Alan Sugar just took his meltdown over Jeremy Corbyn beyond parody

Jeremy Corbyn and Alan Sugar
James Wright


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Alan Sugar has taken his meltdown over a potentially imminent Jeremy Corbyn government to the point of parody. The billionaire began his latest intervention by repeating an earlier threat to leave the UK should Corbyn become prime minister. Five days later and Sugar is still voicing his concern on social media:

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Sugar’s caricature of a Corbyn government may seem utterly ridiculous, but some people actually believe this stuff. For example, political editor of the Sunday Times Tim Shipman deleted a tweet during the 2017 election calling Corbyn a “terrorist loving commie”.

In reality, working for the Daily Mirror, as Kevin Maguire does, hardly makes someone a Marxist, nor necessarily a Corbyn supporter. In fact, the Daily Mirror joined the Labour right, the Conservatives and the corporate media’s coup against Corbyn in the summer of 2016 with a front-page urging him to “GO NOW”.

Labour will actually be better for business

We can assume Sugar must be trolling about Corbyn banning cars in his tweet to Maguire. Although to be fair, it’s not far out of line from his other comments.

Sugar also accused Corbyn supporters of being “anti enterprise anarchist losers”:

But the opposite is true. Under Corbyn, lower and middle earners will have more money and therefore more spending power. That brings about a greater demand for products from the public. Inequality is presently so polarised that the majority of people have little purchasing power.

Also, Labour’s proposals for public-sector energy, housing, transport, and water will reduce costs for businesses. Rather than businesses having to rent their energy from the Big Six at ridiculously high prices, for example, they will have access to cheaper and sustainable energy through Labour’s roll-out of local renewable energy firms. In short, Labour’s plan to take shareholder profit out of our public services will reduce costs for everyone except the monopolies currently renting them out.

Government doesn’t fund spending through taxes

Sugar is wrong on another level too. Governments do not need taxes to fund spending. As the money creation after the financial crash demonstrated, governments can create money for investment. Known as ‘quantitative easing’, the Bank of England issued £445bn of new money in 2010. But instead of investing the funds in the real economy – on education, housing, etc – the bank pumped the funds into financial markets.

Labour’s proposed national investment bank can create money for calculated investment in services and people. We hardly need Sugar’s tax bill, which he depends on workers and public services to generate anyway.

Meltdown

Here’s a selection of Sugar’s other outbursts over the past few days:

Reality check

In response, many on social media mocked Sugar:

It should be clear to everyone: Sugar is a billionaire afraid of change. But Corbyn’s policies only seem radical in the context of a society that free-market dogma has dominated for 30 years. The idea that Labour supporters are ‘anti-business’ and that we need to rely on rich people for public investment are both myths.

Featured image via the Telegraph/ YouTube and Good Morning Britain/ YouTube

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    1. I had the somewhat dubious pleasure of meeting Alan Sugar once whilst trying to get backing with a project I was involved with.
      I found him to be a deeply unpleasant individual indeed. Among other things, he was someone that when you looked him in the eyes, you could see nothing but a dark void, well creepy.
      A true psychopath and someone we all agreed that we would never deal with no matter what he offered, it would be like selling one’s soul to the devil.

    2. I certanly have no love for Alan Sugar – but he’s right. Corbyn is a useless windbag – in the finest Labour traditions of Neil Kinnock or Michael Foot.

      While unrepentant fascists like Piss-Mopp, Gove and Bozo have been hatching a no-deal Brexit that will crash the economy – Corbyn’s been fiddling while Rome burns.

      The fiasco over the No Confidence motion proved that he’s s hopeless, clueless, gormless wanker.

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