It’s a tough life for the posh poor. That’s not the posh who are poor, that’s the poor who are posh. They have a taxpayer out hard at work providing their daily bread for them, and an EU migrant doing their job for them – what we used to call ‘slaves’, or ‘servants’. The rich can’t afford them any longer.
Do not envy them too much, their life is not all it is cracked up to be. They have to undergo regular training for one thing, as the uncaring Tory Government changes the benefit rules. The latest is ‘learning to pay your rent’.
From October, the benefit will be paid to the tenant once a month instead of directly to the landlord.
The National Housing Federation said it expected rent arrears to increase by £245m a year as a result.
The Housing Federations are planning to provide ‘special support’ to explain to the deprived poor that when the nice man in the south of England has handed them the money to give to their landlord and keep a roof over their head, they are expected to, er, give it to the landlord. Perhaps housing benefit should come wrapped in a grubby note saying ’please give Kylie a receipt for her rent’.
It’s not as though they don’t know how to budget. They do. They walk past that enticing shop selling selling breakfast cereal for their children, muttering to themselves ‘mustn’t waste this hard earned taxpayers money, the school will give them breakfast’. They drive their disability scooter (we are the mobility capital of Europe with 300,000 of the pesky things) past the fresh fruit and veg shop, that is trying to ‘suck the lifeblood out of their community’ by ‘targeting residents already struggling to make ends meet’ in a bid ‘to maximise their profits, artificially inflating business rates’. Pausing only to call into MacDonald’s which everybody knows is the most economical way to eat, they head straight for the inanimate object preying on them.
That is, they do on benefit payday. The next day, and the five after that, they stop off at Paywonga.com – an organisation which employs strong arm men to reach out, grab them off their mobility scooter and force more money on them, happy in the knowledge that they will to repaid from the labours of the man down south.
Their troubles are not over even then, for on the corner of the high street, hidden in the depth of a shop with blacked out windows, there lurks an inanimate object just waiting to suck out the last penny from them before it can reach their children’s bellies. The caring Labour Government even passed a law in 2004 to ensure that those 300,000 mobility scooters glided over the doorway with never a moment’s hesitation. Bastards.
Yes, it is the Fixed Odds Betting Terminal. Or FOBT as it is known. Now the swinish Labour Government, that’s the same caring Government that wanted to introduce super-casinos, passed legislation in 2005 limiting each betting shop to four of these machines. Book-makers are law abiding folk – they do only have four machines in each shop – they just opened more shops. Voila! Today there are 73,683 machines in 4858 betting shops in Labour controlled areas. 50% more than in Conservative controlled areas. That’ll be because of the high unemployment in Labour controlled areas and them ‘aving more time to play on the pesky machines, I guess, or it could be a deliberate policy to prey on the poor and rob them of their housing benefit whilst they are making their dutiful way to the rent office.
Of the top fifty unemployment blackspots, the profit from the terminals was more than £173m last year. By comparison in the 50 constituencies with the lowest levels of unemployment, the bookie’s made just £44m.
An astounding 5 billion quid was dropped into those machines last year, by people who imagine there is a better way to get money than working. Fixed odds should tell them something! But hark, there is something wrong with these figures designed to show how Tory Government actions (well, they’re in power now, so they get the blame!) are hurting the poor and deprived. Either that or Book-makers have suddenly come over all altruistic…
If a mere 84 machines in Angie Bray’s Ealing constituency can produce £124,338,153 why would a Book-maker go to the trouble of installing 124 machines in Edinburgh North and Leith to give him a measly £128, 937,293; hardly worth the trouble. The ’Conservative’ machines are considerably more profitable.
There must be a reason why Book-makers are targeting Labour strong holds. Can’t think what it is.
At least we now have the pleasant vision of a centrist statist Labour MP calling for power to be devolved to local councils and away from the Westminster politicians.
Clive Efford, Labour’s spokesman on gambling, called on the government to give local councils the power to decide on whether bookmakers could cluster on the high street.
Would we have had this proliferation of gambling dens if local councils had had the power to decide in the first place? I find it hard to believe that Birmingham Ladywood would have ended up with 157 inanimate gambling machines ‘sucking the life blood’ out of the local muslim community if the, er, ‘community leaders’ had had anything to do with it.
£163 million quids worth of good islamic non-gambling lifeblood at that…
Ms Raccoon lives in the Monbazillac area of South West France, renowned for its fine wines and gourmet food, so she frequently finds better things to do than sit in front of a computer all morning. She is liable to take off traveling at a moment's notice. Consequently this blog only gets updated these days when it is raining - and it doesn't rain very often round here...
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I bet there’s money to be made by investing (?gambling?) in shares in bookmakers.
Anna,
I went to school in the North West of England, Merseyside to be precise. The area I went to school in lost most of its heavy industry, which had produced products as diverse as tanks and biscuit making machines. The mines closed, the super pit at Parkside went in the 1990s, admittedly it was a stupid place to site a ‘super pit’ as the Lancashire Fault meant that they could not tunnel for seams of coal to the North. This dear gentle reader may sound like an apologia for myself and my fellow classmate’s failure to find work, it isn’t.
I no longer live near where I went to school, however due to the modern communications phenomenon that is ‘Facebook’ I am aware of what myself and my fellow pupils are doing. Bizzarely enough I know one or two that are not working, but on the whole, they are. We adapted and got on with life. Life is only grim in certain parts of the North due to the people their abdicating their responsibilities and lives to the politicians. Actually this helps depress property prices and keeps the cost of living low, so when I am back in the UK I benefit from it too.
It is only grim up North where people let it happen, and where they don’t it is far from grim, besides Blackpool because even in the good times, Blackpool is a dump (and also the home of paywonga).
The answer to this and many other questions may be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kAhChC_qxU
It must have been the late 70s, early 80s when I became one of the Posh Poor. I had obtained a mortgage to buy two Properties for Rent which I renovated and let to Housing Benefit Claiments. And then The Local Councils changed the rules and paid the rents directly to the tenants, with no right on my part to object. In fact, they didn’t even inform me. So in a short period of time The Rent Arrears rocketed. And since at the time it was taking over a year to get these non rent paying tenants into Court, I became unable to pay the mortgage or pay for the repairs, and had to sell the houses.
I won’t go into the amount of damage that these non rent paying tenants did. Suffice to say that they rendered the properties uninhabitable, and I ceased to be a Landlord with barely the shirt left on my back. It was a nightmare which I will never forget.
I gather that the rules were changed again at a later date. But the powers that be seem to have very short memories.
S’obvious. Cut out the middleman. Put council-owned FOBTs in the foyers of the local council offices where people claim for benefits. They can play there and we’ll get their bennies back directly. Most foyers have toilets, baby change rooms, comfy chairs and internet access. Add coffee sales, maybe a 1-stop shop for things such as disposable nappies, t-shirts and trackybums.
Extend this idea to hospitals. That way many who use the NHS will be directly funding the services if they haven’t already paid tax. Also job centres and libraries, if not too noisy.
We’ll still be paying them benefits – I’m sure many of them quite rightly should be paid – but this way some of the money will be directly recovered on behalf of the taxpayer. Furthermore, some people will accept payment in direct gambling credits, possibly at an incentive level i.e. the number of tries can exceed the face value, giving local authorities the ability to print their own local currency secured very favourably against their ability to pay out the winning tickets. You could have £100 real cash and then £50 gambling credits which gets you £100-worth of tries on the FOBT, and you keep what you win. The gambling credits don’t even have to be raised from the taxpayer; they’ll only have to shell out a fraction of the face value, so they should be thrilled with the idea.
I don’t know why this comment appears here. I thought I had put it at the bottom. Sorry.
WOAR,
What a superb idea. A little like the Lottery grants but without the overfed middle men….!
The NHS can even keep an eye on the problem gamblers without setting foot off the premises.
Perfect piece of business placement in Preston is the Weatherspoons next to the ‘Job Centre Plus’, a stroke of genius.
I like this idea, very creative. Extending it somewhat, I forsee a kind of mall attached to NHS hospitals – especially the A&E where so many of our less well endowed fellow citizens end up on a Saturday night. In addition to the FOBTs there could be a variety of gaming machines, plus PAYG X-Boxes; a MacDonalds franchise; and (this is where I get really entrepreneurial) a sell-your-body-parts-for-cash booth, with decent prices (it’s only fair) on offer for kidneys, limbs, eyeballs, skin….
Depending on the hospital in question this could be a winner, with fresh bits for transplant, and many of those fellow citizens getting a shower of gold in place of the kidney (etc) that really doesn’t interest them very much and which is probably superfluous to their crap low-brow lifestyles anyway.
My family has rental property, but benefit claimants don’t get past the first step in the landlord negotiation process nowadays (Been there, done that, got fingers burned, won’t accept them as tenants). Proper shorthold rental agreements, direct debits, all that jazz. Only way to go. Regular cashflow allows regular maintenance. Everyone’s happy. I think.
Bring back the gas chambers perhaps?
So long as you sell lottery tickets and gambling machines inside, I have the awful feeling that no-one would complain. Least of all the victims. Isn’t human nature fascinating?
“From October, the benefit will be paid to the tenant once a month instead of directly to the landlord.”
Funny that this is news since I thought it always had been this way.
At least 5 scum families were “de-homed” in my street in the last 5 years or so for non-payment of rent money that they had received directly from council. Thousands in rent each time was skipped and they all managed perfectly well to do a moonlight flit before the landlords could even begin to try and collect their owings.
I guess this is just one way to throttle the buy-to-let mortgage industry.
@ I guess this is just one way to throttle the buy-to-let mortgage industry. @
Given the prediliction of State Authorities to just pay whatever is asked for, it seems quite possible that the rental market has been distorted. Certainly the rents I see advertised in my area seem ludicrously high for the accomodation. You could literally get a mortgage cheaper….
Nothing new, I’m afraid.
Twenty years ago, I briefly worked in the Housing Benefit department of a seaside local authority. Almost without exception, the local landlords used the going rate for holiday accommodation to calculate rents, even if no tourist would ever have chosen to stay in the property.
This is simply not true of most Landlords. although bearing in mind the amount of damage some tenants manage to do in the process of getting themselves rehomed in Council Accommodation because the their rented accommodation is no longer habitable, I can see the point of high rents.
I briefly let my next door house here to a French Tenant. And she did pay her rent. But it cost me nearly as much as I earned to repair the appalling damage she did. Absolutely no point in pursuing her through The Court because she didn’t have any money. The house now stands empty.
There is only one answer. Don’t let to people who claim Housing Benefit. They can live in a tent for all I care.
I had a similar experience, cost me nearly £5,000 to put my house into saleable condition. You wouldn’t believe the state of filth and damage it was left in. This had been my home for 12 years and was let newly decorated and with new carpets. After that I sold for whatever I could get and will never let a house again and certainly not to benefit claiments who are to be ‘trusted’ to pay the rent.
I would believe it, Carol 42. Well, almost. You have to see it to believe it. And they even sell the bloody furniture, and then report you because they haven’t got a cooker or any light fittings because they sold them. But do try proving it. You are the Landlord so you must be a crook.
I sometimes even feel sorry for Rachman if this is what he had to put up with.
@ And they even sell the bloody furniture, and then report you because they haven’t got a cooker or any light fittings because they sold them. But do try proving it. @
When I rented in my younger days, I had to pay about three months up front and then that formed a “deposit”. I also had to sign an “inventory” detailing all the fixtures and fittings. If you have a nasty tenant I can see that merely having the law on your side will not be enough however, because the law is so expensive to “mobilise”.
On another tack of “distorting the market”, I recall a friend who did “buy to let” and she had more than one tenant over time who was a “company let”. This was where a person had their rent paid for by a company, the company would just set such “relocation costs” off against tax or something and didn’t seem bothered what it cost, so this also would push up the rental expectations. One of her favourite tenants was a senior police officer who was on some kind of secondment and the whole family was relocated and paid for by Her Maj. for about two years.
One answer would seem to be “council housing” projects for the people without capital resources to buy, but again the authorities seem incapable of building them economically. I was reading a year or three back of a project in Scotland where “council houses” were being built and the council proudly said each one was “only” costing £200,000 to build.. 8-0 ….. The guys around me are building houses, selling them for £200,000, servicing the loan for the period of building, paying all their workers wages for the “build”, and making tens of thousands profit for their business on top!!
The housing benefits system is partly responsible for the enormous increase in rents, particularly in London. An unforseen effect I’m sure, but the only people who actually benefit are landlords. The taxpayer is fleeced and everyone trying to own their own place is impacted by the knock-on increase in house prices.
Which are still totally ludicrous.
Nasty workshy Northerners supported by hard working Southerners.
For goodness sake Anna, turn the record over.
Can’t help the result of the research Saul. Deprived areas in the north with high unemployment DO account for most of the turnover of these machines.
So does that mean that all the money put in is from unemployment benefit?
Nope, not all – but the inference from my favourite left wingers is that an unfair proportion is – that these machines are in place precisely to seduce those on benefits and particularly deprived – though as I have shown, the actual figures show that those in areas of low unemployment are actually more profitable per machine!
“An astounding 5 billion quid was dropped into those machines last year, by people who imagine there is a better way to get money than working.”
Your words Anna, 5 billion from people not working.
Saul, that phrase isn’t the killer you think it is – I read it as ‘People who might be working boring, dead-end jobs and dream of getting ‘free’ by gambling’…
“An astounding 5 billion quid was dropped into those machines last year, by people who imagine there is a better way to get money than working.”
Scary numbers!!!
Of which little/some/most of which will have been recycled through that machine.
e.g. Someone walks into one of those shops with £100, sticks it in one of those machines, gets (say) £95 back. Puts it all back in. Gets £90.25 back (95% again). Puts that all back in, gets £84.75 (95% again) back.
I’ll stop the calculation there, but you see the series. The 5% is for illustration, and is probably wrong. As is the assumption that our punter will only run through the cycle 3 times and walk out with money in their pocket.
Now – on the figures above, the punter walks in with £100, and has put in (in total, recycled cash) £100+£95+£90.25 £285.25 into the machine during their stay, walking out with £84.75, losing in total £15.25.
Newspapers are reporting the £285.25 figure cycled through the machine, not the £15.25 lost out of the customer’s pocket.
(Someone recycling winnings until they got down to a fiver would [simplistically] have put in £1,900 through the machine assuming the 5% loss, yet only lost £95.
–
Not that I disagree with the premise that these machines shouldn’t exist. Just that the MSM is, as usual, resorting to statistical hyperbole to scare the horses.
If you look at the article I linked to, it links to the pdf which gives the original figures, rather than newspaper hyperbole.
This one?: Spreadsheet
Total Gross Gambling Yield (my £15.25 lost) = £1.23bn
Total Gambled (my £285.25) = £39.4bn
Sadly no context provided to indicate over what period this was over, but I’m generously assuming a year. Assuming a population of 60m for the UK, that’s £656.50 gambled per person with a loss of £20.48 lost. (Yes, I know not even a majority of those 60m will be using these machines)
Can’t find a £5bn figure anywhere. Even on the 2nd sheet where there’s a breakdown by constituency party. Again, I’m not disagreeing that these machines are a blight; just pointing out that the numbers are being misused.
You don’t happen to know the population fo Bethnall Green do you – they seem to have spent an extraordinary amount per head of population for such a small area!
Pikiweedia: 25,440 as of the 2001 census (different page gives 1961 pop as 47,000, but I’ll use the former)
Spreadsheet: £7.59m lost, £2.43m gambled
per-capita: £298 lost, £9,560 gambled.
Ouch.
But this presumes that Wiki’s boundarys are the same as ‘Bethnal Green and Bow’ – which I have no particular reason to assume it isn’t, though the population numbers might have gone up, I doubt they have (for example) suddenly multiplied by 10 in the past 10 or so years…
The 5bn figure came from a different page on the Fairer Gambling web site.
This link:
Yup – that’s the page linking to the spreadsheet I’m messing with. I can’t see where they get the £5bn number from.
(And would you fix that unclosed link in my other post in reply to your query about Bethnal Green when you get round to moderating it please?)
The £5B is probably a sort of bullshit. I spent some time in the gaming business many moons ago and fruit machines generally have a very high payout percentage to entertain the punter. I’m well out of touch with current finessing, but in my day they would commonly pay out 80% plus. Thus, if the punter started with £10, the machine will allow him to win £8… (on average) then if you stake that £8 again you will win ~£6. Then, when you put that back in, you will win ~£5, then you stake that and you win ~£4….. and so on….. So you can see that “statistically” that punter will spend £38 or so…. but he hasn’t, he’s really just spent his tenner.
Inanimate Objects? We used to call them One-Armed Bandits……..
“An astounding 5 billion quid was dropped into those machines last year, by people who imagine there is a better way to get money than working.”
That is a lot of money, but what is the payout percentage on these machines?
It’s about time all these bloody northerners learnt their place again. Any workshy, flat capped, Whippet owning soap dodger, who doesn’t learn to doff their cap and touch their forelock to their southern superiors should be taken out and horsewhipped!
You might consider turning the record over yourself, Saul.
Then I suggest you get a new playlist.
Which part of the north do you come from Saul?
In the North East another form of gambling, the National Lottery, is very popular.
In our local shop recently, a far from thin young woman, whom I know is a single mother, unemployed and ‘disabled’, with a mobility wagon and three very naughty ‘disabled’ children was spending £30 on the lottery. She told me she spends £30 each week. “Have you ever won anything?” “The odd hundred quid, nothing much.”
When I suggested she would be better off putting it into a savings account – £120 a month, £1,500 a year – she replied “Where’s the fun in that?”
Middlesbrough.
Key part there being ‘Middle’…
Glad it’s not Scunthorpe !
You’ve got me there, I’ve looked several times but I don’t get it.
sCUNThorpe – pointed out me by a person with learning difficulties, who could not access information about the town because of a very strict filter applied to his computer to stop him accessing inappropriate sites.
I might be a bit thick but I got that one, it was the Julia m one I couldn’t grasp.
I live in a distinctly posh part of the South East and there are 3 – 3! – gambling shops. The rents around here can’t be cheap so I guess they make a tidy sum. That’s the same number of shops that are in my home town oop north. People gamble. I get why but it doesn’t turn me on so I am immune. To suggest that someones relative earnings means they have no business spending money on things not necessary to survival like food, rent, utility bills – is to ignore one of the great predictable things about human beings. We all need some kind of release – some frivolity. A rich mans frivolity may be some obscenely overpriced watch that adds 3 Kg to his weight while ignoring his children to socialise with people useful to his business. A poor mans might be a pack of fags and ignoring his children to go to the pub to watch the footie. This story struck me as an invented MORAL PANIC and I havn’t changed my pov. It also struck me as particularly snobbish – I dislike gambling that leads to a family neglected as I dislike alcoholism but something about anti-gambling campaigners gets my goat.
Gambling is a vice, and anyone who disagrees should watch the Chinese. They have the gambling bug as if it were a communicable disease, as well it might be.
While we cannot outlaw vices and much silliness and wasted money comes from trying to do so, we don’t have to encourage them either. I think we lost the plot when legislation was amended with the idea that we were merely allowing people to be adults, when what really happened was that people were encouraged to think it was all harmless fun and there were no bad consequences to worry about.
Gambling is exploding in this country, not just on the high street but lately on the internet. Bingo, poker, online slotties. It WILL have serious repercussions and it’s not just the poor or people on benefits who will suffer. (I would also make a plea here – remember that many people in receipt of benefits in the UK are actually working, but for pitiful wages that most of your readership would not deign to get out of bed for).
I was rather hoping that this thread would just attract the good little nazis. Seems there are proper people on here too!
There’s nothing new about tenants not paying rent and disappearing. This song is nearly 100 years old:
“We had to move away, ‘cos the rent we couldn’t pay,
The moving van came round just after dark;
There was me and my old man, shoving things inside the van,
Which we’d often done before let me remark.
We packed all that could be packed in the van and that’s a fact;
And we got inside all we could get inside,
Then we packed all we could pack on the tailboard at the back,
Till there wasn’t any room for me to ride.
cho: My old man said, “Follow the van, don’t dilly dally on the way!”
Off went the cart with the home packed in it,
I walked behind with me old cock linnet.
But I dillied and dallied, dallied and dillied,
Lost the van and don’t know where to roam.”
Won’t some kind man tell me where I am
‘cos I can’t find my way home.
To prevent the undeserving poor from squandering their social security benefits on alcohol and cigarettes perhaps the next Labour Government could arrange for them to be paid by means of gaming machine tokens. These could be used in any of the UK’s benevolent Betting shop chains who would be happy to provide them with a few hours of precious gaming time and pleasure.
I’m going to make a point that no politician will ever make:
Do poor people make bad decisions.. or do bad decisions make people poor (or fat for example….)
Very non-PC, but observation over many years leads me to believe that some poor people are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. (By the way, I also know people who would freely claim to be rather non-academic, but still manage to lead honest, decent and productive lives, so it’s not just down to IQ.) Poor parenting and less than impressive schooling, perhaps combined with influence from sharper but less scrupulous ‘local characters’ does lead some into making poor decisions. At which point the Grauniadistas leap up and shout loudly that the State must protect them from themselves. Others think that a safety-net, and encouragement – perhaps by voluntary organisations – to point them in better directions might have better long-term results.
The poor are usually the ones most exploited too by unscrupulous employers and landlords.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
I guess we’ve run out of places to send ‘em …….
Andy – we also observe from other posts on this thread that there are decent landlords taken for a ride by scumbag tenants. There ain’t no hard and fast certainties in this matter.
My Dad used to put his bets on with the ‘bookies runner’ when it wasn’t legal. Sixpence each way on on a nag running at Aintree. Then came the betting shops to make it legal. We used to ‘go to the dogs’ at Warrington dog track. Really enjoyed that as a kid. Found a lovely white, crisp ten pound note once…..gave it back to the bookie and got a pound back! My dad was a ‘contained’ gambler. Only what he could afford. As for those pesky Mobility scooters Anna. I went on a church coach trip some time ago to Llandudno. The place was infested with them, even then. They get larger and larger. Some of them whiz about at their full 8 miles an hour. Enough to give me 2 broken hips and inside out knees! I predicted they would be misused. I prefere a sedately ridden cycle. They are hated machines as well. Can’t win I’m afraid.
@ Some of them whiz about at their full 8 miles an hour. @
And sometimes beeping and in reverse…..
I cannot understand why they are not limited to normal walking pace as a maximum …. say 2mph, since most of us are not capable of full Yomping Velocity anyway. It might also discourage fat people getting lazier and even more disabled, limiting their necessity to those with a more genuine disability. I would guess the batteries would also last longer.
My ‘Del-Boy’ grandfather was an illicit bookie’s runner in pre-war days, taking bets from his fellow workers in an engineering works. If he thought any particular bet was a no-hoper, he would pocket the stake and not pass it on to the bookie – occasionally he got it wrong ! Great entrepreneurial spirit, I say.
A friend of mine calls them Asbo Scooters!
The health minister Anna Soubry reckons that poor people are fat, not like the poor people in her day who were skinny runts! Tory MP’s, don’t you just love ‘em!
A kindred spirit?
Except that it is true, of course – the well off are getting thinner, the poor are the over welling majority of the obesity issue in this country.
A couple of years ago, there was a hilarious piece (in the laughing-while-you-scream kind of way) in the Guardian, from a very left wing sociologist who went to live on vertical slum estate. It was written (apparently without irony) in a completely Saunders-Of-The-River manner – describing how she felt she had to drop “fake, bourgeois” behavior, such as not smoking, eating salad, jogging and not smoking so that she could fit in.
I enjoyed this, nearly spluttering into my coffee, as a sort of ur-Guardian piece that could hang on the wall and be pointed out if anyone were to ask what that newspaper represented.
Evidently I’m very “fake bourgeois” since I stopped working in factories long ago, gave up smoking shortly after, eat quite a lot of sald (in addition to the red meat every growing boy needs) and take lots of exercise.
The Guardian’s readership would argue passionately that the “slum estate” tenants lived there, alternating puffs at a fag with stuffing their ugly gobs with junk food, through the wickedness of capitalist society which discriminated against them in all sorts of ways; I, on the other hand, tend to think from long and sometimes too intimate observation that these people are impoverished, fat, ugly, unhealthy, dishonest and debased because they are thick or in some way just crap human beings.
I don’t read The Guardian – though on those rare occasions I buy a newspaper it tends to be the Indy, same crap politics but it has good feature articles…
I’m not exactly sure how paying the rent to the tenant rather than the landlord is going to help – other than providing more work for bailiffs after the landlord doesn’t get paid and has to go for an eviction order?
Of course, we don’t have a problem with that sort of thing here because we are all scrupulously honest and straightforward. People who are not get ferrets set on them – or worse: the Smalltown Society
I said all this would happen when Margaret Thatcher shoved the housing of the homeless onto local councils and started selling off council housing at cut rate prices.
No-one listened to me.
ps : In my day a “property developer” wasn’t invited into polite society.
Ah, but I didn’t say ‘not working’ did I Saul – I said ‘a better way [...] than working’ – there is a difference.
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