OVER THE RAINBOW
Page 57
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QOONER or later it was bound to come and perhaps the la narrowly averted rail strike provided the opportunity. One or two voices are asking whether we should not be better off without the railways. Now that the question has become respectable it is likely to be repeated more frequently and in contexts where the Government will be called upon to give an answer.
The Minister of Transport, Mrs. Barbara Castle, has a team of economists preparing a White Paper on integration. The very word is like a knell. In spite of reassuring noises from some of the commentators, road transport operators are bound to be afraid that the mixture will be very much as before and that, as some Left Wing members of the Labour Party might put it, the British Transport Commission will rise again on the dead ashes of its former self.
CRITICISM BOUND TO BE MADE If integration seems to be taking this ominous shape the criticism is bound to be made that the Government, so far from trying to view the transport situation as a whole, is primarily concerned with preserving the railways, if necessary at the expense of other providers of transport, of trade and industry and of the general public.
The criticism will be difficult to answer. The financial drain of the railways on the economy is likely to increase. The negotiated settlement more or less promised to the railway unions can only add to the annual deficit. It might simplify the problem to acknowledge at the outset that it would hardly arise if the railways did not exist. From this point the path is easy to the conclusion that the correct solution would entail the gradual elimination of the railways. Such a solution might almost be described as the logical extension of the I3eeching plan.
Admittedly it would be a little too simple. There are some services for which the railways must be maintained, notably for commuter traffic in London and possibly one or two other large conurbations. A good deal of other traffic could go by road and perhaps ought to go by road unless the railways are able to show that they can carry it economically.
SOCIAL PROBLEMS There are social problems involved. In particular the railwaymen would suffer if their means of livelihood were taken away from them. There is a good deal of sympathy for their predicament. Many of them are underpaid. They may be guilty of restrictive practices; but they are bound to look coldly on the suggestion that higher wages should be linked with greater productivity. They may well suspect that the best they can do will not succeed in making the railways solvent.
How can the interests of the railwaymen be safeguarded? What should be done to provide the best possible system of transport? In any investigation the two questions must be kept entirely separate. The temptation must be resisted to propose special privileges for the railways, or the compulsory transfer of traffic from road transport. This might help to solve the railway problem but that ought not to be the principal purpose of the exercise.
Refusal to acknowledge this has stultified much of the argument on the subject, especially from within some sections of the Labour Party. No better example can be found than an article by Mr. Jack Jones in the March issue of the official journal of the Transport and General Workers' Union.
PLANNING URGENTLY NEEDED He begins by expressing regret that the Government's National Plan ignores the section on transport in the Party's manifesto at the last General Election. Nowhere was planning more urgently needed than in our transport system, the manifesto warned. "Labour will draw up a national plan for transport covering the national networks of road, rail and canal communications, properly co-ordinated with air, coastal shipping and port services."
Mr. Jones does not mention what must be in the minds of most of his union's members when they consider what should be done in the transport industry. Those who are engaged in road transport can hardly think it in their interests that the gradual progress away from railway dominance should be reversed and that they should be caught up in a national plan which could put some of them out of work. Even the fairly limited transfer of traffic involved in the liner-train scheme has had its repercussions among long-distance drivers and their union representatives. The people to whom Mr. Jones was directing his remarks might well envisage a different future from what was in his own mind. They might, for example, have preferred a proposal that road transport should be regarded as the backbone of the industry and that the majority of the railway services should be pensioned off, being allowed to decline gracefully with proper safeguards for the railway workers. The solution preferred by Mr. Jones was the "reintroduction of an overall authority to operate an integrated national transport industry".
THE DISADVANTAGES The disadvantages that this policy might bring to his own members are reasonably clear. His consciousness of them may be the reason why for the most part Mr. Jones' elaboration of the theme seems obscure and even perverse. He seems continually to be leading towards a clear conclusion which evaporates as soon as he reaches it, like the end of the rainbow. Somewhere over the rainbow there is an efficient transport system and "with a socialist approach to the problem the Government will not find our members unwilling to respond".
What is Mr. Jones trying to prove? "With more than 80 per cent of freight now going by road," he says, "the need to provide the most efficient service is self-evident." What seems self-evident to the ordinary person is just the opposite. The transfer of traffic from rail to road, in spite of obstacles and restrictions, seems a simple demonstration of the fact that the "efficient service" is already provided.
Perhaps the most extraordinary statement in Mr. Jones' article is that "private enterprise has had its chance in transport and failed". In so far as there has been a failure it has been in the field of public ownership. Perhaps it was not possible for the railways to succeed completely whatever the type of organization under which they had been run. It is because of the railways that the problem of integration has to be tackled. It is dispiriting to find prominent members of the Labour Party and of the trade unions still under the illusion that a large-scale extension of public ownership is going to meet any part of the problem.
Janus