Workers' Fight workplace bulletin editorials, 27 February 2007

Last Wednesday's announcement of a 20% troop reduction in Iraq was a crude exercise in political fudge. Not only did Blair avoid setting a date for the soldiers' departure, but in the same breath, he made it clear that more troops will be needed in the killing fields of Afghanistan!

The timing of this announcement was motivated by political horse-trading. A vote was due in the Commons over the launch of a public enquiry on the war. The odds seemed to be against Blair, who did not want to face even such limited exposure of his policy to public scrutiny. His announcement was the price of getting his own backbenchers to let him off the hook. As a result there will be no public enquiry. But whether the troops will actually be withdrawn remains to be seen.

Nor did Blair fail to make another nauseating display of his arrogant contempt for the Iraqis. He declared a "victory" for the "forces of democracy", claiming that, having made Basra a "safe area", British troops will hand it over to Iraqi forces to restore the country to "prosperity".

It would be hard to accumulate more lies in so few words. A recent report on Basra stated: "Instead of a stable, law-abiding region with a representative government and police primacy, the deep south is factionalised, lawless, ruled as a kleptocracy and subject to militia primacy." As recently as last December, 127 prisoners were found to have been held illegally and tortured in a Basra police station! Is this a "safe area"?

As to Iraq's "prosperity", how is the Iraqi population supposed to make it emerge out of the rubble left by British bombs, not to mention the economic disintegration caused by the pre-war decade of international blockade against Iraq?

But then, by "prosperity", Blair means something else. The Iraqi parliament is about to vote a bill which will give the oil majors a free ride to plunder the country's oil resources. Blair's friends at BP and Shell are already rubbing their hands in glee. This government's idea of "democracy" only means one thing: big dividends for western fat cats!

5 years after the Potters Bar crash, which killed 7 people, another train derailment has killed one person and injured 22, five of them seriously, including the driver. This time it was a Virgin Pendolino service - which came off the track in Cumbria last Friday evening. And so far, it looks as if it was down to the self-same cause as the Potter's Bar derailment: defective points maintenance. It appears that stretcher bars which hold the rails apart, came off and one has gone missing completely.

We are told that thanks to the "state of the art" construction of the Pendolino trains, passengers were "protected" from serious injury despite the fact that 6 of the 9 carriages tumbled down a steep embankment and were severely damaged.

But this train was travelling at 95 mph on tracks which are anything but "state of the art". Instead of being wholly replaced by new tracks, the West Coast Mainline, one of the busiest in Europe, has been undergoing a patchwork "modernisation" ever since the days of Railtrack. The points are at least 30 years old and the line itself was constructed for trains designed in Victorian times!

In this, the takeover of the privatised Railtrack by state-controlled Network Rail in 2002 has not made an ounce of difference to a patently unsafe strategy. By excluding contractors like Jarvis (which got off scott-free after Potters Bar) and taking maintenance back in-house, Network Rail said safety would improve. But it is forever enforcing cost-efficiencies on its workforce and boasts of how it operates as a commercial business. Its object is to make profits, even if it does not pay dividends, no doubt in preparation for a future re-privatisation which has always been part of this government's objectives. It may be accountable to a government quango, but it is run by 4 executive directors, all ex-CEOs of private companies which benefit from government contracts like Bechtel, Costain, Halliburton and Tubelines, to be exact.

What is more, among the "members" of Network Rail are the same private train operators, including the flamboyant owner of Virgin, Richard Branson, who pay for track use. Keeping costs down is therefore their main preoccupation. How does that improve safety?

As long as King Profit rules public services - as it does, thanks to Labour's servility to big business - these services will never be safe.