Confronted with some socialist literature and an SPGB candidate at the last GLC election, one local newspaper responded in amazement that, while everyone else was worrying about problems like urban decay, unemployment, rubbish in the streets, high rates, inflation and the lousy bus service, our only solution was the prospect of a classless, moneyless world community. A candidacy like that, said our local rag, was eccentric to say the least.
As long as there are so few socialists then what we do is bound to seem eccentric to the rest; so let’s give the local newspaper their conventional point. But from our side of the fence the policies promised by the other political parties as solutions to the problems of the day are not just eccentric, they are laughable; and when workers keep their wits about them they agree with us. During the GLC campaign some members of the Labour party toured the constituency of Islington in an ancient, open-topped, double-decker bus, all festooned with balloons. Two women were talking on the pavement as it passed. They looked up and one remarked, “that must be the extra bus they promised in their election leaflet!”
Better than the most comprehensive set of facts and figures, heartfelt graffiti on the bus shelters reflect the situation; “They don’t bury people in Finsbury: they just stand them at bus stops”. All of the other political parties had promised to do something about the bus service in London it’s the one truly inexhaustible political concern. Voters can forget the bomb, but never the number nine bus.
In the 1930s congestion, lateness and dropped services were blamed upon the trams, which were considered to be noisy, uncomfortable, expensive to run, inflexible and the cause of traffic jams at junctions. So they were phased out. In the 1950s the blame was put upon the trolley buses, which were considered expensive to run, inflexible and the cause of delays when their pantographs slipped off the overhead wires. So they too were phased out. Since the 1930s too we have seen the end of private enterprise when London and General were bought out by the London Passenger Transport Board in a partial nationalisation scheme; followed later by the London Transport Executive. Since those days when big was considered beautiful, London Country Services have been bought out by the omnivorous National Bus Company (which grew big by snapping up corporation bus systems that could not meet their financial deficits out of the rates) and the National Bus Company itself has become as famous as Beeching for cutting services.
The range of this history takes in what the politicians are offering today. With the rise in the price of oil since 1973 all concede that electric trolley buses would now be cheaper to run than diesel buses; but nobody can afford the outlay on a new overhead system. Others favour high subsidies from the rates, while their opponents insist that local industry is being crippled by the existing rate burden and that private enterprise buses are the only answer. So it’s back to trolleys, the London and General and square one perhaps. Meanwhile the buses suffer from a really bad dose of capitalism.
Why does reality so rarely match the promise? What stops public transport from being a public service? The bus industry provides a set of jobs that display perfect symbolic parodies of the capitalist and worker relationship; so that, even without the administrative and technical problems above, it is unreasonable to expect anything except what you get.
The job routine can turn workers into mechanical beings, jack-in-the-boxes who pop up when the alarm clock triggers them off. Who better to observe this than the bus driver on an early turn?
There was I, driving along without a care in the world, I turned a corner and runners came at me from all directions. They seemed to come up out of the very drains, running, shouting and waving their arms. In two stops we were chock-a-block, I got three bells from my clippie and the old RT groaned along on sagging springs, steering like a pregnant camel. Four stops later they all poured off at the factory area and we were empty. Rape must feel like that.
A London Country driver
This is not an essay in cynicism. To the bus company accountants there is no difference between hauling coal by road and hauling people, except that on the buses the load gets on and off of its own accord at each stop. The attitude of the bus crews to the passenger-commodities is a measure of the dualism that goes with production for sale. Passengers are both mere bundles of exchange value and living characters who kick when they are treated like cattle. What can a poor conductor do? If he takes the passengers’ side that buses should be a public service based upon need, then he would run the bus as the users desire, collect no fares, make detours from the schedule and get sacked when an inspector found out. If he takes the company side then he has to dawdle and pick up the maximum number of passengers, yet keep to the timetable within an accuracy of one minute, collect all fares on his fully loaded bus by every third stop, while helping mothers with push chairs, children and the disabled on and off the bus. Telling all and sundry the time and how long the next bus will be (time you bought a watch and twenty-seven feet).
Them Versus Us
It used to be worse of course. During the blitz in the last war the employers forced the crews to suspend the rule of five only standing downstairs (in the interests of national production) and for a time the throughput of passengers on London Transport approached that delight of first world war infantry, the French cattle truck, with its plate bearing the legend “cheveaux 8, hommes 40”.
Then, after years of austerity, in 1949 the bus crews flexed their trade union muscles and tried a half-day strike to wipe out a long-standing anomaly and achieve time-and-a-half for Saturday afternoon work and double-time for Sundays. The employers promptly invoked an agreement forced through during the war and threatened legal action against the strikers (this in a nationalised concern and under a Labour government). Fortunately the bus crews faced down the employers and got what they wanted.
But, as if to show that trade union action unlinked to a movement for socialism is futile, in 1971, when the crews were desperate for a pay rise, the employers faced them down over a strike and offered them half of what they wanted, on condition that they worked Saturday and Sunday at flat rate. The crews accepted and things got worse again.
There may exist a more tricky bunch of accountants than those employed by London Transport, but you'll never convince the crews that this is so. It is legendary at all garages that just before a pay claim goes in the fleet of cars that are held for the use of the managers at administrative centres like Chiswick, Crawley and Marylebone are all renewed. So, whatever the true trading position, the accountants can demonstrate to any tribunal that the board cannot possibly afford any wage increase.
These board members cannot be got at by the crews, but there are surrogates—the inspectors or jumpers, who jump the buses and have to get the crews to sign their cards so many times a day. An index of industrial friction at any shed is the number of crews who refuse to sign the inspectors’ cards, or do so only “under protest”.
Jumpers and cash
The bus crews and the jumpers are at war with each other, either openly or concealed, and the result is occasionally an absurd farce that can only be appreciated long after the event.
You’d never believe what we used to get up to. There was a rota with a dead journey from Luton back to Hitchin at 3.15 every Wednesday (dead because nobody ever travelled on it). My conductor at the time wanted to build a garden shed, but couldn’t afford new wood. So 1 rushed the bus out to a builder’s scrap yard in Luton at 3.15. In pissing rain we loaded the lower deck with half a ton of old timber and dashed back to his house at Hitchin. Halfway, I came over Offley Hill and there was a bleeding jumper with his arm out at a stop. If I picked him up we’d have both got the bullet. So I sailed past to his pitiful cries and covered the bleeder with spray. But the bastard saw the wood as we passed and there was hell to pay when we finished the rota that night. We stuck to the story that we didn’t see him in the rainstorm and as he couldn’t prove anything got away with it. But they came down on us all like a ton of bricks over the tiniest fault for months afterwards.
A London Country inspector (ex-driver)
But most of the aggro between jumpers and crews centres on fiddling of fares. A wise conductor will be tardy over collecting upstairs fares on a bus where the passengers alight at a terminus. As they come down the stairs he'll run off a string of tickets at the lowest fare and pocket the difference between them and the real fares handed to him. Cunning ones will not dump the scroll run off this way in the used ticket box, because equally cunning inspectors search the boxes for them as the first pointer to a fiddler. The cash clerks at the shed, who receive and inspect the take at the end of a rota, here link up with the roving jumpers. Every journey has to be logged by the conductor and the take broken down into the number of tickets of each denomination run off; in this way the cash clerks build up the history of all such journeys. So when the take on a regular rota falls below the average and the number of low value tickets rises above the average, the word gets around and the jumpers start hiding behind cars and lurking in doorways at strategic points to catch the culprit.
It puzzles some people why services with a fare-box facility beside the driver are not supposed to provide change. Most drivers will oblige of course as it provides a fiddle that is impossible to trace. You give the driver fifty pence for a twenty pence fare, he gives you thirty pence change and as you move away he drops two coins in the box. They may be pennies, tuppences or fivepences, depending on how far the driver is pushing it. The only answer the company has to this is to police the buses with a large plain-clothed inspectorate.
The Political Terminus
Work on the buses is not unique, but it provides a caricature of the shifts and subterfuges, the collisions and the wrangles that go on wherever workers handle the revenue that keeps an institution going. Over the years the characteristically cynical attitudes of the bus crews to the passengers has been formed by their experience in the “public service vehicle industry” and any politician who fancies the chances of cutting through the omnibus jungle, uniting the employers, crews and passengers in a real public service is indulging in self-deception.
Even the abolition of fares would have little overall effect. To be sure the bus companies would save on fare machinery, the wages of conductors and cash clerks; while the omnibus jungle would be thinned out as each bus journey ceased to be a transaction between the public and the company. But another jungle of political wrangling would spring up around the problem of who pays for the service. Should the burden be equally loaded on the rate bills of shops, offices, factories and householders; or should the money come from central government? Such questions are the perennial concern of governments, whose battles are fought in the capitalist jungles of council meetings and offices, parliaments and civil services. You get ideological glimpses of these battles at elections and ultimately you may be called upon to do a government’s international battling when the fighting becomes real in war time.
There you are, just one industry, just one problem that all politicians promised to reform at the last GLC election. Yet it proved to be as tangled as the whole capitalist world.
Who are the eccentrics now? The socialists, who want production for use and free access—or the politicians who promise the earth for nothing?
