Workers' Liberty

From the time Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, the government and its lackeys in London Underground's management launched attack after attack on the Tube and its workers. These attacks helped to prepare London Underground for privatisation.

They also provoked fightbacks from Tube workers and our unions. Some won, some lost, all provided lessons that we could have learned from for our fight against PPP.

British Rail privatisation is the most unpopular government policy in a generation. Opinion polls repeatedly show that around three-quarters of the UK population want the whole railway industry brought back into public ownership immediately.

This article is reprinted from the June 1997 issue of 'Off The Rails', a rank-and-file bulletin produced by Workers' Libety and others which will shortly be re-launched.

'Fat Controller' was a regular feature of 'Off The Rails', casting a satirical eye at the antics of the rail employers. It was written by Rob Dawber, a long-standing Workers' Liberty member and RMT activist, who died in 2001 from mesothelioma caused by expsoure to asbestos while working in the railway industry.

- How the party that nationalised the railways in 1948 ended up announcing Tube privatisation in 1998 -

How the British state legislated against free trade unions in the last two decades

For the last 23 years, successive governments have consistently introduced legislation to curtail the action of free trade unionism in the UK. Theirs was a long-term strategy in response to the growth in militant trade unionism from the 1970s. The laws introduced in the 1980s curtailed existing immunities and made solidarity action illegal.

This (long) article tells the story of New Labour's 'Public-Private Partnership' for London Underground.

Announced in 1998, it was originally scheduled to be implemented by 2000, but the strength of the campaign against it forced that back by three years. But the campaign against it was flawed.

The second part of this article takes us from the RMT settling its strike action in late spring 2001 through to the Government's eventual victory in 2003.

You can read part 1 of this article here.

As we publish this pamphlet, London Underground is one year into the Public-Private Partnership. Everything that PPP's opponents, especially the unions, said about it has proved true.

Just say 'no'? A positive alternative

From the Workers' Liberty pamphlet Tunnel Vision: London Underground's Public-Private Partnership and the fight against it.

Year on year, we have faced attacks both by management and government. The result is that we have had to fight a series of defensive battle, to at best just stand still. We are always responding to management's agenda, rather than putting our own needs and views across. So we are stereotyped as 'dinosaurs' who just say 'no' all the time.

One of the reasons that Blair was able to push through PPP is that the trade union bureaucracy allowed him to. RMT's Vernon Hince gave Blair an easy ride during his years on Labour's Executive.

What kind of union do we need? The story of the fight against PPP shows up the strengths and weaknesses in our current union set-up. Union officials will often have you believe that things can only be done the way they are done, because ... well, because they have always been done that way.

We do not agree. We have made several serious criticisms of the unions in this pamphlet, so it is only fair that we set out in more positive terms what our ideal union might look like. Let's call it the Fantasy Union of Railworkers (FUR).