When Friday evening's passengers read their free Evening Standard, they read that the workforce getting them to where they were going was infested with 'extremists' and terrorists.
Yes, Tory government security minister Ben Wallace had announced that they would be rooting out the extremists who work on the transport system. No wonder Friday's late turn staff were getting nervous looks from numerous passengers.
The logic of this scaremongering was played out over the weekend, when a Muslim member of staff at London Bridge was harangued and verbally abused by a passenger who was (literally) reading out the article to him and demanding to know what he was going to do about it.
Adding insult to injury, Wallace also said that autistic people are vulnerable to being turned into terrorists, and that the government was 'seizing' them - ignorant, patronising and alarmist towards our autistic workmates and passengers.
This is not just the sloppy journalism we have come to expect from the Standard - it is incitement to abuse and attack staff. It is intolerable. We want Tube bosses to tell George Osborne's rag that the company will not allow its distribution on our premises unless it stops abusing its privileged access to encourage people to look on staff with suspicion and hostility.
