“You disgusting man. You won't have many tears shed over your demise. Rip Bob!”

“You disgusting man. You won't have many tears shed over your demise. Rip Bob!” So came the comment from Michelle Ryan after my piece on Bob Crow. She may well be correct about the reaction to my demise whenever it happens. Michelle: do you think I give a flying fuck? After a lifetime of getting abuse from those who disagreed with me, when I am ambling up to meet St Peter on that fateful day of judgement (the outcome of which I am not optimistic about) the amount of tears shed by the living will not be my concern. 

St Peter will accuse me of many things and I shall accept my sins. One thing he will not accuse me of is mincing my words. In life I viewed Bob Crow as an appalling man and in death I view him the same way. Why pretend otherwise?

The arrogance of the left is to describe Crow as a man who fought for the working classes. This is simply not true. When the tube workers went on strike investment bankers simply travelled by taxi and felt no impact. It was the genuinely poor, working classes that suffered as they walked to work/shared minicabs at great cost.  Equally Crow remaining in a Council house when he could on his gargantuan wage have afforded better, ensured one more working class family suffered homelessness.

The London metro is far more expensive than Metros in other major cities. Part of the reason for this is that its drivers are paid far too much and because it retains structural inefficiencies such as manned ticket counters. For an investment banker tube travel is a small portion of his disposabale income. It is the genuinely poor workers who are screwed by the system. And Crow must be blamed for this.

Those on the left, such as the BBC, have eulogised Crow as a hero of the working classes. The fact is that Crow looked after one vested interest ( tube drivers) and played the system personally to his own financial advantage. But in doing so Crow helped to make the poor huddled masses even poorer. The left do not really care about the poor. They want the poor to remain poor as a client constituency , voting for the “right folks” and maintaining a system that provides tens of thousands of non-jobs to middle class lefties. 

Those on the right should right now be making the point that Crown was part of that game. The poor can be liberated by having to pay less tax, by gaining cheaper travel and by being given freedom and opportunity. That is not the agenda of the left and was not the agenda of Crow. 

Again I stress that I am sympathetic to his family. I wish death on no-one. But amid the wave of sycophantic praise I regard this as exactly the right time to challenge the left and to expose why Crow, like his co-believers, was not genuinely on the side of the poor.