Dear Dirty America

MICHAEL J BLAIR
Perthshire, Scotland

Just when you think you’ve seen every stupid stunt, a politician will amaze us with something so ridiculous, so utterly mad, that it actually gives the person a place in history and the stunt takes his or her name.

So begins the saga of doing a Corbyn.

One fine day, one of Jeremy Corbyn’s aides had an idea which could not fail to chime with the public mood. It was perfect. Get Jeremy Corbyn on an overcrowded train and find out there were no vacant seats. Poor Mr Corbyn would be filmed sitting on the floor in a corner of a carriage, reading and looking pathetic.

The public would lap this up. An elderly man reduced to this by the evil capitalist owner of this government subsidised train.

The plan was foolproof. How could anything possibly go wrong?

Mr Corbyn and his retinue duly got on to the Virgin train from London, heading to Newcastle. Apparently he was accompanied by his wife, but I don’t remember seeing her on the video footage shot on the train.

There is a shot of him walking through the train, passing a variety of empty seats and apparently ignoring them.

Then we see him filmed, sitting on the floor reading and looking serene. There is no sign of Mrs Corbyn, who I presume must have found a seat or perhaps was standing somewhere looking embarrassed at her husband, who we must remember is leader of Her Majesty’s opposition in parliament, sitting on the floor of a train trying to make some kind of statement about the overcrowding on the rail network.

This is all videoed by his entourage and quickly sent to many media outlets. Of course there is a huge storm of outrage over this terrible treatment of a very important man.

It was the lead story on every news channel. Massive publicity for poor Mr Corbyn, and not forgetting his equally poor but unseen wife.

It was only later in the evening when people looked more closely at the video footage, that suspicions were raised regarding the “staged” look of the entire episode.

Why had Mr Corbyn decided to ignore the obviously empty seats in many of the carriages? Why was he the only person on the train sitting in the corner, on the floor of the train? Where was Mrs Corbyn? How did the rest of his retinue manage to find seats, because he was the only one on the floor?

Believe me, if anyone else had been sitting on the floor looking pathetic, they not only would have been filmed, but also been put up for media interviews.

The answers given to these questions and many others were a bit wooly and didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Apparently Mr Corbyn wanted two seats together for himself and his unseen spouse.

Another answer was that all the “empty” seats had either a piece of luggage or something else on them, making it impossible for him to sit down.

There were obviously no other people sitting on the floor and this made the whole thing smell like a PR stunt going badly wrong.

If you and your wife were on a crowded train, surely it would make sense to sit in separate seats until spare seats became available? It’s not some impossible conundrum, it’s just common sense.

Also if there were pieces of luggage or whatever on empty seats, I’m sure either Mr Corbyn or one of his many aides, could have asked the person sitting beside the offending article, if the seat was taken or had the piece of luggage bought its own ticket?

Another fairly simple way of getting a seat on a train, is to book it in advance. This isn’t some kind of voodoo or black magic. This is actually possible. Easy in fact. A child could do it.

The Corbyn entourage knew that they were going to Newcastle that day. It wasn’t some spur of the moment idea.

The other problem for Mr Corbyn’s team was that pesky train company had cctv film of the entire episode. Now, the Corbyn team should have been listening to the announcements. They specifically state that the entire train is covered by cctv cameras.

I imagine that they were too busy setting up the stunt to pay any attention to some person making announcements. They were too important to listen to anyone else.

By the end of the day, Mr Corbyn’s stunt had backfired so badly, that his aides were reduced to out and out lying.

The train footage wasn’t correct.

Was it legal to make such footage public?

It was a media conspiracy.

It was in fact everyone’s fault except their own.

They were happy to use the media to push their story of an old man who couldn’t get a seat on a busy train, but when the same media began to ask awkward questions, they started squealing about conspiracy theories.

This is typical of all political parties. Attempt to pin the blame on anyone except themselves when a stunt goes tits up.

We, the great unwashed, aren’t nearly as stupid as the people who run the country think we are.

So, doing a “Corbyn” is now common usage and is being used regularly to demonstrate childish, petulant behaviour.

On other matters regarding and relating to the Labour party, the leadership contest is still in full swing.

Boring rigid anyone who is mad enough to listen to five minutes of “I’m more radical than him” nonsense. These people believe they are of such importance that you or I would have anything to do with them. Deluded doesn’t really describe them properly!

In the end, whichever of the nonentities wins this leadership contest, it won’t make the Labour party any more electable than it was the day before. It is finished as a force in British politics and is even less relevant than the Liberal Democrat party, and that’s saying something!

The British public deserve a proper opposition party to take this unpleasant government to task over its goal to make the poor suffer at the expense of the multinational corporations and the hedge fund billionaires, who get rich regardless of the state of the economy.

We should confine these ridiculous politicians and their increasingly desperate stunts to the pages of history, as a warning to future generations.

The greed of these parasites is breathtaking! They get elected to parliament. Then they kiss all the right arses to get promoted to a position which will then get them a few directorships or another well paying positions when they leave Westminster. This also applies to top civil servants, who are just as venal as their masters in parliament.

The general public should be outraged at this manipulation of position for financial gain, but sadly the public are almost numb to any of this because they think they can’t do anything to stop it happening! And also, more scarily, they sit watching their 50 inch televisions, eating vast quantities of junk food, or hunched over a smart phone or iPad, lost in a fantasy world of the internet.

This behaviour has been encouraged by successive governments. They tell us it’s our right to have high speed broadband in our homes.

Their aim has always been to keep the public under control by any means possible. Technology has been perfect for this purpose. A non non violent means of making people so un-engaged with reality, all they want to do is get home from slaving away at some menial job and veg out in front of the television, which with modern technology, can be used as a computer. So there is no having to get up and move five feet to access anything. It’s all served up with minimal effort.

It’s a very dangerous situation when people who were politically active, are reduced to practically brain dead couch potatoes. The result of this happening is that the people who are engaged in politics and political activity are generally the far left or possibly the far right.

Real socialists are not engaging in anything except eating burgers and chips and watching brain numbing crap on television. Or perhaps sharing cute pictures of cats and dogs on Facebook.

This is where we are now. Nothing matters as long as soaps and mindless quiz shows dominate Prime Time television. Even the news is reduced to pimping some reality show its channel is showing!

Once, religion was the opium of the masses, but now it is the internet and reality shows on television which are their addiction.

Act now or the game is over.

ALSO BY MJ BLAIR

Vote Bollocks Or Water Buffalo

Out Out Out! What’s next after Brexit?

The Brexit Turkeys have come home to roost

[Jeremy Corbyn in a conductor’s hat, photo courtesy of David Hunt, Wikimedia Commons;]