Once more into the Beeching
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IF THE Angry Brigade had tried to blow up the Palace of Westminster instead of the Conservatives' humble Leeds office, the explosion could scarcely have been louder than that caused in Parliament and elsewhere the same day by the Serpell committee's report on the railways.
The Opposition, still smarting under the Franks committee's exoneration of Mrs Thatcher from blame for the Falklands fracas, turned its wrath on the inoffensive David Howell as the minister responsible for railway policy or lack of it.
The report was, he said, not a matter for snap judgments. he was one of the few who thought so. MPs variously described it as horrendous, disgraceful, a waste of time and Beeching-like. To British Rail parts of it were unreliable, superficial, inaccurate, misleading, inexplicable and contained serious omissions.
Union leaders robustly described it as a "heap of rubbish" and a "disaster." Transport 2000 saw it narrowly as "a blinkered irrelevancy."
A report that merely adumbrates six possible courses of action without making recommendations hardly warrants such violent emotion. Blow me, not all the committee members could agree even on the interpretation of their terms of reference.
My sympathy goes to Sir David Serpell who as chairman has to suffer all the opprobrium attaching to the committee and its report. "A nice fellow," as they say; "nobody likes him."