issues.
Within two months of rail privatisation in 1996 Railtrack and the train operating companies started plotting to do away with guards on trains. Ever since the RMT has been fighting to defend the guard's vital safety role.
In 1999 Railtrack changed the railway Rulebook diminishing the safety role of the guard. Three days later the Ladbroke Grove crash killed 31 people. With both drivers killed the remaining train guard carried out train protection despite the rule changes. Railtrack admitted - 'If the new rules had not already been brought in, they would now have been suspended."
Since then the RMT has been demanding that the safety role of guards is restored. In June 2001 Rail Safety Ltd (formerly the Railtrack Safety division) and the operating companies agreed to an independent risk assessment of the RMT's proposals. Despite the fact that this assessment came hour shifts. This cannot be safe.
At the same time the government has intervened - to promise to indemnify the operating companies against any fines they would normally receive for failing to provide a service!
Despite all this, confidence is high.. The strike is solid across the country. The companies' scab plans were unable to deliver more than a handful of trains in most cases. On the picket lines RMT guards and drivers are resolved to see the dispute through to a successful conclusion.
Train crew were balloted for strike action over safety in 1997, 1999, 2000 and 2001. Each time we were given promises that safety rules would not be compromised, or that positive changes would be reintroduced. These promises were subsequently broken. This time round train crew want to see a positive result before they call off any action.
The RMT's train crew conference will take place in mid April. The RMT Executive will join with delegates there to discuss opposition from his own party, Health Secretary Alan Milburn is doggedly pressing through his controversial plans for "Foundation Trusts", which will give new powers and privileges to ten or a dozen of the country's top-rated "3-star" hospitals
The plan has been denounced by health unions and by the BMA as a return to the type of market-style methods wheeled in by Margaret Thatcher's government in the early 1990s, and which Labour ministers claimed to have swept away after 1997.
Former health secretary Frank Dobson and other former ministers have pointed out that the new "freedoms" to be granted to Foundation Trusts could only be at the expense of other NHS Trusts that have been excluded from the elite status.
Foundation Trusts will have extra freedoms to borrow, including from the private sector - but their borrowing will count against the total cash limits on the NHS, and so their extra will mean less capital for maintenance or new building in other Trusts
They will be free to retain any cash raised prompting fears that some may embark on a new round of asset-stripping.
They will be free to set up private companies that offer managerial and other services inside or outside the NHS and which can bid to run neighbouring "failing" Trusts under the government's franchising scheme.
They will also have freedom to vary the pay of their staff, giving scope in some areas to offer more to recruit staff with particular skills - subject only to vague restrictions on "poaching" staff from other Trusts.
Although Alan Milburn has said that Foundation Trusts would be covered by the new - highly controversial - NHS "Agenda for Change pay structure, it is clear that they would be effectively free to vary from the new, laboriously-negotiated national pay scales.
Milburn has insisted that the Foundation Trusts will be non-profit making bodies, with their assets "locked" to prevent Foundations being privatised at a later stage.
But he should take warning from the experience of the first foundation-style experiment in Sweden, where a major hosboard - against the wishes of the local health authority and the government.
He has already retreated in front of those warning that Foundations would seek to expand their treatment of private patients
He has also argued that Foundations will remain "part of the NHS", and that they will be controlled by elected "stakeholder" members from the local community. However the real power would remain in the hands of an unelected Management Board.
But the Foundations will be run as businesses, and they will inevitably seek to strengthen their market share by competing against other Trusts for contracts to treat more NHS patients as another aspect of Milburn's reforms - a re-establishment of the internal market system through a new system of payment by results - takes effect
Although a mere two dozen Labour MPs abstained on the second reading of the leg. islation for Foundation Trusts, the level of opposition has rapidly expanded, with wel over a hundred now expressing concerns in the aftermath of the back-bench revolt over the looming war with Iraq.
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Miror ast reststance April 2003 3