A blueprint for disaster

Ten years ago the lethal consequences of the reckless gamble of privatising Britain's railways were lodged indelibly in the public mind as the images from the disaster at Potters Bar were broadcast into the nation's living rooms.

The truth is that this was a rail disaster that should never have happened.

Seven people died and a further 76 were injured as a direct result of political actions by MPs determined to destroy the notion of a publicly owned railway run as a public service, free from the profit motive.

The points with the loose and missing bolts that caused the tragedy were supposed to have been maintained by the private company Jarvis working at the direction of Railtrack.

To prove the extent of the corrosive relationship between politicians and big business that led to privatisation in the first place, one of the top bosses at Jarvis was none other than uber-Tory and former mayoral candidate Steve Norris.

Instead of admitting its culpability in the aftermath of the Potters Bar crash, Jarvis decided on an alternative course of action. Ducking responsibility and fuelling the pain of the grieving friends and relatives, it claimed that the defective points may have been caused by "sabotage."

That is the measure of the despicable level that big business will go to in an all-out effort to cover its backside and try to lump the blame for its profit-driven corner-cutting - invent an excuse and lie through your back teeth.

Eventually the firm was found out and a half-baked apology, along with some compensation monies, were extracted from the Jarvis board room.

But - and here's the point that really ratchets up the insult - not a single Jarvis director was ever prosecuted for their corporate role in the Potters Bar disaster.

There was talk of it for years but by 2011, when Railtrack's successor Network Rail was finally taken to court and fined £3 million, the rail regulator said it was "not in the public interest" to prosecute Jarvis, which by then was in administration.

So Norris and his Jarvis oppos got away with it without a mark on them. Not only that but Jarvis continued to milk a fat profit out of rail contracts for nearly a decade after Potters Bar. And when it finally pulled the plug it left a trail of wreckage, unpaid wages and workers dumped on the dole queue in its wake.

RMT's demand for a joint public inquiry into both Potters Bar and the 2007 Grayrigg derailment has been ignored by successive governments.

Inquests and safety investigations have repeatedly exposed the part played by the failures of privatisation, but the political class as a whole run scared of any wide-raging examination that would shine the light on the ideology that led to the horror of Potters Bar in the first place.

We know why. Those self-same politicians are hell-bent on dragging us into an action replay.

They call it the McNulty report, although the man himself is nothing more than a highly paid stooge instructed by the last Labour government to draw up a blueprint for the further decimation and privatisation of rail whose work has been gleefully seized upon by the Con-Dems.

The government has adopted McNulty's rail review almost in its entirety and it has been wrapped up in some ancient parliamentary device known as a command paper.

But if you thought that meant the plan needs to be ratified through the usual political process, think again.

McNulty's core objectives - destaffing trains, stations and track, introducing gold-plated 15-year franchises and opening up infrastructure once again for profit - are already well in train.

London Midland is in cahoots with the government on a rapid programme of ticket office closures, train operators are eyeing up any opportunity to ditch the guards, the Great Western franchise is to be let on strictly McNulty terms and the creation of the first mini-Railtrack - the so-called Deep Alliance on South West Trains - kicked in last month.

McNulty is all about recreating the same poisonous cocktail of conditions that led us to the tragedies of Hatfield, Potters Bar and Grayrigg.

Once again private companies will be calling the shots on the maintenance side as the clock is wound back to the grim days of Railtrack.

That is why on this 10th anniversary of Potters Bar we renew and step up the fight against McNulty and the politicians who are determined to push his agenda of cuts and profit in total ignorance of the cast-iron case for the railways to be returned to public ownership with the 30 per cent cost savings that could be achieved once greed and exploitation are stripped out of the equation.

Across Europe the principles of privatisation are being forced on nations that have run railways as public services for decades as the bankers and the bosses set out their demands and tie the sell-off of these crucial assets into the conditions for continuing loans.

To their eternal shame, Labour MEPs have flown McNulty to Brussels to sell his package of dangerous and discredited goods to the Euro elite.

In the face of all of this, our fight for a safe and secure railway goes on. Working with sister unions, the TUC, commuter groups and communities, RMT will be holding more days of action, building on the work so far. Potters Bar is a reminder of just what is at stake.

Bob Crow is general secretary of RMT.