Forcing out misfits is a capital idea

THE FRIDAY THING: IF you come across lengthy wagon trains of removal vans trying to work out how to get through, round or over Oldham town centre’s satnav-defying traffic system it will be time to get in the jellied eels and brush up on the cockney rhyming slang.

Enterprising councils in London, especially those within javelin-throwing distance of the Olympic stadium, are turfing people out of houses and flats so they can let them to moneybags city types.

They are contacting towns across the Midlands and the North asking them to find homes for “problem families” they say they can no longer afford to house now that the Government has put a cap on housing benefit.

Most areas in the country have their share of problem families (unemployed parents, truanting, vandalising ASBO-certificated children) already and are unlikely to put out the welcome mat for the decanted refugees. And this is no small-scale exodus. East London’s Newham, for instance, has already asked Stoke-on-Trent to take 32,000 families on its housing waiting list.

The leader of Newham Council says that the only option to decanting 32,000 families to Stoke would be to put them up in tents.

Now we all know that Oldham Council has lengthy housing waiting lists and certainly has enough problem families of its own to contend with but I doubt that Charlie and Jim would be issuing eviction notices along with the council-tax bills, although there is surely no doubt that there are folk they would like to be able to send to Newham, Stoke, Rochdale the outer Hebrides or the Falklands.



WITH the local elections on the horizon, it is no surprise to hear the Government (we are all in it together, remember) described as being guilty of chaotic thinking, having no strategic thoughts, misfiring and a shambles.
The surprising element about these indictments of the Cameron Government and, indeed Cameron himself, is that the criticisms do not come from the Lib-Dems or from Labour but from the Tory back-benches and even in some cases from the Cabinet.

It is not easy being prime minister and it is not a job everyone would want. But nor is it a job that everyone could do and wanting it, as Cameron has passionately for some years, is not the same as being able to do it.

And it begins to look as though Mr Cameron — gregarious, cheerful and quick-witted at the Dispatch Box as he most certainly is — lacks an ingredient that is key to successful tenure at Number 10.

His privileged public-school background has equipped him to be good at debating, at chairing meetings and at public-relations glibness but is that enough to enable him to be a national leader?

What does he stand for? What is his political ideology? What, for instance, is Cameronism?



FINAL WORD: I admit to not being particularly good with money (I was always first at the bar!) but if you are up to your eyes in debt and hiding behind the sofa when the window cleaner calls to collect his dosh, would you be likely to set yourself up us a usurer or money lender, even using someone else’s money?
We hear on a regular basis just how much in debt we, as a nation are, and we are already well into the fiscal stratosphere of indebtedness with bills running into hundreds of billions (maybe even a trillion or two, whatever that is).

So how come George Osborne, who we trust to look after our money because he seems to have made plenty of it himself, is lending the International Monetary Fund £10 billion on our behalf to help to bail out the Greeks, the Spaniards and anyone else from the Eurozone who comes along with a begging bowl?

If we have got money to lend or indeed to give to foreign parts, including India and even China, we should be using it to create jobs or apprenticeships for the unemployed young people.

I know it’s not a trendy, politically correct or even socially responsible view but, for me, charity begins at home.