Leading article: First class war

Sir Nicholas Winterton has a point. Consider his argument that MPs need the "peace and quiet" of first class travel because of the amount of work they do on the move. How would Sir Nicholas have devised his ingenious plan to transfer ownership of his mortgage-free home to a family trust, rent that home from the trust, and then claim the rent back from the Commons Fees office, if he had been surrounded by noisy commuters looking over his shoulder the whole time?

But the comment from the veteran Tory MP that parliamentarians cannot be expected to share standard rail class because those who travel on it "are a totally different type of people" gave the game away. There is no other conclusion to be drawn: Sir Nicholas must be a mole for the Communist Party, directed to stoke up resentment against a decadent bourgeois political class at its moment of maximum weakness. Comrade Winterton, you have done the international proletariat a service.