Willing the Means

The British are foolish-fond of their railroads, as they are of any public inconvenience that has been around for more than 100 years. Sprouting from the main lines, branch tracks lace the map like a web spun by a Stakhanovite spider. One-and two-car trains jog across the countryside as leisurely and erratically as the village gossip on her daily rounds. Except on the crack trains, cars are dirty, creaky, ramshackle and old, though also comfortable in a musty, antimacassar way. Cartoonist Rowland Emett has epitomized both Britain's love and loathing in Punch's "FarTwittering and Oysterperch Railway." But these rachitic sinews manfully bore the baggage of war. When the railroads were nationalized by the Socialists in 1948, the equipment was overaged, the labor force (at the unions' insistence) oversized. The government could never firmly decide whether to subsidize hundreds of half-idle porters and uneconomic Far Twitterings or to streamline the railways and run them as a self-sustaining enterprise. Besides, austerity Britain had no money for modernization.

The Losing End. Since under the nationalization act the railway system was supposed to pay for itself, the British Transport Commission could not raise wages without raising fares and freight rates--which would antagonize other voters and raise the price of Britain's exports. Other workers got raises. But the railwaymen were made to feel that any demand for higher wages was an unpatriotic act. Four years ago "Big Jim" Campbell, amiable, earnest chief of the 400,000-man National Union of Railwaymen, said: "The men are sick, sore and sorry. They feel they are at the losing end of nationalization." A year ago Big Jim warned: "The loyalty of the railwaymen should not be taken as weakness or complacency. Their patience is not inexhaustible." Three weeks ago, refused a modest $1.12-to $1.32-a-week raise for workers making between $17 and $24, Big Jim reluctantly gave the order to strike. The Transport Commission could only stick to the old argument: the commission did not have the money.

Last week, as the strike deadline neared, there was an air of wartime emergency. Sir Winston Churchill himself ordered the country deployed as he had for the General Strike of 1926. Government department heads designated key workers who would have to sleep on the job, and beds were installed in old wartime air-raid shelters. Department chiefs were to be housed in a massive concrete annex to the Admiralty built to be the government's last stronghold in case of a Nazi invasion. Car pools were organized (the London Underground would also stop).

The New Report. At midweek a hastily convened Court of Inquiry rescued the railwaymen with a report that Britain may live to regret. Its findings were a triumph of the modern "ought-to-have" school of economics over the classic "where-will-you-get-the-money" school. Railwaymen, said the court, ought to get wages that would put them "in no worse case" than workers in "comparable" industries. Said the court: "The nation has provided by statute that there shall be a nationalized system of railway transport, which must therefore be regarded as a public utility of the first importance. Having willed the end, the nation must will the means."

With the Churchill government's acceptance of the report, the union happily collected raises ranging from 70-c- to $1.12 a week for 60,000 workers in the lowest brackets, and a promise of other raises later. The boost will cost the Transport Commission an extra $22 million a year which it has not got -since 1948 the railways have already run up a $76 million deficit. Gone was the notion that the railways must pay for themselves. "How the money can be found is not my business," gloomed Transport Commission Chairman General Sir Brian Robertson.

The obvious answer was that the money would come--somehow--from the British taxpayer, for whom the "standard rate" of taxation is 45-c- on every $1 he makes. "This principle," huffed the Economist, "may be the opening of a new stage in British industrial and political history. On the court's ruling, a nationalized industry now means an industry which has an inalienable right to draw a subsidy from the public, and no responsibility to return efficient service to it."

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