Why are right-wing grievance-merchants having such temper tantrums over the Virgin/Daily Mail non-story?

Twitter is suddenly full of hard-right polemicists filling their nappies over the story about the Virgin West Coast rail franchise deciding to stop selling copies of the Daily Mail on their trains.

Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Isabel Hardman, Fraser Nelson, Daniel Hannan, Michael Ashcroft, and a wave of assorted Tories, Ukippers, Biffers, and Brextremists have all posted hysterical comments about this so called "ban".

The main problem with this whole pathetic story is that the fuss is so grotesquely disproportionate to what's actually happened.

Nobody is banning people from taking copies of the Daily Mail onto the train, and nobody is banning anyone from using the on board WiFi to access the Daily Mail website. 

In reality the private train company has decided to stop selling issues of the paper on board the trains, mainly because they were only selling 70 copies per day!

The incredible amount of froth and noise over this ludicrous non-story is quite remarkable from a bunch of people who never seem to stop yelling "snowflake!" and "social justice warrior!" at anyone to the left of Joseph Goebbels who takes offence at anything or calls for any kind of social change.

It's almost as if they're a bunch of total hypocrites isn't it?
How is it possible to explain all of this hypocritical right-wing hysteria over a newspaper market that's worth a paltry £45.50 per day (70 x 65p a copy).

The reason the hard-right have decided to have such nappy-filling tantrums over this story is because they know that facts are almost entirely irrelevant to their target audience.

They know that a story like this is perfect material for the victim complex mentality they work tirelessly to foster amongst the cognitively lazy.

The fact that this decision actually involves such a trivial number of newspapers (just 0.004% of the Daily Mail's circulation) is completely irrelevant because the person this kind of trope is aimed at will already be too consumed with the desired feelings of rage, hate, and self-pity over the story to ever consider checking the facts for themselves.

The reason the hard-right foster the sense of self-pity with this kind of hyperbolic grievance-mongering is that they know that once people have had their victim complexes inflated to the size of hot air balloons, it only takes the slightest puff of air to get them all mindlessly floating in the desired political direction.

Then there's very real examples of public transport censorship. Regular readers of this page will know that access to Another Angry Voice is blocked by the onboard WiFi of multiple public transport companies, including Arriva.

Are the hard-right up in arms about the fact that the private profiteers who operate swathes of our public transport system have chosen to censor a political blog that openly calls for the renationalisation of public transport?

Are the hard-right calling for public transport providers to stop blocking access to political sites on their onboard WiFi?

Of course they're not. And the reason is obvious. They don't really give a damn about freedom of speech at all.

All they really care about is creating simplistic political tropes to feed to the easily led about how the hard-right are the perpetual victims. They do this because grievance-mongering is an absolutely essential lubricant for the kind of socially and economically ruinous hard-right dogma these fanaticists are actually pushing behind the scenes.

Part of this ruinous hard-right dogma is the rail privatisation agenda which has seen the UK rail network carved up into franchises with the primary function of generating huge profits for their owners (be they private companies like Virgin, or foreign state rail operators). 

One of the side-effects of this right-wing privatisation agenda is that the private companies that run the trains get to decide which newspapers they sell on board.

If the right-wing grievance-mongers had any wits about them at all, they'd be able to see their own culpability in the situation they're whipping themselves up into a frenzy about.

For all of the right-wing temper tantrums and soiled nappies over this pathetic non-story, one person is talking sense about the whole thing. Jeremy Corbyn has announced that there will be no newspaper "bans" once the railways are brought back into public ownership.

The irony of course is that if the right-wingers who have been filling their nappies over this non-story really want to be able to buy a copy of the Daily Mail on the train, they should vote for Jeremy Corbyn at the next election. And if they vote Tory they should accept that they're voting for the continuation of private profiteers leeching profits out of our rail network and deciding which newspapers they want to sell on board the trains.

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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.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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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".