RAIL UNION’S XMAS MISERY FOR MILLIONS

Corbyn’s militant pals to wreck major routes for a MONTH

UNION militants have ordered an unprecedented 27- day Christmas rail strike.

Workers on South Western Railway will walk out from December 2 to New Year’s Day – inflicting misery on millions of commuters, shoppers and sports fans as well as those visiting friends and family.

The action by the Rail, Maritime and Transport union – over the threat of driver- only trains – threatens to paralyse a vast swathe of the rail network. South Western Railway carries almost 600,000 passengers a day.

The RMT, which has strong links to Jeremy Corbyn, claims that leaving drivers – rather than guards – to open and close train doors is dangerous. This is despite repeated assurances from the rail watchdog that driveronly controls are safe.

Critics believe the union is determined to retain guards so they can

cripple the network in the event of future pay disputes.

The only non- strike dates are December 12 – General Election day – and Christmas and Boxing Day, when trains do not usually operate anyway.

South Western Railway runs 1,700 trains a day across London, Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset and Devon, carrying 216million passengers a year.

It is the main operator into London Waterloo, which is the country’s busiest station. Previous strikes on the network have seen almost half of services cancelled every day.

The announcement came hours after Network Rail announced plans for 386 engineering works across the festive period and a total shutdown of London Paddington over Christmas.

The move by the RMT marks the latest – and biggest – flashpoint in their bitter three-year dispute with operators over the role of guards.

Yesterday, RMT general secretary Mick Cash said its members had been ‘left with no choice’ but to announce fresh strikes after talks broke down.

He said: ‘At the last meeting we held with SWR, principles in agreements were made in good faith with the company’s negotiating team and we feel hugely let down again. As long as the company continues to refuse to give assurances on the future operational role of the guard, we will remain in dispute.’

Last year the RMT put forward plans to ‘align’ with the Mr Corbyn and his policies.

Mr Cash has also criticised a ‘hard core of Labour MPs’ who he accused of trying to undermine the Labour leader ‘ and the radical changes he has made’ to the party.

Labour under Mr Corbyn has previously vowed to work with the RMT in the fight against privatisation.

Last night Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s official spokesman said: ‘Every train which does not run as a result of these unnecessary strikes impacts thousands of passengers at a very busy time when families and friends want to come together.’

Anthony Smith, of independent watchdog Transport Focus, said: ‘Yet more strikes are being dumped on passenspokesman gers who may have to cancel Christmas holiday plans or endure miserable journeys to work. This dispute has dragged on for far too long.

‘It is vital that the parties get back around the table to resolve this matter.’

A South Western Railway said: ‘The deliberate targeting of services up to, and during, the Christmas period is typical of the lack of concern the RMT continue to have for our customers.

‘The RMT appear purely focused on keeping control of train doors in a misguided attempt to hold power over the industry.’

Network Rail revealed yesterday that London Paddington will be shut from December 24 to 27 while workers repair to tracks, switches and crossings. A reduced timetable will also run from December 28 to 31 for work on the heavilydelayed Crossrail project.

This eight- day disruption will hit passengers heading to South Wales and the West Country, as well as those hoping to use the Heathrow Express. Great Western Railway trains heading into London are likely to terminate at Slough or Reading.

Other work means Southeastern Highspeed and Eurostar trains will not stop at Ashford, in Kent, between December 26-29. There will be disruption on December 27 at London King’s Cross.

There will also be smaller levels of disruption at London Victoria, Clapham Junction, Liverpool Lime Street, Euston and Stratford in east London.

Network Rail chief executive Andrew Haines said: ‘Significantly fewer people travel over the Christmas holidays, which is why we do so much work at this time of year.’

‘Lack of concern for passengers’

WE ARE only a few days into the election campaign and the conspiracy theories have already begun.

Since the weekend, Labour have been vigorously whipping themselves into a lather of outrage over the Government’s decision to postpone publication of a report by the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee on alleged Russian activities in Britain.

On social media, Labour supporters talk darkly of Russian money influencing the Leave campaign, Russian oligarchs donating to the Conservative Party and — a particular favourite — the supposedly murky activities of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street svengali, the controversial Dominic Cummings.

Mr Cummings will probably not mind one bit, since all this merely burnishes his reputation as a Machiavellian man of mystery. But although we certainly need to take a long, clear look at the question of Russian influence on British politics, I can’t help finding Labour’s hysteria shamelessly hypocritical.

Deluded

Among the supposed ‘serious concerns’ surrounding Mr Cummings, for example, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, the risible Emily Thornberry, has demanded information about his academic tutorials at Oxford in the early Nineties, as well as his three years working in Russia between 1994 and 1997.

How, I wonder, will she react if it turns out that Mr Cummings owns a copy of War And Peace or has a taste for beetroot soup? Would that qualify him as a security risk?

The irony of all this, of course, is that there are plenty of people in this election campaign who genuinely are security risks. I can think of plenty who have said and written genuinely hateful things, and espouse genuinely disturbing, deluded and unpatriotic ideas.

And if Ms Thornberry wants to find out who they are, she need only scan the faces on her own front bench.

I’ll come to Jeremy Corbyn in a moment. But first, it’s worth looking at the man Ms Thornberry and her Labour colleagues are backing against Boris Johnson in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, one Ali Milani.

As it turns out, Mr Milani has a gory record of tweeting antiSemitic abuse, even using the hashtag ‘Jew’ to mock people for supposed meanness. On top of that, he claimed that the U.S. government carried out the 9/11 attacks itself as a ‘false flag’ operation to scapegoat Islamic militants.

Mr Milani has apologised, explaining that he was young and made a mistake. Fair enough. We all make mistakes.

Isn’t it odd, though, how many of Jeremy Corbyn’s enthusiasts make the same kind of mistakes? You might almost think they actually believed what they tweeted — and you’d be right.

Here’s another example. The Labour candidate in Coventry South, Zarah Sultana, declared on social media that she supports ‘violent resistance’ against Israel, and said she would celebrate ‘when the likes of Blair, Netanyahu and Bush die’. That’s the same Tony Blair who led her party for 13 years.

That such people are allowed into Mr Corbyn’s Labour Party, and are even picked as candidates, speaks volumes about his moral values, or lack of them. Indeed, the fact is that they are not aberrations; they faithfully reflect Labour’s political culture under the current leadership.

Their leader, remember, is a man who posed with a wreath near the graves of Palestinian terrorists, and counts the Hamas murderers as his ‘friends’. He tweeted his support for a disgustingly anti-Semitic mural (he later apologised, claiming he had not looked at it properly), and has appeared on platforms with Islamic militants.

Under Mr Corbyn’s leadership, Jewish MPs such as Luciana Berger have been hounded out of their own party, while one senior rabbi broke with tradition this week in begging Jewish voters not to back Labour.

And horrifying as all this is, it is only one element of Labour’s toxic new conspiracy-theory culture, in which Britain and the West are always wrong, and our enemies always right. How can we forget that Mr Corbyn invited Gerry Adams to London at a time when the IRA’s bloody bombing campaign was at its height? How can we forget that his Shadow Chancellor, the self- declared Marxist John McDonnell, has a plaque in his office honouring the ‘martyrs’ of the IRA, and publicly praised their ‘bombs and bullets’?

And then, inevitably, there is Russia. For when Ms Thornberry criticises the Tories for accepting Russian money — and to be fair, she has a point — she conveniently forgets that the greatest enthusiasts for Vladimir Putin’s cruel, repressive regime are sitting next to her in the Shadow Cabinet.

Mr Corbyn, who spent the Cold War arguing that the Soviet Union had been maligned and that the West was always in the wrong, has never hidden his Russian sympathies. Not content with calling for Nato to be disbanded, he blamed the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 on the West.

And how did he react when Russian agents went about their deadly work in the streets of Salisbury, poisoning Sergei and Yulia Skripal with novichok in broad daylight?

Slavish

Disgracefully, he did everything in his power to cast doubt on Russian responsibility. In an almost incredible suspension of reality, he even suggested that Britain send a sample of the novichok to Moscow, so that the Russians themselves could tell us whether it was theirs.

In this, as in so much else, Mr Corbyn merely reflects the views of his puppet-master, his spin doctor Seumas Milne. For Mr Milne is not just a Marxist; he is an out-and-out Stalinist who has claimed that the Soviet terror regime should be remembered for its ‘genuine idealism and commitment’, rather than the millions slaughtered in the name of progress.

The faces in the Kremlin may have changed but Mr Milne and his boss have remained as slavish and sycophantic as ever. Mr Milne has even shared a platform with Vladimir Putin, interviewing him on stage in the Black Sea resort of Sochi at a conference designed to rehabilitate his international image. His expenses, naturally, were paid by Russian businessmen.

None of this is a secret. And it bears repeating that no previous Labour leadership has ever said and done such things.

Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, Neil Kinnock, Gordon Brown — whatever you think of them, they were all patriots. It was the Attlee government that commissioned our nuclear deterrent and was instrumental in founding Nato. And as a veteran of World War I, the former Major Attlee would be utterly repelled by the unpatriotic fanatics who now lead his party.

Destructive

All this is before you even get on to Labour’s plan for a fourday week that would cost taxpayers an estimated £17 billion, its projected ‘nationalisation unit’ to seize major British utilities, or its ‘economic revolution’ to be funded by massive tax rises on the middle classes, all of which have been trailed in newspapers this week.

Against this background, perhaps it is not surprising that Ms Thornberry is so keen to talk about what Dominic Cummings did when he was a student. After all, the last thing she wants to talk about is Labour’s dementedly destructive plan for our economy, let alone the colossal, unprecedented security risk of having Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street.

This is rank hypocrisy, of course, but it is also ruthlessly cynical politics. For as she well knows, Labour did much better than expected in 2017 because they were always seen as faintly comical outsiders, which meant Mr Corbyn and his comrades escaped serious scrutiny.

From her point of view, therefore, the less people talk about his record, the better.

But this time, things must be different. Whatever you think about Brexit — and most sensible people are just desperate to get it over with — the fact is that in this election, there is only one genuine, glaring risk to Britain’s national security and economic prosperity.

And that, needless to say, is Jeremy Corbyn.