This super-viral Corbyn Tweet illustrates why the Westminster establishment class hate him so much

Jeremy Corbyn's clapback at Richard Branson for having sued the NHS because they wouldn't privatise services into his hands is already one of the most mega-viral political Tweets of 2019.

Branson's Tweet is absolutely dripping in privilege. It's easy to delude yourself into "truly believing" that "stuff" like money and material possessions aren't a big factor in happiness when you're a billionaire who rakes in huge profits at the public expense by snapping up former public services on the cheap and then renting them back to the public at twice the price.

If you've never had to worry about how the hell you're going to put food on the table, pay your transport costs, provide your kids decent shoes and bags so they don't get bullied by materialist little shit-heads at school, or find the massive sums your profiteering slumlord is charging you to like in an absolute hovel, then it's obviously easy to pretend that money and material wealth are irrelevant to happiness.

If you have ever experienced the stress, anxiety, hunger, and crushing depression of extreme poverty then you know that it's vapid over-privileged blibber-blabber, especially when it's coming from a guy who gets paid millions whichever way the dice fall.

He either snaps up lucrative NHS services to profiteer on, or he sues the NHS for £millions if they say no.
Of course it's easy to pretend that money and material circumstances aren't important factors in life if you're a billionaire still counting your loot from the time you sued the NHS.

When Corbyn snaps back at Branson, he's quite clearly standing up for the rest of us.

But within the Westminster Establishment bubble, Corbyn's behaviour is absolute political heresy.

For the last four decades the conventional political wisdom is that political leaders need to suck up to corporate fat cats and billionaires in order to win their approval, to bag multi-million donations from wealthy elitists to bankroll their party operations, and to demonstrate their subservience to billionaire right-wing propaganda barons like Rupert Murdoch, Jonathan Harmsworth, and the oddbal Barclay brothers.

By actually standing up to corporations, the mega-rich, and the right-wing propaganda barons, rather than licking their boots, Corbyn is outright defying the Westminster bubble groupthink.

Some of them hate him for this because they honestly believe that the role of politicians is to relentlessly serve the interests of corporations and the already extremely wealthy at the expense of everyone else (Tories and their depraved Lib-Dem austerity enablers).

But others, especially those of the Blairite persuasion, are terrified of what it would mean if he actually succeeded.

It would mean that it was never actually necessary for Labour to sell out to Rupert Murdoch, or to suck up to greedy profiteering pillocks like Alan Sugar and Richard Branson, or to kick down the door to NHS privatisation, or to bring in £billions worth of rip-off PFI economic alchemy schemes, or to set the school privatisation agenda in motion, or to dangerously deregulate the financial sector, or to whip up anti-immigrant rhetoric and xenophobia, or to abstain on Theresa May's despicable and unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment", or to pathetically imitate Tory austerity fanaticism in 2015.

If Jeremy Corbyn succeeds by making Labour a genuine grass roots-funded democratic socialist party that's not beholden to billionaires to bankroll their operation, it'll mean that all of the sell-outs and betrayals between 1997 and 2010 weren't even necessary in order to deliver the good stuff that they pathetically groveled to the rich for permission to do (minimum wage, Tax Credits, Sure Start, NHS reinvestment).

It'll mean they sold their souls for no reason.

Which is why the Labour right seem to hate Corbyn with even more venom than their right-wing, orthodox neoliberal, austerity-fixated, wage repressing, public service annihilating, disability persecuting, welfare vandalising, school privatising political opponents like the Tories and Lib-Dems.

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Why does Richard Branson think Virgin Trains are above the law?

Jeremy Corbyn clearly exaggerated when he said that the train he was on was "ram-packed" in order to make his case for rail renationalisation, because he now admits that there were a few single seats available but that he didn't want his wife and his team distributed randomly throughout the train.

When there's an ongoing scandal over the Tory health secretary Jeremy Hunt's decision to bury the evidence that his 7 Days NHS agenda is unworkable and dangerous because there simply aren't enough staff it seems odd that week old train stunt is dominating the news agenda.

There couldn't really be a better example of a deliberate distraction than millions of people talking about whether there were sufficient seats on one particular train on one particular day, rather than the fact that the Tory health secretary deliberately hid the evidence that his 7 Days NHS plan was inevitably going to lead to either service reductions or dangerously overworked staff. One man sitting on a train floor is suddenly more important than the safety of millions of NHS patients!

The week old story of Jeremy Corbyn sitting on the train floor was reignited when Virgin Trains released CCTV images of the train journey to the press to try to prove that the service was not as crowded as Jeremy Corbyn had claimed.

The Data Protection Act is pretty damned specific when it comes to the use of CCTV images. The law of the United Kingdom says that "Access to retained images and information should be restricted and there must be clearly defined rules on who can gain access and for what purpose such access is granted; the disclosure of images and information should only take place when it is necessary for such a purpose or for law enforcement purposes.".

The data protection rules that Virgin Trains are obligated under UK law to maintain state that "In certain circumstances we may need to disclose CCTV images for legal reasons. When this is done there is a requirement for the organisation that has received the images to adhere to the Data Protection Act".

A private train franchise feeding their CCTV images to the press in an attempt to damage the reputation of a politician who wants to renationalise the rail network clearly doesn't fall under the definition of a legal reason or a law enforcement purpose.

The Information Commissioner's Office has stated that they are investigating the Virgin Trains CCTV leak as a potential data protection breach. It would be very surprising if they didn't conclude that Virgin Trains had broken the law by leaking their CCTV images to the press because doing so is so clearly not a law enforcement issue.

Richard Branson clearly endorsed the unlawful behaviour of his company by sharing a link to the press coverage of the CCTV leak on his Twitter account.

The answer to the question of why Richard Branson and Virgin Trains decided to ignore the law of the land is completely obvious: Jeremy Corbyn favours renationalisation of the railways, meaning that their company stands to lose their profiteering cash-extraction schemes. Damaging Jeremy Corbyn to protect their own business interests clearly takes precedence over complying with the law.

It's incredibly fanciful to imagine Branson and whoever it was in Virgin trains who decided to authorise the leak had no access to lawyers who would have told them that such a leak would be unlawful, but just for the sake of argument let's keep it alive as an option. This leaves us with two potential scenarios.

1. Whoever it was who authorised the leak was unaware of the Data Protection Act and didn't bother to run their plan past Virgin's legal team. Conclusion - Virgin Trains are incompetent

2, Whoever it was who authorised the leak was well aware that leaking CCTV images to the press for political purposes is unlawful, but they decided that the law of the land is secondary to Virgin Trains business interests. Conclusion - Virgin Trains are criminals

The behaviour of Virgin Trains in this scenario is illustrative of what has gone so horribly wrong in this country. Business tycoons, corporate executives, bankers and the like have come to believe that they are completely above the law.

They believe that stuff like obeying the law and paying tax are just for the unimportant little people, and that the only thing that governs the behaviour of their corporations is profit. If more profit can be made by paying tax lawyers to hide their profits in tax havens, that's what they do. If the law stands in the way of their scheme to discredit a politician who threatens their ability to keep profiteering from their taxpayer subsidised monopolies, they just ignore it.

These people are so used to buying influence and hobnobbing with the Westminster establishment club they genuinely believe themselves to be untouchable. 

Look at Fred Goodwin and his oh so cosy relationship with Gordon Brown and the way he got to walk away from destroying RBS with a fat pension instead of a jail term. 

Look at Philip Green and his love-in with David Cameron and the way he pillaged BHS and its pension fund and then flogged the husk of it to a bloody charlatan with no retail experience whatever resulting in over 11,000 job losses. 

Look at Richard Branson's cosy relationship with Tory Blair and the way that he's clearly going to be let off with an insignificant slap on the writ  at the absolute most for completely ignoring the Data Protection Act in order to try to protect his profiteering rail franchises from the threat of nationalisation.

These people are used to buying influence, dodging-tax and ignoring laws that don't suit them, and that's why they're absolutely terrified of Jeremy Corbyn. They know that his principles can't be bought. They know that he won't back down on plans to renationalise the railways or make corporations actually pay tax on the profits they earn in the UK, even if they offer him a cushy post-politics corporate consultancy.

That's why they'll attack him relentlessly, even if that means ignoring the law of the land to do it.

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"Train-gate" vs "NHS patient safety-gate"

There are two stories about political Jeremies doing the rounds, it's interesting to consider which is actually the most important, and which is being given the most media attention.

Jeremy Hunt

A leaked risk assessment document drawn up by the government's own civil servants revealed serious risks in the 7 Day NHS service that Jeremy Hunt has been pushing.

One of the highlighted risks is that there are simply not enough trained NHS staff to implement the 7 day programme. In the section entitled "workforce overload" the document admits that without sufficient consultants, GPs and other health professionals the full 7 day service simply cannot be delivered.

This revelation is a complete vindication of the Junior Doctors who have always stated patient safety as their number one reason for their strike actions. The Junior Doctors repeatedly argued that without significant additional investment in staff, the choice would be either a deterioration in NHS service coverage, or patient's lives being put at risk by tired and overworked doctors. This leaked risk assessment document proves them absolutely right.

A second subsidiary lie that the report reveals is the way the Tories endlessly harked on about their "Plan" for the 7 Days NHS as if it was an actual plan, rather than a just an empty vote-winning sound bite. The risk assessment document states that the objectives and scope of the project were not properly finalised meaning it was liable to scope creep, and that there was no robust, quality assured plans for the various NHS work streams meaning a likely inability to effectively deal with delays in the project's implementation.

The leaked document reveals that Jeremy Hunt and the Tories repeatedly mislead the public by hiding concerns about the risks to public safety, and again by pretending that they had a proper plan for a 7 days NHS rather than just a vague vote-grabbing sound bite that was always likely to turn into a complete shambles.

Jeremy Corbyn

After Jeremy Corbyn filmed a short clip about over-crowding on Britain's shambolic and massively over-priced private rail franchises onboard a Virgin train, the company responded by breaching the Data Protection Act* and their own privacy policy** by releasing CCTV footage of Jeremy Corbyn apparently walking past empty seats before he recording his piece.

It's absolutely obvious why Richard Branson would want to undermine Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn's policies of renationalising the rail network and ending the ongoing Tory NHS carve-up would clearly hurt Branson's Virgin Health and Virgin Rail business interests.

It's no surprise that the mainstream media and a load of Anyone But Corbyn coup-plotters jumped on the story instead of focusing their efforts on the much more serious case of Jeremy Hunt deliberately provoking a series of Junior Doctors' strikes and misleading the public over the safety risks inherent in his 7 Days NHS project.

I'm not going delve too deeply into the debate over whether there were available seats on the Virgin train or not. There are pictures Corbyn walking past loads of clearly reserved seats, a video clip of him walking through a clearly crowded train and there's public testimony that the train was over-crowded too, but then there's also the Data Protection Act breaching CCTV images of what appear to be unreserved seats on the train. To me the bigger issue actually appears to be that billionaire business tycoons like Richard Branson feel entitled to completely ignore Data Protection laws and use the CCTV data they collect on unsuspecting members of the public to launch political attacks against them, which is all a bit Orwellian for my liking.

The important issue isn't whether there were seats on a particular train. Everyone who has travelled by rail in recent years knows that rip-off prices, unreliable services and dangerous levels of overcrowding are real problems faced by millions of commuters a day.

All rail users have thought "how bloody much?" when buying train tickets (even pre-booked ones); we've all experienced severely delayed or cancelled trains (especially people who are reliant on the abysmal Southern franchise); we've all had to stand on trains that are so jam-packed that it's a filthy perverts' fantasy of inappropriate touching opportunities; and we've all wondered how many people in the severely over-crowded carriage we're travelling in would end up dead if there was some kind of accident.

The sad thing is that people (including an awful lot of Labour people) are so busy going potty over "Traingate" and poring over images and video clips to see if seats on one particular train on one particular day were reserved or not, that they're forgetting all about the fact that the other Jeremy was willing to put the lives of millions of NHS patients at risk, and that he repeatedly and deliberately mislead the public by hiding the safety concerns about his project, and by misusing statistics as propaganda in favour of his dangerous reforms.

I guess that trying to discredit Jeremy Corbyn's rail renationalisation policy is a much more important political agenda for a lot of people that the safety of NHS patients.

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* = "The disclosure of images and information should only take place when it is necessary for such a purpose or for law enforcement purposes". Trying to undermine the pro-nationalisation policy of a politician doesn't really seem to be a "law enforcement purpose" to me.

** = "In certain circumstances we may need to disclose CCTV images for legal reasons. When this is done there is a requirement for the organisation that has received the images to adhere to the Data Protection Act". 

The Tory contempt for the disabled

Here's another example of the Tory determination to attack labour rights. This time from the Tory MP for Shipley Philip Davies, who came out with the suggestion that employers should be allowed to pay less than the National Minimum Wage to people with disabilities. Here's what he said:

"My view is that for some people the national minimum wage may be more of a hindrance than a help."

"People with a learning disability clearly, by definition, cannot be as productive in their work as somebody who has not got a disability of that nature."

"If those people who consider it is being a hindrance to them, and in my view that's some of the most vulnerable people in society, if they feel that for a short period of time, taking a lower rate of pay to help them get on their first rung of the jobs ladder, if they judge that that is a good thing, I don't see why we should be standing in their way."

One of the most offensive things about this proposal was the way that Davies dresses up this attack on the employment rights of people with disabilities as a way of  "helping them".

The first criticism is that the National Minimum Wage is a pittance, especially for people under the age of 21. There is a large disparity between the minimum wage and what is considered to be a living wage. Allowing companies to pay disabled adults less than £6.07 an hour seems like an absurd suggestion, but allowing them to pay less than £3.68 to disabled under 18s (that have finished compulsory education) would be grotesque exploitation.

Huge numbers of people in minimum wage occupations already have their incomes "topped up" by Tax Credits and Housing Benefits, which are essentially forms of government subsidy to employers that pay poverty wages to their workforces. If the government allow employers to opt out of the Minimum Wage, the taxpayer would end up making up the difference in increased Tax Credit and Housing Benefit payments. Davies' scheme can be seen as yet another example of Tory MPs attempting to make the taxpayer subsidise corporate interests.

Another obvious consequence of this "opt out" scheme is that employers would put pressure on the disabled to accept lower wages. One can imagine the situation. "We have had plenty of able-bodied people apply for this position Mr Bloggs, however in light of your disability we would consider offering you the position if you were prepared to accept a lower wage in order to compensate us for your disability".

Yet another criticism is the fact that allowing one minority additional rights, namely the right to undercut the labour market by legally working for less than the minimum wage, is a form of positive discrimination. Tories normally tend to go frothy at the mouth about any form of positive discrimination. Imagine their reaction if someone like Harriet Harman had suggested bringing in discriminatory legislation to favour the interests of the disabled, ethnic minorities or single parents. People like Philip Davies would have been screaming blue murder. However, when it comes to attempts to undermine labour rights, their objection to positive discrimination suddenly evaporates.

Yet another objection is Davies' statement that disabled people are "clearly, by definition" less productive than people without disabilities. Does anyone think that Stephen Hawking is "by definition" less capable of brilliant scientific achievements than some random scientist that doesn't happen to have motor neurone disease? Does anyone believe that Richard Branson is "clearly" less able to run a gigantic corporation than some random person that isn't dyslexic? Does anyone really believe that whether a person is disabled or not is the primary contributing factor to their productivity? Does anyone believe that the Northern Ireland peace process would have been significantly better had someone "more productive in their work" than the cancer sufferer Mo Mowlam been in charge?

After a storm of criticism Philip Davies reacted by claiming that it was just "left-wing hysteria". An absurd and misleading assertion since criticism came from across the political spectrum. In fact one of the MPs to criticise the proposals to his face during the Parliamentary debate was fellow Tory MP Edward Leigh, who asked him: "Why actually should a disabled person work for less than £5.93 an hour? It is not a lot of money, is it?" Senior Tories were quick to distance themselves from the proposals and a Tory spokesperson tried to calm the storm by stating that "these comments do not reflect the views of the Conservative party and do not reflect government policy".

It was good to see that the Tories distanced themselves from these proposals, however one suspects that this distancing operation had more to do with the storm of political criticism, than it had to do with any moral objection. That the Tories hold the disabled in contempt is absolutely obvious from the fact that not a single Tory MP supported John McDonnell's early day motion to end the Atos disability denial system. The Tory contempt for labour rights is even more obvious, with people like Iain Duncan Smith forcing the unemployed to work for corporations for no wages under the Workfare scheme. 

Philip Davies' suggestion that employers should be allowed to pay less than the minimum wage to the disabled just goes to show the kind of people that become Tory MPs. He clearly didn't think his idea through or consult with any mental health charities before proposing it in Parliament. The motivation behind the idea is quite obviously contempt for disabled people, (who he considers to be "clearly" inferior, "by definition") and the natural Tory contempt for the whole concept of labour rights. Not only that, but his pathetic defence that criticism of his proposal is just "left-wing hysteria" clearly demonstrates the Tory paranoia, that all criticism of their lunacy must be some kind of left-wing conspiracy.

See Also
 

The Tory contempt for working people

 

More Tory attacks on labour rights

 

Lord Bichard's plan to force the elderly work for their pensions

 

A letter to fans of Workfare
 
The Atos disability denial factory