PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: march 2012 :: RMTnews 23 President’s column ALTERNATIVES TO PRIVATISATION AND AUSTERITY RMT members joined unions representing transport workers from across Europe to protest in Brussels on March 28 against the EU’s privatisation drive. For decades EU directives covering postal services to ferries to energy to health care have directed governments to open public services up to competition, which means closing them to public ownership and control. Selling off state-owned, publicly-run companies cheap to the private sector has become the European Commission’s primary purpose. Of course, the neoliberal cliques that dominate the Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties don’t need encouragement and they willingly bend over backwards for the corporate shilling. This month, the ConDem coalition’s Health and Social Care Bill passed through parliament. 62 out of a total of 217 peers who voted for the bill in the House of Lords have financial interests in private health companies, which they did not disclose. The attack on our National Health Service has been mounted by politicians bought and paid for by private health insurance firms and ‘Big Pharma’. Institutional corruption still shocks when it happens in parliament. However, in the merry-go-round of EU corporate lobbying such systematic corruption and corporate lobbying is the rule, not the exception. The EU’s privatisation model is particularly dysfunctional for public services. An artificial separation between distribution networks and services they supply benefits private- sector cherry-picking to the detriment of planned public enterprises. The latest EU diktats ordering Greece, Portugal and Ireland to privatise state assets are a smash-and-grab by powerful French and German monopolies and banks. It represents the emasculation of national sovereignty in order to end the independent democratic life of those countries, conferring on them the status of EU colonies, by removing their essential infrastructure from democratic public control. The EU’s 2009 Lisbon Treaty is designed to make returning public services to public ownership constitutionally impossible, whatever the peoples of Europe vote for. A similar process of dismembering Network Rail under the misnomer ‘deep alliances’ is proposed in the UK government’s Rail Command Paper. Whatever criticisms RMT has of Network Rail, it must be acknowledged the firm has succeeded in putting engineering back in charge of Britain’s railways, which were in a ruinous state following the multiple train crashes under Railtrack. Now government policy is to put private train operators in control of devolved Network Rail regions, which raises the likelihood of creating ‘Railtrack mark two’. This retrograde step must be reversed for the safety of rail workers and the traveling public. As RMT has suggested, why can’t Network Rail take over train operators and run services in a joined-up, publicly owned railway? We could call it, I don’t know, British Rail? This May local elections will provide an opportunity to set out an alternative to policies of privatisation, cuts and austerity that the EU, the ConDems and local authorities are all agreed on. In some constituencies RMT members are standing as candidates to oppose cuts and privatisation. I wish Paul Reilly, our Nuneaton branch secretary well in his contest. From such small acorns do mighty oaks grow. I am proud to be standing alongside RMT’s London Transport regional organiser, Steve Hedley, for election to the Greater London Assembly on May 3, as part of the Trade Unionists and Socialist Coalition. If elected we will see it as our duty to fight for the slogan we took on the streets of Brussels: "For Nationalisation, not Privatisation!" This demand is echoed by transport workers and public service users all over Europe who are sick of the EU's neoliberal dogmas and government- by-corporation. RMT members don't just want a bigger slice of the cake, we want the whole bakery. Alex Gordon force national railway authorities to privatise domestic passenger rail services. That is also why EU leaders are interested in the McNulty report in Britain which seeks to make workers and passengers pay for a railway dominated by corporate interests. The EU proposes to take railway, bus, metro and ferry services and infrastructure out of the control of accountable public bodies and create a single European transport network dominated by private sector monopoly interests. Portugal’s CGTP transport union general secretary Armenio Carlos has made a call to confront these neo- liberal attacks on workers. “We are at a crossroads, either we surrender or we fight. “Our people have already proved that at the various times we were occupied, we did not surrender, we always responded by defending our sovereignty,” he said.