The collapsing infrastructure on the privatised railways constituted a growing threat to public safety and was the cause of a series of major train crashes. The tragic disasters at Clapham Junction, where 34 people were killed and 110 injured, followed by Southall, Paddington, Hatfield and Potters Bar, again accompanied by many deaths and injuries, sent shockwaves throughout the country. The scenes of carnage, twisted and charred wreckage and ripped up tracks, provoked a widespread backlash against the privatised railways. The private rail companies had received billions of public money in subsidies, and still continue to do so, yet they had failed to put fail-safe systems in place on trains because of the cost. As one of the Paddington crash survivors put it:
“Money takes second place to lives.” Belatedly, some of the directors of these companies have been charged with corporate manslaughter. But, despite this, thanks to the deployment of expensive lawyers, they all appear very confident of escaping justice.
Opinion polls continually reveal massive opposition to privatisation in Britain, which has gone the furthest of any advanced industrial country. A Guardian/ICM poll in March 2001 showed 76 per cent wanted to see the railways renationalised, while 60 per cent wanted an end to private prisons. Regarding the privatisation of air traffic control, 72 per cent were opposed, with only 14 per cent of Labour and 14 per cent of Tory voters supporting the plan. Even 40 per cent said BT should be renationalised! This was surprising, as many workers had been given shares in the company, and even their union, the NCU, had in the past consistently rejected calls for its renationalisation. It was supposed to be one of the most popular privatisations carried out by Thatcher. Now all that has turned to dust. Contrary to all the propaganda of New Labour, privatisation is not a vote-winner but deeply unpopular with the electorate – even with many Tory voters. Yet Blair stubbornly reaffirms his determination to press on with “more of the same”.
In a transparent attempt to fool the public, the government has resorted to the policy of privatisation in the form of the so-called private-public partnership – a ploy originally dreamed up by the Tories. But people immediately saw through this manoeuvre. According to the polls PPP is deeply unpopular: only 25 per cent support it, including just 32 per cent of Tory voters, and a mere 23 per cent of Labour voters. The polls also show that all voters wanted public services to be run by the government or local authorities and overwhelmingly rejected the view that public services should be run for profit. Only 6 per cent, and just 13 per cent of Tories, thought they should be profit-run.
This reflected a massive sea change in public opinion. Despite years of privatisation, there is now a massive reaction against this policy, and indeed a growing distrust of market economics in general. Yet the leaders of New Labour are blind to the facts of life. For them, everything is for the best in the best of all capitalist worlds. The Labour election anthem of 1997 was Things Can Only Get Better. But the reality has been completely different. For the great majority, things were going from bad to worse. Despite the obscene wealth made by the super-rich, there now exists a general and well-founded perception that Britain is becoming transformed into something resembling a Third World country – at least in comparison to our neighbours in Europe. Yet this powerful and growing groundswell of resentment against “the market” was completely ignored by the Blair leadership, which continued to pander to the interests of big business and sing the praises of the wonders of “free enterprise”. And this is supposed to be realism!
For Blair, the way to reduce unemployment was to force the unemployed off the dole into very low-paid jobs while continuing to fiddle the figures as the Tories had done. The government has cracked down hard to stop the unemployed claiming benefits – even harder than under Thatcher and Major. Blair boasted in an interview with American business magazine Forbes, “We are the first government in 30 years in which the welfare bill is falling. People go on about the Thatcher government but their welfare bill went up every year. Our real welfare bill is falling. Now, we need to deepen that.”
The Blairites were increasingly seen as out of touch. In the May 2000 local elections, Labour experienced its worst election result since 1992, with the loss of 600 council seats. In Liverpool, then under a new Blairite leadership, Labour experienced its worst election result in the city for more than 50 years. This was in marked contrast to the success of the Militant-led City Council of the mid-1980s, when Labour went from strength to strength. In these elections, by contrast, Labour supporters stayed at home in droves, disillusioned with the government’s performance. Turnout was only 30 per cent nationally and 32 per cent in London. “I have a wife and two children to raise and I really thought in 1997 that we were heading for a bright new era. Tony Blair has failed to deliver. If anything, he is more Tory than many Tories”, stated Brian Cox, 31, an unemployed dockyard labourer.[4]
The attempt of the Blairites to block Ken Livingstone as Labour’s candidate for mayor of London created a furore within the Labour movement. Livingstone secured over 74,000 votes, while Frank Dobson, the candidate of Blair, only managed to win some 22,000 votes. Livingstone’s support in the affiliated trade unions was even higher than amongst Party members. Scandalously, Dobson “won” the official nomination thanks to the handful of votes from MPs, MEPs and Labour candidates for the London Assembly. Mass protest meetings were held and Labour Party meetings suddenly came to life. In the end, however, Livingstone decided to stand as an independent candidate. For many Londoners, he was regarded as the legitimate Labour candidate and as a consequence easily won the mayoral election, while Dobson (with only 13 per cent of the vote) was humiliated, and pushed into third place behind the Tory candidate. In protest at the failure of the Labour leadership to listen to the concerns of Labour’s “core” supporters, the former right-winger turned “soft” left, Peter Kilfoyle, resigned from the government and became an increasingly vocal opponent of the Blair line. Later Dobson himself left the government and opposed Blair over Foundation hospitals, the Iraq war and other issues.
Despite this clear vote of no confidence in the local elections and in the London mayoral election, the Blairites continued with their Tory policies. For them, the poor showing in these elections was simply a matter of “presentation”! So, despite massive public opposition, they continued to push through the privatisation of air traffic control (dubbed the “Railtrack in the sky”), as well as the part privatisation of London Underground. In the latter case, some 6,000 workers were handed over to the private sector. Even National Savings was handed over to Siemens Business Services, who in turn ended the final salary pension scheme for their workers.
Once again, the disappointment on the political front saw the working class turn increasingly towards the industrial front. “Militancy is growing across the transport unions in relation to working hours which are directly related to safety”, stated a report in the Socialist Appeal. “Following ASLEF’s decision at its conference a few weeks ago to fight for a four day week, the RMT Annual General Meeting in Great Yarmouth Town Hall voted to step up the fight for a 35-hour week, including a campaign of industrial action.”[5]
At this time, there were also strikes, notably strikes against bad working conditions at call centres. It had been argued in some quarters that these workers could never be organised or take strike action. But once again life proved the sceptics wrong. The strikes at BT call centres took place over the threat to discipline workers if they failed to complete calls within 285 seconds. These exploited white-collar workers had been subjected to Fordist production methods superimposed upon the emerging 24-hour service economy. As Sue Fernie, research fellow at the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance, stated it: “The possibilities for monitoring behaviour and measuring output in call centres is amazing to behold – the tyranny of the assembly line is but a Sunday school picnic compared with the control that management can exercise in computer telephony.”
A survey conducted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation about the pressures on workers’ lives concluded that job insecurity was at its highest level since the Second World War. Far from job insecurity falling as unemployment fell, research showed that the workplace was dominated by a lack of trust, a loss of control over the pace of work, general anxiety, and a sense that workers were being driven to extremes. Despite two decades of “New Realism” and the campaign by the TUC for “partnership” agreements, only 26 per cent of workers said they believed workers and management were on the same side. The overwhelming majority believed that the class divide was as wide as ever. Despite these feelings, John Monks was at pains to declare: “There is a large degree of mutual interest” between labour and capital. This view was echoed by the distinguished Digby Jones, the Director General of the CBI:
The TUC’s New Unionism project has outlined a significant change of philosophy. It is a recognition that the old union role of bulwark against managerial innovation and initiative is dead. In companies that operate in global markets, looking to prevent moves to end restrictive practices, or cut excessive overtime by shifting to annualised hours, are bound to be damaging to the long term interests of the business and its staff.[6]
While whispering sweet love-me-nots to the TUC leaders, British bosses were busy making plans to break union organisation. Union-busting firms that had made billions of dollars attempting to destroy unions in the USA were now being employed in Britain. “They earn lucrative fees by specialising in helping management to defeat ballots for union recognition, which often result in the sacking of pro-union employees”, wrote Anthony Barnett in The Observer.[7] “Examples of their tactics include engineering one-to-one meetings between individual employees and management where workers are pressurised not to join a union because they risk bankrupting the firm and losing their job or benefits.” Richard Bensinger, a union adviser in the US, advised British workers: “Stop these guys at your shores. They are the lowest in the food chain.”
Meanwhile, there was growing industrial strife in the Post Office, as a result of the constant attempts of the employers to change working practices. Royal Mail management had been trying to impose new “flexible working” arrangements for years, provoking the workforce at every possible opportunity. This resulted in a spate of so-called “wildcat walkouts.” These conflicts were usually localised and illegal, exploding suddenly and then quickly dying down. To keep within the anti-union laws, the union leadership was keen to repudiate the strikes. But attempts to quell the strikes had no effect. In fact, the Post Office became a central battleground in the war between workers and bosses.
According to the Office for National Statistics in 1999, the Post Office accounted for nearly half of all recorded stoppages – 84 of the 195 incidents logged. But this, in fact, was a gross underestimate of the real position. In the financial year 2000-01, 63,000 working days were lost in disputes at Royal Mail – most of them spontaneous unofficial walkouts. In 1999-2000, the total number of strikes was greater than the 84 recorded officially, with Royal Mail admitting to 210 stoppages (only 27 of them official). In 1998-99, there were 206 (70 official), and in 1997-98, around 337 (176 official). In the year 2001-02, about 53,000 days were lost through strikes, many over changes to working practices. It was these developments that were to lead to profound changes inside the 284,000-strong Communication Workers Union. This was no “red plot”, as alleged by the right wing, but reflected the need for workers to transform their organisations.
The continuing crisis in the postal service led Royal Mail to demand the cutting of 30,000 jobs through voluntary redundancy. It was an added insult after spending millions in a failed attempt to re-brand its commercial image. Not satisfied with this, in their remorseless pursuit of cost cutting within the industry, Royal Mail bosses announced a further programme of job losses and the end of the second delivery. Marx explained long ago that social being determines consciousness. The workers had learned from bitter experience that only a serious struggle could defend their interests. The previous two decades of subservient trade unionism, epitomised by the right-wing TUC leaders, had ended in abject failure, with workers facing a further round of attacks. That is why the workers voted for the Left and new leaders, more responsive to the rank and file, replaced the right wing.
The continuing crisis of British manufacturing industry was reflected in the threatened closure of the Rover Longbridge plant, quickly followed by the announced closure of the Ford Dagenham plant after 70 years of car production. While the union leaders patched together a “solution” over Rover – backing the take-over by the Phoenix Consortium – there was no such rescue for Dagenham. After a lack-lustre campaign by the union leaders, which failed to inspire or persuade workers that they could win the struggle, the workforce voted to accept the plant closure. Many of those being made redundant hoped to get jobs promised by management in the diesel engine plant. In early 2002, the last Ford car left the production line at Dagenham after 70 years of car making – a testimony to the bankruptcy of modern-day capitalism. This was followed by the closure of Vauxhall’s car plant in Luton, and in a separate move the Japanese car manufacturer Nissan threatened to pull out of the UK.
The general election in June 2001 saw once again the victory for the Labour Party after a flat and dispiriting campaign. There was by now little enthusiasm for Labour, but even less for the Tories. The continuing crisis of the Tory Party allowed the Blair government to win an unprecedented second term, with a majority of 167 seats. During the election, The Times and Financial Times, two traditionally Tory papers, as well as The Sun, supported Tony Blair. With the Tories in a mess, the bourgeoisie were consciously backing Blair as a man they could now trust.
The lack of enthusiasm for Labour in the working class areas was shown in the sharp fall in the turnout of only 59 per cent. In Liverpool Riverside, a Labour stronghold, only 34.1 per cent turned out to vote – 18 per cent lower than the previous poor turnout of 1997. But while support for Labour fell, support for the Tories collapsed even more dramatically. The Tories were shattered, failing to win a single seat in Wales, and just one seat in Scotland. They were reduced to a small rump confined to the South East of England. The debacle immediately brought about the resignation of William Hague, opening the door for a new round of in-fighting. With Hague gone, the poisoned chalice was then handed over to another nondescript, Iain Duncan Smith.