Alan Sugar knows nothing about the British rail system, and even less about communism

Labour are moving ahead in most of the polls and suddenly the political right are shrieking frightened and incoherent abuse all over the Internet again.

Alan Sugar's furious accusation that Jeremy Corbyn is a "communist idiot" because of Labour's policy of renationalising the UK rail network is a case in point.

The first thing to note is that a significant majority of British people actually want the railways renationalised.

If it's "communism" to want vital infrastructure and public services like the rail network to be run on a not-for-profit basis for the benefit of the British people and the British economy, then a clear majority of Brits are a bunch of communist idiots by Alan Sugar's warped definition.

That's the problem with furiously screeching "communism" at popular and sensible centre-left democratic socialist policies like public ownership of the railways. The more that venal right-wing propagandists like Alan Sugar do it, the more they actually make communism look like a good idea!

Then there's Sugar's absurd claim that private ownership of rail franchises has improved the railways, when in reality Britain has an increasingly expensive and overcrowded rail network, with very low levels of investment, and many services outside London still operating clapped out old trains that were built before privatisation in 1994!

And what's worse is that this expensive, over-crowded, under-invested farce of a system comes at the cost of far higher public subsidies than it used to cost to run the entirety of British Rail before privatisation!

The British pubic pay twice as much to support the railways today as we did when it was a not-for-profit public service, all just to allow the likes of Richard Branson to siphon £300 million out of the system in private profits.

It's quite incredible to try to credit the people guilty of ripping vast profits out of the system for any marginal improvements in the system, when any taxpayer-funded improvements over the last 25 years have happened despite the private profiteers, not because of them.

Then there's the problem that if Alan Sugar believes it's "communist" to have publicly owned railways, then Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Italy, Belgium, Singapore, Ireland, and even Northern Ireland must all be communist states!

Who knew that "communism" was actually so commonplace?

Then there's the fact that 74% of the UK rail network are actually operated by the state rail companies of other countries like the Netherlands, France, Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China.

If supporting public ownership of the railways makes someone a "communist", then supporting the current UK franchising model (which allows foreign state-ownership but bars the UK from bidding to run its own railways) obviously makes the likes of Alan Sugar a supporter of foreign communism!

As a self-appointed cheerleader for the current rail franchising model Alan Sugar believes that UK should be the only state on earth that is barred from running UK rail services, while the state rail companies of ... errr ... "communist" countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands and Singapore should be allowed to run British rail franchises!

See what a pickle people get themselves into when they wantonly lob accusations of "communism" around without even bothering to acquaint themselves with the absolutely basic facts first?

Once we see the screeching abuse of people like Alan Sugar in the context of some actual facts about the UK rail system it's beyond obvious that he's got an incredible amount of brass neck to be calling anyone else an "idiot", and that he resorts to such venal abuse and hyperbolic accusations because he simply hasn't got the intellect or knowledge to contest the argument with stuff like facts and evidence.

But instead of getting upset at this kind of vitriolic abuse, the majority of us who want decent not-for-profit public services that are run for the benefit of the British people and the British economy should be delighted that the only arguments that supporters of the private profiteers can muster are vitriol, abuse, fact-aversion, hyperbole, and glaring logical incoherence.

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