A BEECHING REPORT FOR EUROPE

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: june 2011 :: RMTnews 20 The European Transport Workers' Federation (ETF) has warned that the EU’s new "recast" of its first EU rail liberalisation package – which calls for a "vertical split" between track and trains – will have huge consequences even undermining the right to strike. Twenty years ago next month, the European Commission published its infamous rail directive 91/440/EC. It was seized by John Major’s Tory government in 1992 as a blueprint to break up and privatise British Rail. The Commission’s new ”recast” is designed to privatise the remaining state-owned railways in Europe and switch investment from a ‘social railway’ to a corporate “single European railway area” with a priority on high-speed and trans-European rail freight to serve Europe’s single market. The European Commission’s latest proposal - a ‘Directive establishing a single European railway area (Recast)’ - is a smash-and-grab raid on state- owned railways using EU ‘liberalisation’ rules to impose privatisation despite the fact that no electorate in Europe has ever voted for it. French CGT rail union spokesman, Henry Wacsin told the ETF: “This ‘recast’ represents nothing less than a project led directly by the Commission, to completely break up public sector, state-owned monopolies in railways and to use the market and EU rules on competition to create corporate, transnational EU transport and logistics monopolies”. The McNulty report complies with these EU plans and was written with an eye to promoting Britain as the shop window for this latest stage of EU rail privatisation. Page 68 of the McNulty report summary points out that there are no legal obstacles with implementation “provided due attention is given to conformance with EU and public law restrictions, EU directives, particularly with regard to the separation of railway infrastructure and undertakings and EU procurement and State Aid constraints”. McNulty and the ConDem government share the EU’s mania for ‘liberalisation’ and privatisation as weapons to attack railworkers’ jobs, pay and pensions. The Commission is promoting this by demanding complete organisational separation of infrastructure and railway undertakings, as first outlined 20 years ago in its directive 91/440/EC. The effect of separating management of track and trains is of course well known in Britain. It is the fundamental ‘vertical split’ that led to the fragmentation of our railway system with such disastrous results. However, the European Commission’s new ‘recast’ directive undermines ‘holding companies’ that countries such as France, Belgium, Austria and Germany set up in the last ten years to delay the total fragmentation of their railways as occurred in Britain. With the ‘recast’ directive, the European Commission is demanding complete dismantling of national rail companies. As the British experience of implementing EU rail liberalisation demonstrates, PROTEST: RMT members march in Paris in 2008 on an ETF demonstration against the EU’s rail privatisation drive A BEECHING REPORT FOR EUROPE RMT president Alex Gordon exposes EU plans for Beeching-style rail cuts and McNulty- style privatisation across Europe