The strike may be off but chaos carries on

Old strikes were simple. They had bosses on one side and unions on the other. The public knew who was fighting whom and could hold each side to account.

In the convoluted public sector that Brown has created, the old lines of accountability have vanished faster than lines in the sand. No one is in charge, no one is responsible and no one cares where the buck stops as long as it is not with them.

Weary commuters may have assumed that managers from Transport for London were responsible for transport in London, and that the workers were confronting them.

Not so. The workers were employed by Metronet, one of the private public partnerships Brown insisted should take over Tube maintenance, line upgrades and station refurbishment, despite all expert opinion being against him. I should emphasise that it wasn't just Lefties throwing up their hands in horror at private money: everyone who knew anything about transport warned Brown that this was no way to run a railroad.

Brown and his sidekick, the cocksure Treasury civil servant Shriti Vadera, insisted on pushing on with the half-baked scheme nevertheless. So complicated were the contracts that they cost £500 million of taxpayers' money to set up. Armies of accountants and lawyers growing fat at the public's expense, but Metronet went bust.

RMT members went on strike because the administrator can't guarantee that their pay and pensions will be safe. But how can he? He's just an accountant called in to wind up the company. Transport for London may have convinced them for now that they have nothing to worry about but as they're not in charge, why should the RMT believe them?

Now I may have incited states of psychopathic rage in readers by hinting that the RMT had a point yesterday. But the case against Brown is as strong if you want a tough line taken with the unions. For in the fragmented, lawyer-ridden Underground that he created, there's no one to take a strong line because no one has sole responsibility for managing the system.

Don't imagine that the confusions of this week are going to go away. Brown has built schools and hospitals with private finance, and all over the country patients and pupils are facing cuts in services because firms are charging exorbitant fees. But although they are taking public money they can't be restrained by public authorities because they are beyond democratic control.

For years people have been complaining-that neither Parliament nor local councils can control Brown's exotically elaborate state. What this week has made clear is that there is not only no democratic control but no managerial control either.

The only intelligent response to the question "who's in charge?" is a bewildered shrug of the shoulders.