Like every other public service in Britain under threat from the millionaires' government, transport faces a bleak future if the Con-Dem coalition is not forced to change its economically, environmentally and socially illiterate course.

Imagine a railway where three-quarters of stations have no ticket offices. Where there are no guards on trains, where worn-out rails from the main line are transplanted onto branch lines, where visual track inspections are a thing of the past and where fares are left to the whim of unregulated, parasitic privateers who are also handed the infrastructure assets to sweat.

Imagine a bus industry where rural communities are left without even the skeleton services they have today, where the same privateer operators run only those routes that return a guaranteed profit, leaving the most vulnerable and least mobile in our communities as prisoners.

Imagine lifeline ferries to island communities abandoned to the market and tendered at the cost of a race to the bottom in jobs, living standards and services.

All these things will become the reality if government plans stand unchallenged.

The "business railway" we have always feared, in which premium routes with premium fares displace any idea of a social railway, has taken a step closer with the McNulty "value for money" review - a review by and for big business.

After more than 15 years of rail privatisation, wealthy boss Sir Roy McNulty found that Britain's railways had higher fares and higher costs and were more fragmented than the publicly owned railways elsewhere in Europe.

Full marks so far. But his solution? Even higher fares, even more fragmentation, unstaffed stations, removal of guards, lower safety standards - and even more asset-sweating by private interests that have already drained billions of public money from the network.

It all adds up to rail workers and passengers being made to pay for the disaster of rail privatisation with an attack worse than the Beeching cuts of the 1960s.

If implemented, the McNulty review can only mean a declining, dangerously understaffed and fragmented railway with worse safety standards and huge fares - but more guaranteed, risk-free profits for the private interests that have already drained billions from the industry.

McNulty wants to lift the cap on rail fares that already allows private operators to impose inflation-busting increases - making passengers pay even more towards shareholders' dividends and forcing more people back onto the roads.

In the crazy world of business logic, McNulty says that the answer to fragmentation is to divvy up the tracks and signalling among the private operators.

That means not just one Railtrack Mark II, but a whole series of mini-Railtracks - so it won't be a case of if but when another Hatfield or Potters Bar sees passengers and workers being stretchered from the tracks.

McNulty wants to reduce the frequency of essential visual track inspections in favour of automated ones, and even wants to use second-hand rails on regional lines.

He wants to leave three-quarters of stations without ticket offices, creating more ghost stations and a nightmare for those, especially women, who travel alone or at night.

Despite the overwhelming evidence from crash inquiries proving that guards save lives, McNulty wants to remove all guards from all trains.

More than a third of McNulty's savings would come through sacking safety-critical staff even though productivity has increased ahead of pay - and those who remain have been told to expect real-terms pay cuts.

In short, McNulty is a recipe for disaster that will make passengers, staff and the environment pay for the mess that privatisation has created.

The only option not considered by McNulty was the obvious one - bringing railways back into public ownership.

McNulty compared Britain's railways with publicly owned networks in Europe - but then managed to miss the obvious conclusion that public ownership works.

And it's no better on the buses, where the same big five that dominate the rail industry - Stagecoach, First Group, Arriva, National Express and Go-Ahead - also have control.

Within its blinkered remit, the Competition Commission has found that the wholesale deregulation that accompanied bus privatisation of the mid-1980s led not to healthy competition but to higher fares and fewer and worse services, with commercial routes taking precedence over social routes.

That is no surprise to those of us who fought the fragmentation and sell-off of the National Bus Company and municipal bus companies 25 years ago.

But it is a picture that is set to get worse with the withdrawal of bus subsidies.

The government is cutting 28 per cent of the grant it gives to local authorities for public transport and cutting fuel tax rebate by a fifth - which means that many rural communities will lose their only transport lifeline, while many evening and weekend services are being withdrawn and some pass schemes will simply vanish.

Together, these changes threaten to trigger a devastating downward spiral in an industry that employs well over 120,000 people.

And with the big five firms seeking to carve up the profitable bits of the bus industry in a way that dovetails with their rail franchises - and a government in power that puts big business interests first - we clearly have a battle on our hands.

On the maritime front, there was some good news when, ironically, the union used a complaint to the EU to force the government to outlaw discrimination against foreign nationals, at least while on British ships and working in British waters.

But the key problems remain - dwindling numbers of British seafarers displaced by "social dumping" in which overseas nationals are super-exploited at a fraction of the rate for the job, and failure to apply minimum employment standards.

Even the new training programme that RMT has painstakingly negotiated in recent months looks set to be undermined by a government "review" that even asks if Britain, an island nation, needs British seafarers at all.

In Scotland, the SNP government has betrayed Caledonian MacBrayne and its workforce, sparking a race to the bottom through the latest completely unnecessary tendering process and a catalogue of deception in an attempt to cover up job losses, pay cuts and a poorer ferry services.

The Scottish government had the gall to boast that it had cut funding to the Gourock-Dunoon service by £1.5 million a year, but it has done so at the expense of jobs and pay and a poorer service.

Fighting back

The government is trying to split public and private-sector workers. We need to unite them.

The government is trying to destroy jobs and services piecemeal. We need to defend them together.

The government says there is no alternative. We must show that there is, based on investment in services, fair taxation and harnessing the banks that have been propped up with £1.3 trillion of our money.

From Southampton to the Scottish isles, workers striking to defend their jobs and pensions on June 30 and beyond need the support of us all.

With the unprecedented attack on jobs and services unleashed on all fronts, the only possible response is unity across the labour movement, alongside pensioners, students, passengers and all service users, with co-ordinated strike action, civil disobedience and a crescendo of protest.

All these issues will be debated this week in Fort William.

I know that RMT members will not shirk the challenge.

They are coming for us all, we need to stand firm together.

Bob Crow is general secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers.