I adore the British tabloid press: The Sun makes me laugh….today it’s the headline ‘Cashier No 10 please’. Above is last week’s front page turning Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling into a Thunderbird. Classic. I’ve recommended this before and I’ll do it again: for the full and hilarious exploits of our top tabloid read ‘Stick it up your punter’.
Not so funny is their hate campaign against the asylum seeker family who get housing benefit on rather a large house because there happen to be rather a lot of them. Now the mother is branded a 'scrounger'.
What would they prefer, that all 7 kids be forced into a bedsit? That the mum leave them to fend for themselves while she sells her body to scrape together an income that probably wouldn't feed them all anyway, resorting to drugs to numb the pain and shoplifting to alleviate the hunger pangs?
WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE??
I understand what you are saying but lets face it, you move to another country with your seven kids (fgs!) and none of them work? Despite the fact that some of them are adults.
I didn't think the Sun treated them too badly actually. They gave one of the sons an opportunity to speak up. And he came across fine saying "well if you got the opportunity to win the lottery would you turn it down?".
The real issue is that the landlord is getting £12,000 rent from the council. The landlord is conning the council. The council will pass this onto the taxpayer. The government should have been allowing councils to build new and affordable housing with the huge amounts earnt from the council house sell-off in the 80's. This is money the councils have been sitting on for decades, which has now gone up in smoke in the Icelandic banking system. Great. Everybody loses. (Except that landlord and this family).
I do have issues with refugees coming to this country and being treated better than British families. If that makes me a right winger so be it. I know single (British) mothers who have been in crappy accommodation while recent refugees have been housed in spanking new state of the art council housing built around the corner. If you have to flee to another country, you wouldn't really expect to be given luxury housing for free really would you?
I've lived in France and the USA and I've seen how they treat foreigners. No wonder they all want to come here.
Now with the credit crunch watch them all flee….
That's £12,000 a month rent. Nuts.
In fact, ranting here, all of our present economic problems stem from the deregulation and privatisation of the Thatcher era. An idea she exported successfully all over the world.
So now the banks are nationalised, are we all going to get dividends if they ever make a profit? After all they are ours now aren't they?
I am still outraged that it was legal for the government to sell off our property…our trains, our post office, our water, our gas, etc etc. All that infrastructure was paid for by the tax payer. Yes it all needed reforming but to sell it to the private sector, to foreigners (after all what do the French care about us? and they own our water and electricity. Notably they haven't allowed us into their country to buy up their basic infra-structure) well all of it was so unpatriotic, something Thatcher claimed to be.
Dumb.