Mark Steel: Things can happen when you travel on a Virgin train

I've just been to the cinema, to see Paranormal Activity, and found the experience highly disturbing. The film was no problem, but there was an advert on beforehand for Virgin Trains with Richard Branson that must be causing people to wake up shrieking "Aayeeugh he's all jolly and fluffy and horrible," until they're given an injection.

No one should be reminded of Virgin Trains at any time, as their one outstanding achievement is attention to detail, because everything is awful. Any train company can make trains late, but Virgin put in that extra effort, so there's an announcement as you leave that there's no tea because the boiler's busted.

As you pass through the doors between carriages they jolt shut to chop you on each side like a wrestler, and there's one toilet working on the whole thing, with passengers hopping back and forward in search of it. And the door is a digital automatic push-button thing that makes you think "Nothing else works on here so I'm not trusting THAT," as there must be at least a 30 per cent chance that mid-session you'll hear "whsssssh" as it opens up again, leaving you bleating "I'm really sorry", to an old woman outside as you yank up your trousers.

Virgin has been rewarded for all this effort with an announcement that this year they've received twice as many complaints as any other rail operator, and more than all the others put together. So they deserve an awards ceremony, with representatives from South-West Trains and Capital Connect saying, "We all try hard to be as appalling as possible, but Richard, once again we're not in your league."

Perfectionist that he is, Virgin also has the worst record for answering complaints, replying to a wonderful 36 per cent within 20 days. I enjoyed some of this service last week, when I rang to reserve a seat but couldn't get through for 26 minutes.

So I said I'd like to complain, and was put on hold for another 15 minutes, then told the complaints department was very busy so could I ring back later. So later I called a customer relations department who told me, "This can happen."

"Is there an explanation?" I asked, and she said: "I've given you one." I said, "What was it?" and she said: "I TOLD you – this can happen."

Just to make sure, I said, "Are you telling me 'This can happen' is the explanation."

"Yes," she said triumphantly.

So it seems Virgin is being run by philosophers from the 13th century. When someone rings to ask why they were stuck for two hours outside Preston they must get told "Ah, 'tis God's will". The station announcements will soon say: "We apologise for the cancellation of the 2.15 to Coventry. This is due to the fact that this can happen. It's not our place to incur the wrath of our creator by asking why."

And you have to reserve a seat in the first place because everyone crams on to the few trains that aren't "peak service", so until 10am, and then from 3.15 until 6.30 the fares are joyously extortionate. For example, a return from London to Wigan comes to £235, which is to say TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FIVE ******* POUNDS!!!!

And if you try to do anything Bohemian like return by a different route, you send the whole structure into panic. Ask if you can go to Manchester and come back from Sheffield, and you might as well have said: "Can I have a carriage to myself as I like to masturbate as we're going through Stafford?"

And last year they made £73m profit, but their cleaners have been told there's no money for a pay rise, and 10 per cent of ticket staff are being replaced with machines, and he's the 261st richest person in Britain and cool with no tie and worth £1.5bn.

So there he was in this advert, in which a businessman in first class perfects a presentation, which hopefully was successful as he'd need to secure the world's oil rights for 15 years to afford his ticket back again.

Maybe Branson could do a more realistic advert, similar to the one for his airline, in which you see passengers get on a Virgin Train amidst a huge fanfare in 1996 when his company began, then a scene from now in which the thing's just arriving in Glasgow.

And as the poor sods clamber off, a stewardess smiles and says "This can happen."

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/mark-steel/mark-steel-things-can-happen-when-you-travel-on-a-virgin-train-1832163.html

What Richard Branson really thinks of his workers...

Sir Richard Branson has been accused of patronising rail staff after dressing as a station cleaner for a TV advert.

The billionaire Virgin boss appears with forearms covered with fake tattoos and blacked-out teeth as he empties bins at Glasgow's Central Station.

The RMT rail union said it demonstrated a patronising attitude to staff who had worked hard to make him a fortune....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8035524.stm

Blue sky mining

Below is the article that has prompted me to create this blog.

"Richard Branson has set up his own “war room” to do battle with global warming.59 The battalions he wants to mobilise on “the path to victory” are successful entrepreneurs — like himself—and their weapons are “market driven solutions to climate change”. It's a shiny new business model to save the planet. The Carbon War Room—where inspirational quotes from Richard Branson are mixed in with those of other titans like Churchill, Roosevelt and Einstein—represents the type of rich man’s folly common amongst modern entrepreneurs with a Messiah complex.

Branson’s War Room site links to a paper co-authored by Lee Lane of the American
Enterprise Institute, published by the centre run by “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg. The paper concludes that the benefits of geoengineering vastly outweigh the costs and shows how to set an optimal temperature for the Earth for the next two hundred years. The authors write that ethical objections from environmental advocacy groups may present an obstacle to the deployment of solar radiation management, before noting with relief: “In reality, important economies remain largely beyond the influence of environmental advocacy groups.”60 They expect that deployment of solar radiation management will be led by nations with weak environmental lobbies — which of course means dictatorships"

http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/media/documents/articles/dr_strangeloves_return.pdf

I should point out that what they mean by "geo-engineering" and "solar radiation management" is pumping sulfur aerosols into the upper atmosphere. Aside from god-know how many other side effects, this would turn the sky from blue to white and turn the oceans to acid.

Who the fuck wants to live in a world with a white sky and no sunshine just so that people like Richard Branson can keep profiting from carbon?