SAVE YORK WORKS

Keep the East London Line public RMTnews :: december 2006 :: www.rmt.org.uk 22 The cat is out of the bag after the mayor of London finally revealed that he has cut a deal with the government that requires the East London Line to be privatised. That is a step forward from denying that any privatisation is planned, or the nonsense that the extended East London Line was always to be thrown to the privateers. After ten years of private-sector failure on the national railway network, the same fate has been lined up, for the first time, for a London Underground line. Make no mistake, this is the thin end of a privatisation wedge that so far we have managed to keep away from Tube operations, and that is why there is a determination to stop it. Thieving scum? A couple of years back the mayor referred to private train operators as “rapacious thieving scum”: now there are four of them shortlisted to run the East London Line. I remember standing alongside Ken when he said that there was blood on the tracks thanks to rail privatisation, and that it should never be allowed to be spilled on the Tube. He pledged then that if there was a strike against the proposed part-privatisation of the Tube he would stand with us on the picket line. Ken should know Tube workers better than to suggest that we are looking for a ‘third way' on the East London Line – we are campaigning for the very way that he espoused himself. For Tube workers, privatisation is resisted because we know it is expensive and dangerous. Under this plan, a railway currently in the public sector will be turned over to a privateer whose sole aim is to make a profit. Trains would be operated and our members employed by a private company, while signalling would be controlled by Network Rail, another private company. It would be one thing if the mayor took over responsibility for the North London Railway and, after consulting the unions, reluctantly conceded there was no prospect of bringing its operations back into the public sector. It is something entirely different to take the publicly-run East London Line, parcel it up with the NLR and hand it over to a privateer. The attempted justification is that Transport for London wishes to link the line with the current Silverlink Metro services that come under TfL control from November 2007, led by the TfL-controlled London Rail. Let us get one thing straight: there is no physical, technical or legal reason why the integration of ‘London Overground’ services cannot be done while retaining the East London Line operations in the public sector. TfL has also intimated that the line was always to be franchised out to the private sector, this is simply not the case. The decision to make the Passenger Service Operator a private-sector company can only have been made in the spring of this year. The documents we have seen indicate not only that senior LUL managers were hoping that the line’s operations would remain within LUL, but that it was also still in the running to be named PSO as recently as March. No consultation What makes matters worse is that this whole shady deal has been shrouded in secrecy, with a shortlist of bidders – National Express, Govia, MTR Laing and NedRail –issued with invitations to tender. There has been no ‘stakeholder consultation’, the invitations to tender are not in the public domain and bidders have been told not to divulge what they are being asked to bid for. Even the miserable franchise process for the national railway network has been more transparent than that. Along with our colleagues in the TSSA we have complained to London Rail over the absence of consultation and the lack of transparency surrounding the process. The campaign against any further rail privatisation is supported not least by Labour Party policy. In September the TUC Congress voted to oppose the ELL privatisation plan, and the most recent opinion poll shows that 74 per cent wanted the ELL operated by the public sector. A number of London MPs have signed Early Day Motion 2398 supporting the campaign against privatisation. Private train operators have been a disaster for Britain’s railways. Subsidy and profits are up, yet services remain worse than under public ownership. The ‘public private partnership’ has already fragmented Tube infrastructure and undermined safety and efficiency, while delivering little else than guaranteed, risk- free-profits at £2 million a week. That mistake should not be repeated with the East London Line, and it doesn’t have to be. Expecting the labour movement to embrace it is like expecting the Christmas turkey to take the lead in stuffing itself. RMT general secretary Bob Crow explains why London mayor Ken Livingstone has got it wrong by privatising the East London Line