A bad case of tunnel vision FRANCE AND BRITAIN have recently signed a treaty to go ahead with the building of a fixed-link railway tunnel under the English Channel. Known in Britain as the "chunnel" (an amalgam of channel and tunnel), the project has caused an uproar across the country -from the trade unions to rural communities in the south-east.
Lewis Emery, a member of the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), takes a look at the issues behind the furore. LEWIS EMERY
BRITAIN division of wealth and jobs. As a result of all this, a considerable wall of political opposition - from the labour movement to sections of the Tory party - is building up against the tunnel project.
A crucial element of this opposition is Britain's largest trade union, the TGWU, which represents about a million members. At its 1985 conference, the TGWU voted to officially oppose the tunnel development. In an article titled "A costly white elephant", TGWU Assistant General Secretary Eddie Haigh said: "This ill conceived scheme is not in the interests of the people of our country.
"The first question to be asked is: Why build a tunnel - is it necessary? On examination of the government's White Paper in February, 1986, the evidence is thin. To cover up envisaged job losses, the White Paper talks about direct economic benefits in the form of cost savings.' In plain English that would mean a ten per cent reduction in fares [across the channel]....
"Job losses will be horrendous. 37,000 people work on the ferries and in the ports. British Ports Association say that 176,000 jobs are at risk from the tunnel. By the year 2000, without the tunnel about 50,000 would have jobs. All these jobs are threatened by a project that will employ approximately 5,000." (From the TGWU Record, August 1986).
The labour movement is by no means united in this view. The railway unions, for instance, are supporting the project on the basis of new railway development and increased rail traffic.
In the context of a declining capitalist economy the shortcomings of the whole chunnel enterprise are overwhelming from a working class point of view. We need look no further than the dereliction and decline of many of Britain's northern cities to see the consequences of capitalist economic and political priorities.
The chauvinist platform on which unions like the TGWU are to some extent building their anti-tunnel campaign should not blind us to the real base of labour opposition. For British steelworkers to see in the tunnel project the "threat" of French steel and so on is a measure of the extent to which the workers movement has failed to meet the challenge of European economic and social development. It shows that we haven't found an internationalist approach in the labour movement to the realities we are facing. Insignificant as it may seem, bizarre as it may seem, the channel tunnel issue sheds light on serious problems which we cannot afford to ignore.
The channel tunnel hype has raised quite a bit of dust over the past year or so in Britain. For the Thatcher government it serves quite nicely as potential showcase for modern capitalist vision. Rather better, in fact, than selling off the previously British-owned companies Land Rover or Westland Helicopters into United States ownership! The beaming faces of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Francois Mitterrand on television signalled the start of what was to be the latest round of chunnel mania.
There have been plans to dig a direct-link tunnel from Britain to France (or vice-versa) for over a hundred years, most of which have never got any further than the drawing board. The remnants of several previous attempts, since abandoned, can still be found.
It is no accident that there is an historical association between Britain's participation in the European Economic Community (EEC) and the proposal for a channel tunnel. In the eyes of European social democracy the "unification of Europe" makes both Britain's membership of the EEC and the building of the tunnel equally important in terms of signposts for the future.
The idea of two competing factions within capital - the industrial/proEuropean and the financial/proAtlantic - is not a new one, and, indeed, it is hard to see such conflicts in the face of Thatcher and Mitterrand's unity around the chunnel project. Certainly, the multinationals, financiers and building moguls stand to rake in the profits if the tunnel is ever built. But for Thatcher and company it is more an "affair of state" , and this is how it has been sold through the British media.
There are many reasons for opposing the chunnel project: channel ferry companies have recently been privatized as a first step; environmentalists have been mobilizing around the proposed destruction of the countryside and new fears about the importation of rabies; in both the short and long-term, job losses will be massive. After the initial euphoria, the government have gone rather quiet, and the pro-chunnel lobby are getting a bit isolated. A string of political mishaps threatens to lose the Tories some of their most loyal constituents in the heart of rural England. These run from the issue of where nuclear waste is to be dumped (creating four Greenham Common look-alike campaigns in the test sites for the dumping), to post-Libya worries and the Loyalist revolt in the North of Ireland.
The chunnel issue has raised questions of a deeper significance, however. First, there are competing capitalist interests - the chunnel conglomerate versus the ferry companies, and competing ideological groupings -English-chauvinists versus Euromodernists. Second, it is an issue that has mobilized the same kind of labour movement opposition that was seen to the pit-closure programme that sparked off the year-long miners' strike. Coincidentally, many of the same working class communities that led the miners' struggle - the villages and ports of the Kent area in the south-east - are now being galvanized by the prospect of the knock-on effects from the collapse of ports like Dover, Ramsgate, and Newhaven as trade is diverted through the tunnel.
Middle-class opposition to the desecration of the "garden of England" by bulldozers and juggernauts, combined with working class fears, is putting pressure on Conservative members of parliament and on the government. Furthermore, realization is dawning in the north of England, Scotland and Wales that the tunnel will automatically mean that new industrial and commercial developments will be attracted to the southeast, reinforcing the north-south