Philip Bagwell: End of the Line — the Fate of British Railways under Thatcher, Verso NLB, £3.95
British Railways have a reputation for being overstaffed and unproductive. Debates in the media focus on whether 'the country' can afford the huge subsidies involved in running the system and whether or not railway lines should be concreted over for the use of private vehicles. This preoccupation only goes to show how far hatred of the public sector can distort reality.
In 1950 British Railways employed 497,000 staff. By 1981 the figure was 166,000 and falling. Yet passenger mileage was only 5 per cent down on the 1950 figure — quite an achievement in terms of productivity statistics! Strangely enough, of the 21,000 miles of railway closed down since the early 1920s only 70 miles has been converted to roads and that's despite the fact that most of the lines were not in rural areas but in big cities or on main routes.
Conversion to roads is a nonsense. So is the idea that the railways are oversubsidised. It is roads and private transport that have benefited from government transport subsidies over the years. The long term discrimination against public transport is finally being transformed under Thatcher into suffocation of the railways. End of the Line documents the process.
The railways are beginning to rot in front of our eyes. Out of the remaining 22,000 miles of track 3,000 miles will have to be closed by 1990 due to lack of maintenance making it unsafe. More and more speed restrictions due to worn out track are slowing down the system.
Again by 1990, 7,000 miles of railway will be controlled by signalling equipment more than 50 years old. In 1979 only 16 new locomotives were built out of 2,000 which needed replacement. The government is firmly blocking electrification which is the key to development of modern railways.
From a straightforward economic point of view it doesn't make sense to run a major national asset into the ground. Britain is completely out of step with the rest of Europe in its transport policy. A 1977 study found that BR capital expenditure was lower than any of the nine other countries examined. That was before Thatcher got in. Since then BR investment levels have fallen to half the 1977 level.
However, the opposite applies to the roads and to private transport. The government happily approved expenditure of £740 million of trunk road schemes in 1982-3, an increase of 20 per cent on the previous year. Nor did they object to local authorities spending a further £1,200 million on road maintenance and construction. This reflects the blatant discrimination involved in allocating transport resources.
When the Department of Transport considers a trunk road scheme, it uses a method of cost benefit analysis which takes into account the value of time saved by motorists using the route. In other words, the road scheme is assessed as a public service. But when it comes to the railways, capital spending is judged by commercial criteria in terms of return on capital invested.
It's no wonder that other industrial countries which do not make this crazy distinction spend so much more on public transport. Anyone reading an article in the press about BR would gain the impression that the discrimination worked the other way around.
The granting of licences to private coach firms has resulted in low coach fares between cities. But it has also forced the National Bus Company to compete on equal terms with the privateers — cutting back on their rural services which were subsidised by takings from the more profitable routes. Dozens of villages are now without any form of public transport at all.
The success of the NBC in competing with the privateers (despite the fact that private coach firms were also receiving subsidies) is to be rewarded by privatising sections of the NBC itself. The NBC estimate this could lead to a withdrawal of sixty million miles of services.
There are many other hidden subsidies to private transport. Tax subsidies to company car owners run at around £2,000 million a year, while the cost of road accidents is estimated at £1,730 a year.
Pollution and damage to the environment is impossible to estimate in cash terms, as is the social cost to the old, the young, women and the poor in general who have to rely on public transport and suffer at the hands of government policy.
As far as the labour movement is concerned, a policy of simply defending the railways and public transport is inadequate. The only case that can be made is a case for improving services entailing a massive national campaign mobilising transport workers and the public.
End of the Line is a useful tool for such a campaign. It explains the problems facing the industry and the attacks made on it by the government, the consequences of privatisation to date and the proposals of the Serpell Report. This is vital educational material both for railworkers (the NUR has purchased 5,000 copies) and for socialists concerned with the serious development of policy on industry.
As far as the actual development of policy by the rail unions is concerned, however, Professor Bagwell's book suffers from his long association with the NUR bureaucracy during the era of Sid Weighell. In two chapters on the 1982 strikes he defends the sell out of the ASLEF strike and the deliberate disorganisation of the 2-day NUR strike. It is clear that along with the trade union bureaucrat he doesn't expect much from the rank and file. His only hope for change is placed with the election of a Labour government.
But in order to see elected the type of Labour government which would seriously put public transport first, the NUR and other trade unions will have to lead their membership into campaigning and confrontation.
IVOR EVANS is an activist in the NUR, working on London Transport.