POLITICAL CONTROL

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 11, 12 July 1930, Page 8

POLITICAL CONTROL

It would be inadvisable to discuss railway staff dismissals and the proposal to avoid them by rationing when that proposal is to be further considered by the Minister with the leaders of the railway organisations. There is one aspect of the matter, however, to which attention may be drawn, as it affects general railway policy. This is the question of political control. The public requirements of the railway management at present are conflicting and anomalous. When the railway accounts are published there is an outcry for business methods and economic management. When the Department sets itself to put its affairs in order, on the other hand, it is regarded as a State concern with an obligation not to accentuate existing unemployment. The political and the business viewpoints and motives are inextricably mixed. This should not be so. There should be business management —depoliticalised. An I undertaking which is called upon to pay its own way should not be required to carry any burdens which are not its own. Of course even depoliticalised railways would be under the obligation to consider the interests of their own employees as big private enterprises are. This is a moral and, to some extent, an economic obligation. Every wisely directed enterprise seeks to keep its workers in constant employment. But the responsibility common to all good employers should nbt be added to by a political responsibility which is fulfilled at a cost not fairly chargeable to the operation of the enterprise. This applies in other directions—in. the use of railways as a development agency and in the construction of "political" lines. Yet there is a prospect of this vital point being missed in the investigation of railway affairs which the Government has in hand.