While waiting for a bus that never seems to come, console yourself with the thought that the London Transport Board (LTB) is doing its best to provide the advertised services! The Board’s official reasons for the chronic service are staff shortages and difficulties in obtaining spares.
But these excuses won’t stand up to the shallowest investigations. The simple answer to staff shortages is to recruit. But what is LTB’s present recruitment policy? It has stopped all recruitment!
The real cause of the bad London bus service is the shortage of buses. LTB blames the shortage of buses and spare parts on the motor industry. But the factories have the capacity to remedy these short-falls. It’s the bosses who are perpetuating the ills of public transport. There are lay-offs, short-time working and closure threats through out the bus and truck divisions of the motor industry. Meanwhile most of the buses on the road are in dire need of replacement. Of the RT model buses, now over 25 years old and previously due to be put out to grass two years ago, hundreds are still in operation.
To make matters worse, the GLC has tightened the purse strings on public services, so from now on even less new buses will be bought. At the beginning of December another £9 million was lopped off LTB’s budget. To get around this the LTB has started to buy second-hand buses off the Southend, Birmingham, and Stoke Corporations.
Over the years the GLC has borrowed large sums of money from banks and finance companies at extortionate rates of interest. A considerable portion of the rates is used to re-pay these debts and the interest accruing on them. These repayments are crippling all public services, including public transport. Which is more important — healthy bank balances of a few loan sharks or the maintenance and expansion of the public services on which we depend. Faced with such alternatives, we must demand that the local government debts be cancelled, and that interest-free loans be made available to them.
The bosses’ quest for profits makes it impossible to gear production to social need. This is particularly true of the motor industry; it must be completely nationalised and receive a thorough-going reorganisation.
But rationalisation must not be done at the expense of working people. We must demand nationalisation of the motor industry, including the bus, truck, and spares and components divisions, under workers’ control and with no compensation to the bosses. Workers’ control does not mean that we take responsibility for the industry. While the banks and finance houses control the rest of the economy, we can have no real control based on one industry. We need the right to veto management decisions and inspect their books to ensure that firms are not being run against our interests.
For instance, bus workers must have the right to veto decisions on bus designs to make sure that dangerous contraptions such as the Leyland National don’t get on the road.
With a fight around these demands we can get a decent public transport system. But if we don’t win these demands we will find ourselves doing a lot more ‘strolling’ and even more of us to the dole office.
