THE NEW WORKER

The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 3rd November 2017


No new money in bogus “£85 billion rail plan”

THE RAIL union RMT last week expressed anger that the industry bosses’ club, the Rail Delivery Group (RDG), is pumping out the same old stream of bogus propaganda in a desperate bid to con people into buying their claim that private train operating companies are investing in rail transport in Britain when, in fact, they are robbing hundreds of millions of pounds from the British people to invest in domestic transport operations in other parts of Europe.

The RMT has looked closely at the at the flimsy Rail Delivery Group report and was not surprised to find that it contains absolutely nothing new.

In a speech to the UK Rail Industry Forum on 14th September 2016, RDG chief Paul Plummer praised the industry’s Railway Upgrade Plan of over £50 billion, and why the investment is needed ... as well as £11.6 billion being spent on 5,500 new carriages by the private sector.

Then again, up he popped in March this year to remind us that “the £50 billion-plus Railway Upgrade Plan will help ease the congestion on Britain’s railway.”

This time round the report says six times that the private sector is investing £11.5 billion in the desperate hope that someone will believe them.

RMT General Secretary Mick Cash said: “The much-hyped Rail Delivery Group’s plans for Britain’s railways do not stand up to scrutiny and are exposed as yet another fraud imposed on the British travelling public by a racketeering rail industry that is out of control.

“There is not a penny piece of new money in any of this and the cash that is being talked up is British taxpayer and fare-payer money that has already been announced and spun up on numerous occasions in the past.

“It is double-accounting on an epic scale which leaves the foreign companies that own the vast bulk of Britain’s railways free to carry on fleecing passengers in the UK in order to invest in services in Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam. That is a national scandal.”