Newsfight!
Call me an unreconstructed Bolshevik, but I like strikes - and the tube strikes earlier this year were the best thing to happen to Britain's crumbling transport system for a very long time. Transport workers and passengers were united in demanding a publicly owned, properly funded system: despite denunciations from all the major political parties and tabloid headlines like 'Hang the Tube bullies', public support for the strikers remained firm. It's just a shame that the pathetic bootlickers who run the rail unions have doffed their caps to Massa Tony and wimped out of another round of strikes. (They might have won, and we can't have that...)
The problem afflicting Britain's transport system is the same one that afflicts all our public services: too much capitalism. Everything from transport to the NHS is basically run to make a profit and/or provide a docile, punctual workforce for the CBI. But, as those of you who don't do Economics and Management will have noticed, there's a contradiction here. Although your average bourgeois would quite like an efficient transport system, he or she is damned if they're going to pay for it. So services are privatised, down-sized or simply scrapped, fares soar and our trains, tubes and buses fall to bits. Forget about making people's lives easier - our transport system can't even get the proles to work on time. Nationalised transport was/is also rubbish, of course, but that's because it's starved of cash and run by incompetent bureaucrats rather than the real experts - transport workers and passengers themselves. The Tories specifically aimed to make British Rail crap; Virgin Trains, by contrast, is crap because it's there to make money for a bearded oaf. No one except the Stalin Society (write to W. Straw, c/o New College for more information) seriously thinks that nationalising things is an end in itself, but nonetheless, public ownership is a vital part of the solution.
We need a socialist transport system - publicly owned, democratically controlled, integrated and funded through progressive taxation. Until we have that people will keep using their cars and all higher fuel tax will do is crucify the poor and let the rich - once again - off the hook.
spiritof68@hotmail.com).
Transport is a great national issue that effects everybody from the highest to the lowest. My daily trip from the dreaming spires up to Summertown is of particular concern, of course, leaving me with agonising decisions over walking, bicycle use or catching one of the ridiculously expensive bus services. But apparently the "real world" is facing a dilemma nowadays, too, about the future of the rail networks - presumably because there are some occasions when you just have to let the chauffeur have a day off?
One main topic, obviously cynically "buried" this month by the government in the wake of the attacks on New York, was that of Railtrack. Oddly enough, I am not hugely keen on the privatisation of the network, as I think it presents more problems than it solves, and doesn't help provide competition, which is the basis of any decent business efficiency. However, one has to consider the consequences of Stephen Byers' actions in his backdoor re-nationalisation manoeuvre, which bares all the hallmarks of this government's two-facedness. It has completely destroyed any confidence the private sector had for helping to fund future public-private initiatives such as the London Underground. Given Blair's reluctance to raise taxation, how exactly do they think they can improve this vital public service?
The simple answer is, of course, that they can't. In any case, though, they have to deal with this anachronistic mentality that the British public have, namely a socialist-conditioned idea that somehow in the field of public services the private sector cannot provide a good and comprehensive alternative. Never mind the fact that the old British Rail was just as bad, if not worse, than its private successors. Never mind, also, the fact that two of the world's best railway systems, those of Switzerland and Japan, are privately run and are a hundred times better than the over-subsidised TGV in France, for instance. Short-sightedness seems to rule the day. I suppose the government could up funding by selling overpriced rail tickets and introducing extremely expensive sandwiches for sale to gullible consumers. Oh, hang on...
anatole.pang@wadham.ox.ac.uk)
18th Oct 2001