subsequent collision with a freight train crossing the HST’s path.

The Ladbroke Grove crash has ominous similarities. A GWT HST proceeding into Paddington at high speed crashes head on into a Thames Trains unit coming out of Paddington. Initially blame was put on the Thames Trains driver. He passed at danger a SPAD signal SU109. Since then, however, evidence has mounted up revealing what the Health and Safety Commission calls “a systems failure”. Railtrack has been further exposed by statements produced by Aslef safety reps, such as myself, who complain of repeated attempts to get Railtrack to rectify the sighting difficulties of this signal. SU109 had been SPADed - ie, passed at danger - eight previous times since its introduction in 1993 when the line was remodelled, re-signalled and electrified as part of the Heathrow Express project. Further revelations on Channel 4 news from the ex-BR Western Region general manager, who was involved with the early stages of the project, showed that this junction was designed for use solely on the basis of all trains having ATP added - further proof that this accident was entirely avoidable.

The fallout from the Ladbroke Grove disaster has yet to hit home fully. Nevertheless, already it is highly likely that Railtrack will lose its safety functions and that ATP will be fitted to some trains, especially after Aslef general secretary Mick Rix scared Prescott with his threat to ballot all train companies that refused to fit ATP. Obviously the government is going to fund some improvements in rail safety and/or force the private train companies to cough up.

A largely ignored side to all of this is the RMT balloting its conductors over the recent changes introduced by Railtrack at the behest of the train companies to the standard rule book. They effectively take the safety functions - in the event of a failure or a crash - away from the conductor. Instead these duties are placed onto the driver. This tampering with rules that have held good for decades is all to do with the companies wanting to de-skill conductors so they can subcontract the job to security firms like Burns. Such changes are a real threat to both workers’ and passengers’ safety, being a recipe for confusion and delay in event of an accident, where the stopping of oncoming trains is vital and must be effected quickly. But this is the logic of a fragmented network of capitalist rail companies whose raison d’être is cutting costs in the drive for profits.

What should the attitude of communists be? Is it good enough to just call for the re-nationalisation of the railways as the SWP, Morning Star and most of the left do? Is it enough to identify the outrageous salaries paid to the directors and call for their sacking? No. Re-nationalisation under Blair will just replace a set of capitalist bosses with a set of state capitalist bosses. After all under successive Labour and Tory regimes nationalised British Rail was starved of cash. Accidents like Clapham were caused by excessive pressure on the workers and cost-cutting.

What is needed is for the railways to be under workers’ control: that is, under the democratic control of those who work on the railway. This demand can be met under capitalism although it very much challenges its logic. It is a demand premised on the needs of those who work on the railways and travel on the railways, while ignoring all the hand-wringing debate over how much safety capitalism can afford.

The Aslef and RMT leadership - both of which contain a not inconsiderable stratum of leftists, including some remaining SLP members - must not be allowed to mouth militant hot air till the dust settles. Privatisation is in crisis. Huge numbers of ordinary passengers are angry. A majority of Aslef, RMT and TSSA members could be won to political protest strikes around the democratic demand for taking the running of the rail industry from out of the greedy and incompetent hands of the millionaires. If the leadership cannot or will not fight, then the rank and file must - their very lives depend on safety.

A cross-union rank and file movement with a programme for workers’ control is an urgent necessity.

Steve Johnson