An EU model for rail privatisation

Unbeknownst to most rail workers, passengers and politicians across Europe, the European ‘parliament’ will vote later this month to repeal EU rail directives 91/440/EEC, 95/18/EC and 2001/14/EC and ‘recast’ them in order to ‘establish a single European railway area’.
So in one poorly attended, crushingly dull and ill-understood session this EU institution will finally commit member states to hand over all publicly owned railways in Europe to monopoly finance capital without a shot being fired.
Yet the postmodern banality of this action will not soften the impact on rail workers or passengers as it will inflict all the pain and suffering endured in Britain since the railways were privatised by rail directive 91/440/EEC.
There is a history to all this.
More than twenty years ago on July 29 1991, the European Commission published its first infamous directive on railways and it was seized by John Major’s Tory government in 1992 as a blueprint to break up and privatise British Rail.
This EU privatisation model demanded a split between train operations and infrastructure, ie splitting wheel and steel, in order to fragment the industry to force market mechanisms into what is, in effect, a natural monopoly.
Not surprisingly chaos ensued but it allowed private transport monopolies and their allies to make money - lots of it. Under rail privatisation in Britain subsidies have quadrupled, while profits for the monopolies running public transport have soared alongside rail fares.
How is the European Commission going to implement such an unpopular project?
First, by enforcing separated management of track and trains, breaking up "holding companies" by which some states have maintained a common parent company with separate accounts to avoid outright privatisation.
Second, through further fragmentation, with "more flexible" service facilities for train maintenance, cleaning, refuelling and shunting to boost outsourcing and subcontracting in rail services.  This is an invitation to ‘sub-contracting specialists’ such as ISS, Mitie, etc to exploit casual workers across the European Union, as they have in Britain.
Third, the Commission wants to take away from national governments and rail authorities the power to allocate train paths and set track access charges.  National rail companies will no longer control transport planning, which undermines co-operation between national transport authorities and railway operators.
The directive also opens access to rail infrastructure for all types of transport operator, while competition will be prioritised and safety regulation loses its independence.
Fourth, the directive encourages private finance initiatives (PFI) for design, commission, development and operation of railways.
Fifth, the directive repeals legislation on safety of staff, rolling stock, working conditions and social rights of workers and consumers, and imposes strikebreaking clauses in commercial rail contracts. 
This latest EU business proposal regarding rail is also remarkably similar to the controversial McNulty ‘value for money’ report on the future of British railways, which demands even more fragmentation and more privatisation.
Page 68 of the McNulty report summary even points out there are no legal obstacles with implementation “provided due attention is given to conformance with EU and public law restrictions, EU directives, particularly with regard to the separation of railway infrastructure and undertakings and EU procurement and State Aid constraints”.
The full report goes on to say that “EU legislation is unlikely to allow the transfer of assets into a single nationalised public body”.
McNulty, the Con/Dem government and Brussels share the EU’s mania for ‘liberalisation’ and privatisation and agree on the need to jack up fares and attack jobs, pay and pensions to pay for it.
The new ‘recast’ directive seeks to undermine the ‘holding company’ model that countries such as France, Belgium, Austria and Germany set up in the last ten years to delay the total fragmentation of their railways as occurred in Britain.  Now the ‘recast’ directive is demanding complete dismantling of national rail companies. 
Railways are by their very nature monopolies; the only question that remains is whether such monopolies are publicly owned and controlled in the interests of society, or whether, as in the view of both Sir Roy McNulty and the European Commission, they should serve the interests of monopoly finance capital – the bankers, PFI-profiteers and big business.
By buying up competitors in recent years, global logistics companies such as DHL (Germany's privatised post office), Deutsche Bahn (Germany's state railways) and SNCF (French state railways) have built themselves up to be "Euro champions" - competing globally in transport markets while collecting railways across Europe as in a game of monopoly.
The European Commission aims to fragment national rail systems to ensure permanent private ownership and bumper profits for investors achieved on the backs of cuts to safety, jobs and services.
The Commission can do this based on powers it gave itself under section 290 of the Lisbon Treaty.
Transport policy is defined as an area of "shared competence", like the internal market, in which EU member states "cannot exercise competence in areas where the Union has done so".  So when the EU decides a rail policy, national rail authorities have to comply under the Lisbon Treaty.

The so-called ‘Recast’ creates a ‘Single European Railway Market’ by destroying major, publicly owned, national railway operators.
And Sir Roy McNulty’s ‘value for money study’ into Britain’s fragmented, costly and privatised railway and EU plans for rail are a road map for rail privateers to profit from EU-wide rail privatisation, thereby creating the conditions for Potter’s Bar-style train disasters and Beeching-style line closures on a huge scale.
Now who voted for that?
Over forty transport unions met in London earlier this year at a gathering  hosted by the transport union RMT to share their experiences of the disastrous effect of right wing, neoliberal EU legislation on their respective shipping, rail and local transport sectors.
It is re-convening later this month to co-ordinate protests and actions against EU plans for a single privatised European ‘railway area’.

Brian Denny is editor of RMT News Magazine, the journal of Britain’s largest specialised transport trade union.  The photo is by Bob Spiers.