15.05.2002

How many more?

What a shambles. Now Potters Bar must be added to the tragic litany of avoidable disasters that have happened since the break-up of British Rail in 1996. Seven dead - seven families bereft of their loved ones; scores of people injured, some critically ill, and all of them destined to bear the physical or psychological scars of this horrific experience for the rest of their lives. Whereas the direct cause of the accident remains to be established - incompetent maintenance and slipshod safety inspection seem likely - the ultimate cause is clear, just as it was at Hatfield in October 2000: this is what happens when public services are run to satisfy private greed, when, as a result of the politically motivated fragmentation of the industry, everything, including safeguarding human lives, must take second place to the interests of shareholders. The response of Railtrack? Cynical prevarication, false information and frantic buck-passing. The response of Steven Byers - still, miraculously, a member of the Labour cabinet? Just as in the worst days of the Tory government, this ultra-Blairite New Labour minister, grotesquely over-promoted on the grounds that he was a 'safe pair of hands', refuses to accept responsibility for anything. It is always somebody else's fault. Adding insult to injury, he rejected the justified calls from Bob Crow, general secretary of the RMT, and others for a full public enquiry. Instead, he told the House of Commons that this tragedy was just a "one-off", a "freak" accident, something therefore nobody could possibly have foreseen. Yet even when the findings of the health and safety executive's investigations are made known, understandable doubts and anxieties will remain. What we do know is that when the 12:45 King's Cross to King's Lynn service passed over points outside Potters Bar station at around 100mph on Friday May 10, at least two of the vital nuts that secure the stretcher bars operating the points were totally detached. At first, Railtrack was not even able to say which firm was responsible for maintenance on this section of track. Sabotage was canvassed as a possible cause. Later, it emerged that Jarvis Rail, part of Jarvis plc - one of the "principal contractors" who have made millions out of maintaining the physical infrastructure of the rails since privatisation - was the company in question. Jarvis admitted that the same nuts were found to be missing on May 1, nine days before the accident, but that they had (allegedly) been securely replaced. The points, according to Jarvis, were given a further visual inspection just one day before the derailment and were supposedly found to be in order. It turns out that a railworker member of RMT had warned management about the state of the track more than three weeks earlier. No action was taken. Earlier still, a commuter had contacted Railtrack to complain about the unstable track. Weeks later, he was contacted with an unbelievable request to help Railtrack out by supplying precise information as to the whereabouts of the problem. I spoke to two of our comrades who work on the rails. They replied in a personal capacity. First, Derek Goodliffe (RMT train crew and shunting executive and Eastern Region Socialist Alliance): "To begin with, Railtrack's suggestion that sabotage might have been the cause of the incident was entirely typical. Anything to try and shuffle off responsibility. If you remember, after Hatfield we had the same talk about terrorism, bomb blasts and the like, until it became clear that a broken rail resulting from corner gauge cracking was the culprit. Bad maintenance then; bad maintenance now". As Bob Crow and the media themselves have made clear, even the recommendations that came out of the Paddington enquiry have still not been probably implemented, which is "nothing short of a scandal", said comrade Goodliffe. The truth is that privatisation - another Tory drive to tame the unions, in this case by breaking up the network, while simultaneously lining the pockets of the fat cats in the city - has produced a chaotic lack of coordination and control: 25 train operating companies, plus Railtrack, all desperate to secure their own bottom line by penalising and claiming off one another for the slightest failure to observe tight contracts and rigid deadlines. Small wonder that, as a result, safety is scandalously compromised. "Subcontracting of vital work has led to a lack of control and to direct attacks on the working conditions and union organisation of track maintenance staff," he said. "Experienced workers have left the industry and new recruits are turned out onto the railway with little knowledge or training." Describing the Potters Bar accident as "an utter disgrace", Peter Grant (Manchester Piccadilly Aslef and Greater Manchester Socialist Alliance), pointed to a catastrophic fall in the standards of maintenance and safety inspection as the root cause of the problem. Citing Ken Loach's film The Navigators as a vivid and accurate portrayal of this decline, he said: "Now we see it every day - people who don't have a clue. They simply don't know what they are doing." As the truth begins to emerge, we see what the comrades mean. Post-privatisation, some 110,000 workers employed by around 1,500 different firms are involved in maintaining the railways on the basis of work subcontracted by the likes of Jarvis and Balfour Beatty. These casual workers, many of them recruited in pubs and clubs, have no experience and receive a bare minimum of training. Despite repeated warnings from the health and safety executive about employing staff whose level of competence fails to meet the required standard, the principal contractors (motivated by profit considerations) continue to cut corners. Jarvis's shares fell by 14% last Monday, as investors worried about the company's liabilities. But in the period since Jarvis became a principal contractor for rail maintenance, its shares had trebled. Rich pickings indeed for the parasites who boarded this gravy train. Many of them, having taken their profits, will be waiting to pile back in at a lower price, once the 'fuss' over Potters Bar has been forgotten. Meanwhile the Tories and their press shed crocodile tears, while gleefully blaming the whole affair on the "demoralisation" of management caused when Railtrack was put under administration. How many more lives are to be sacrificed on the altar of private greed? What is to be done? Not only Railtrack - currently in limbo under administration while it waits to be sold off to a government-backed and government-funded buyer - but Âall train operating companies must be immediately taken out of the hands of the profiteers and renationalised. We must force the state to act now to safeguard railworkers and passengers alike. However, we do not hark back to the 'golden days' of the bureaucratically run British Rail. The industry must be brought under the control of its workers and those who use it. With the backing of their unions if possible the workforce on the rails should take action to bring trains, the whole railway infrastructure and its working practices under their direct control. The Socialist Alliance railworkers' network, formed at the SA's trade union conference in March, has a crucial role to play in leading a campaign along these lines. Maurice Bernal