Are you listening, Mr Darling?

12 April 2012
Evening Standard editorial comment

Our expos? today of neglect for safety standards in the maintenance of the railways will shock and disconcert rail travellers. The glib protestations of Railtrack and the big engineering firms that "all the necessary checks are in place? ring hollow in the face of the catalogue of hurried safety training, illegal breach of limits on shifts worked and a culture of maximum pay for minimum effort.

When the worker in charge of safety standards on the track claims, as in our report, that he is "too frightened ever to travel by train" because the state of maintenance is "horrendous", something has gone badly wrong. The culture of amateurism, incompetence and skiving is endemic, and it is shameful of the rail maintenance companies to pretend otherwise.

The one ray of light is that we have a new Transport Secretary, Alistair Darling, who unlike his predecessor, Stephen Byers, has not lost all credence with the public. Mr Darling knows that he must act quickly to restore public confidence in the railways. His first step should be to make clear to the engineering companies and their sub-contractors who oversee the maintenance of the railways that they must directly accept responsibility for omissions in safety standards. Conditions must be hammered out to ensure that the kind of malpractice our report describes is not allowed to continue.

It is clear that the tolerance of sharp practice and neglect of fundamental precautions is known about by the companies who accept lucrative maintenance contracts. The engineering firms and their subcontractors must not be allowed to slip away from their duty to keep the railways safe. Why should we believe their glib assurances of professionalism after what we have read today? They must be forcefully reminded by Mr Darling of their responsibility - and liability - for proper management of the track. Lives depend on it.

Lessons from France

The strongest political party in France today is once again the Abstentionist Party, with one voter in three refusing to go to the polls. This morning one unrepentant abstainer said that he hopes the low poll "will remind politicians of how angry we are. They are not supposed to be there to serve themselves but to serve their country". This is the second warning the French voters have issued.

In last month's presidential election they not only abstained, they also gave the extremeright leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the biggest vote of his long and shabby career. In the first round of yesterday's general election Le Pen's Front National candidates did not do so well, and the extreme-right will play no significant part in the new National Assembly. But, with over 11% of the vote the FN remains the third largest party in France. Even though it can hope to win very few seats, it is now established in the role the French Communist Party played for so many years, providing a refuge for millions of disaffected citizens who feel no sympathy for the activities of the mainstream parties of left or right.

There are many reasons for this French cynicism. The re-elected president, Jacques Chirac, is widelyperceived as devious and self-serving - his election nickname was "the crook". And the defeated Socialist government was regarded as haughty and ineffective and had become even more unpopular than President Chirac. It now stands to lose over 100 seats when the final result is announced next week. Its coalition partners, the Greens and the Communists, have suffered equivalent losses.

The new government led by Jean-Pierre Raffarin has promised to introduce measures against crime and illegal immigration and to lower taxes, but there is a deeper discontent that may be more difficult to dispel. The French, like other European nations, feel threatened by a loss of national identity and by an inability to control their own destiny. In the despair of the absentee voters the unelected Eurocrats of Brussels and the shadowy masters of the global economy must take their share of the blame.

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