Be Excellent To Each Other

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26527325

"General secretary of the Rail Maritime and Transport union Bob Crow has died aged 52"

Gosh.

Well that was unexpected.

But not undeserved.

Harsh. You'll be railroaded for that.

At least you're not giving mixed signals.

Bit harsh.

Why? Anyone who's that out of shape can't really complain if they just suddenly drop dead.

Was listening to an interview with him on Radio 4 on the way home yesterday, that had been recorded whilst he was stuffing his face at a restaurant.

Unrelated, I'm sure.

Anyone who makes Grim... a bit late for work once every two years deserves death, you see.

Damned right.

I work with steelworkers, utility men, NHS workers, railwaymen and public sector employees and I live amongst the last vestiges if the fishing industry. Before this, I lived in the valleys and worked amongst those who used to mine.

In all that time I've only come across one privatised industry where the workers on the lowest rung of the ladder still had secure jobs, still had decent pensions, still were spoken to like human beings by their managers for the most part. Who didn't worry that they'd not be able to plan beyond the next year or two financially.

RMT members knew they had someone to stand up for them when their employer tried to treat them worse than their brothers in the next hacked away slice of the rail industry. You don't go from 50 to 80 thousand members in this climate without being very good indeed at standing up for employment rights.

If anyone had a late train, I might remind them that Crow didn't run the railways, and if you know his name better than that of the infinitely richer, infinitely less committed to social justice people who did, that's because he was willing to take a world of shit in order to stand up for people while they hid behind logos and in penthouse apartments as they put profit ahead of service and workers, neither of which ever needed to suffer. I don't think The Sun ever blockaded the council home of Half-million-pound per year David Higgins.

R.I.P. Bob Crow - beloved by the working man, hated by the mildly inconvenienced commuter and most right wing scum.

Interesting experiment on Twitter this morning. Turns out that if you slagged off Thatcher when she died nobody batted an eyelid even her defenders. If you slag off Crow the left go nuts. One poster even tried to defend the fact he lived in a council house despite earning £145,000 a year. Double standards much?

I danced on Thatcher's grave, I'll dance on Crow's grave. Now fuck off.

One hundred and forty five grand a year and living in a council house that could be being lived in by a much more deserving family.

Reminds me of Scargill and his flat at the Barbican funded by his members.

They are ALL corrupt. Every last one of them. Tory, Labour, Liberal, Unions, you name it. All of them. Just some people are blind to it.

I think calling either dead person a cunt is pretty shameful, personally.

Why, because they're dead?

For people who call themselves socialists and with strong links to the unions, not living in a council house is something many of them wouldn't even consider. I'd imagine he'd have argued that we shouldn't blame him for living in a council house, we should blame the government for building and providing less affordable and local authority housing. Especially since the sale of council houses by Margaret Thatcher was a decision motivated by the idea of giving workers a problem if they decided to strike.

"Talking shit", in other words? Someone earning that much wouldn't have any trouble hopping onto the housing markey.

[edit]Yes, Markey.
[edit again]And I meant "ladder" anyway. Christ.

Oh come on, Chinny. Of course it isn't. That was me, by the way, readers.

The entire point of a council house is that you get a lifetime tenancy. I don't agree with it, but that's what it is and that's what the vast majority of people in the UK want it to be. A house is a HOME not just a place you live or an investment. A man has a right to stay in his home, his partner's home, his children's home even if he does alright for himself. His kids aren't earning 90k a year and maybe they want to stay living next door to their best friend, say - "Sorry kids, we're too rich, we've got to move in next to Tarquin in Hampstead now. Don't worry, you'll soon adjust."

Bollocks. If you like living somewhere, you should be able to stay living somewhere.

There are tens of thousands of council houses nationwide containing four bedrooms and one old lady, husband dead, kids flown the nest. Usually there'll be a four or five person family in a 2-bed flat just up the road, desperate for a four-bed property. Are you going to have a go at those old ladies as well? They are doing nothing different. You comment was about people 'deserving' council houses, as if you are some sort of self-elected arbiter of that. Well, it happens to be exactly what I do for a living, and the allocations process for council housing is far more rigorous and considered than the braying vessels in the media (don't forget, I've worked there too so I know exactly what both sides of this debate are like) prefer to make out. He's got his house fair and square and I hope Nicola, no doubt left in occupation, has the tenancy transferred to her so she enjoys the same rights as every other 'widowed' person in a council property in the UK.

Are you REALLY conflating Thatcher, who set about creating the zero-hours contract culture for the working classes that insinuates every industry today and sold off the council stock to wide-eyed optimists who believed her lies and are now coming to me in droves, houses repossessed, needing another one because they can't afford anything else (lost their incomes due to Tory cuts) with the case of a docker's son who was working track maintenance at 16 and got a council house, then stayed in it?

That's pretty low, there, but then again you also said he'd "Never lifted a finger" in his life. I'm willing to bet at 16 you weren't putting your back into manual labour of that ilk with the prospect of a lifetime of it ahead. Crow might have spent most of his later life on full-time union duties but you have to be voted into that and you can be voted out again. In an active, relatively politicised union like the RMT you have to be a grafter to manage that.

So keep peddling your lies, I'm not possessed of enough spare time to read them on here (which means I have to go) or on Twitter, where you are, I assume, gleefully making spectacle over the discovery that when your behaviour is disingenuous, spiteful and ill-informed, people stop wanting to follow you.

Now, I've got people down the road at the station who've lost a well-loved friend and colleague this morning. But that's the sort of fat-cat socialist priority I'm bound to focus on, isn;t it? We're all just caricatures, after all.

24 hour robot trains could happen now.

Crow moved into his council house mere months before being elected leader of the RMT and in fact was already deputy leader, no doubt on a equally comfortable salary and 10 grand a year expenses account.

The joyful thing about Twitter is that you can choose to follow or not to follow. I just find it hilarious that the same people who were jumping up and down when Thatcher died suddenly don't like it when the boot is on the other foot. I'll leave the last words to Bob, a man who died while paying £150 a week in subsidised council housing rent while earning £145,000 a year + a 10 grand expenses account:



Bob Crow there. Like Thatcher no working people could stay in his house either.....

Been possible since the DLR was built. It's just nobody DARE try and implement it. Was told that by someone who works in that area and he described it as the "elephant in the room". The faintest whisper of a suggestion would cause an unimaginably large shit storm and a strike.

Oh, deffo.

I've made it a lifelong maxim to try not to speak ill of the dead, so I'm not going to start now.

"London looks forward to the introduction of 24 hour driverless trains " should cover it, mate. Noble sentiment, though, you should be lauded for it.

Good job one of us built a really good ignore function then, isn't it?

So good, everyone ignores it.

I don't - I use it liberally!

You'd think Myp would have something to say etc.

Robot trains could presumably happen, but I always thought the main reason the Tube network is not a 24-hour thing is because of, due to the age in which most of it was built, the tunnels are all single-track with no redundancy built in. So they need to close the network down at night to perform regular track maintenance.

Oh, Chinny, that's appalling, once again. Come on, you're better than that, I've spoken to you enough times, I know you're a good natured and decent person.

If your notion for deserving council tenants was followed, we'd have only unemployed people living in council housing, this is a fact. Indeed, I'd gladly state no property with more than one bedroom would have anything but a vulnerable single mother and children in it. Nationwide. Ghettos would appear, as they have done all over the places I've worked and then the TV cameras roll in along with the gangs, the despair, the class As and the poor health and lack of education. I would have given my right ball for someone like Crow to move in to one of the streets I used to work down, so that some of the people there could meet a man who had done ok for himself and who stuck up for weaker people, as opposed to yet another who had failed for whatever reason and preyed on those weaker out of desperation.

Believe it or not, this issue has been covered by social landlords for many years and the rules are as they are because that's what keeps the whole system from breaking down. You can cite individual cases where deviation from the mean occurs, but that's systems for you. If Crow only moved into his place in recent years, that will be because his old one was regenerated or condemned or he'd applied according to the publicly accountable rules made by elected representatives of precisely the working class community he lived in. And the allocations process would be thrice-checked. Council tenancies are transferable between properties, or at least their rights are. Are you saying well-paid people should have fewer basic rights than poorly paid people, because that's how it sounds from here. Yes, Crow could afford to live elsewhere, but so can tens of thousands of others. If they did, though, taxing us all at 90% of income wouldn't be enough to cover the cost.

Social housing needs economically diverse communities, and while I accept that Crow might have been at the far end of that scale (before tax, he paid a lot more than you and probably enough to keep every family on his street going for a year) I don't see you complaining that people are at the other end, the one that really needs people to be making a fuss about it.

Please, don't make reductive arguments about boots being on other feet. That's scarcely the point. This isn't about you chipping away at a subject until what's left is something you can point at and laugh about, this is about the last man to secure a reasonable living wage for bottom-rung workers in our nation's capital passing away and the political repercussions, which could be punitive for many honest, hard working folk. In council houses or otherwise.

People can find loads of things to have a go at Bob Crow about, so why pick on two of the very shakiest of *ahem* premises in order to do so? This Thatcher thing is a ridiculously far-fetched comparison. They aren't yin and yang, this isn't a binary debate. The only people who seem to wish it were are those who seem to take every opportunity to demonise not only the working classes but the people who dare to say that said classes should not bow and scrape to the rich.

Oh man alive, it's tempting. But I shall resist.

Missed MaliA's 24 hour point. Indeed 24 hour trains can't happen as the network isn't designed for it and they need time to do maintenence and cleaning.

They call those 'weekends' right now.

I thought they were going to start 24 hour service. Did I dream that?

[edit]They are, but at weekends. Fair enough.

Your restraint is so great here it's like you're stood in front of a LineUp machine with a pocket full of £1 coins but aren't putting any in...

Harsh.

Very true

How does it follow that saying people earning £140,000 a year not being allowed to live in social housing would cause people to be made homeless?

If you are earning in excess of £140 grand a year then I'd argue that there are people FAR more deserving than you to be in council housing, especially when the waiting list is years long. You are CAUSING people to be homeless because through exploiting the system you are taking up housing stock that is much needed.

There has to be a cut off point. Even if the cut off point is saying "If you earn more than 100 grand a year then the council will charge you FULL market rate for your house". Council housing should never be there to subsidise people on executive saleries.

I don't think that is unreasonable and it won't create ghettos because people like Crow can afford to buy or rent a house like everyone else who earns that much money has to. You are not impacting 99%+ of people living in such houses. You are casting out very wealthy individuals who are getting wealthier at taxpayers expense and at the expense of people who need those houses.

Hearing that the cause of death was that he drunk too much Kia Ora.

Nope not at all - Lineup did not take £1 coins - if it was 50's he'd be wavering quite a bit.

Okay the remakes did - but the original took 10p / 10p tokens / 20p's and 50p's only

Fair enough, you're the expert. I'll put the great swathes of estate I've worked where precisely this has happened down to bad luck.

Council housing is by design open to all. Perhaps anyone earning over a threshold should have to go into BUPA and not use the over-stretched NHS because they can afford that, too. Just because they (like Crow) are paying for that service which benefits the poor, doesn't mean they aren't bed-blocking some benefit claimant. Ditto schools - except there it's somehow criticised when the rich or powerful send their children to private establishments, they should be expected to educate their children along with the proles.

But not live amongst them, eh?

Bob Crow living in a council house barely affects the problem, in either direction. We're just arguing over whether the tiny difference is a positive or a negative one. In any case, Crow's local authority operate a choice-based lettings policy, so there's no waiting list. Points are awarded according to need, eligibility and situation and those most deserving who choose to bid for a property get it ahead of those who are not and do not. I'm sure they'll be glad to examine the case if you make an official complaint.

His neighbours generally seemed to like him well enough, anyway. This is tantamount to insisting that people give up the environment they were raised in and feel happy or comfortable in because they've become successful. It's an awful thing to insinuate, let alone say. Are council properties people's homes, their place of community and belonging, or are they just a solution to a problem in society? A function of a system, a finger in a dyke? Because I've got one of the biggest estates in Europe here with some of the most notorious issues, the majority of residents of which who'll gladly come out and tell you that all the money in the world wouldn't move these people from those they consider their own.

It's not the easiest thing to understand, sometimes. I'm in a 3 bed terrace next to the docks railway and I'd like to sit in my garden without Coronation Street being acted out 2 doors down when I'm trying to read. I miss my acres and stables in rural Monmouthshire. But I can at least acknowledge that where you live has more to it than socio-economic relevance.

We don't have the German word Heimat in our language and we're a lot poorer as a society for it.

For the lazy:

I think, flippancy aside, that we can all agree on the growing income inequality gap being a bad thing.

Whatever your personal feelings towards him, to reduce it we'll need more people like Bob Crow.

Flippancy aside that's not an assumption I'd make.

Rich people would not agree.

Okay.

99% of people would agree

I imagine they probably would agree, so long as they weren't the ones to suffer.

It's probably closer to 99.9%, but yes.

Man, but that Line Up sure looks good, hasn't paid out for ages and it's veritably gagging. *jangles 50p pieces*

Hey, perhaps Chinny fancies a game of 'doubles' where we split the stake.