Worst Opinion of the Week: Local Councils Don't Owe Renters Anything!

Story: Council tenants in a Barnet housing estate say they don’t want to live in unsafe, damp, cockroach-ridden flats.

Reasonable take: Nobody should have to live in those conditions, especially when it’s the local council's job to maintain such premises.

Brain rot: I believe living in filth is too good for working class scum as the government owes you sweet fuck all – a proud Tory.

Brian Coleman – a former councillor for Barnet and former Tory mayor – appeared on BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire this week as part of a panel discussing a housing estate in which tenants are living in squalid conditions. Coleman gave a performance so masterfully arrogant, sneering and callous you would be mistaken for thinking it was a double agent attempting to bring down the Conservative party from within by flagrantly displaying their hardwired contempt for the working classes on national TV.

The BBC filmed on the estate where residents say they are being “left to rot” by the local council, as they captured the terrible conditions tenants find themselves in – dealing with broken security doors meaning anyone can access the building, addicts openly injecting in corridors, communal areas flooding anytime it rains, cockroach infestations and mould, despite the current Minister of State for Housing, Esther McVey, having recently visited the constituency and praising it as “delivering the regeneration and homes residents deserve”.

Alongside Coleman on the panel sat renowned social realist filmmaker, Ken Loach, who has extensively chronicled the lives of the working classes in the UK, and Annie, an NHS administrator and resident in the estate that talked about the living standards her and her family are forced to endure.

You might question why it was a former leading member of Barnet council for 16 years appearing on TV to answer for the despicable conditions, and not the current Conservative-controlled Barnet council leader Daniel Thomas, or any Tory councillor on the regeneration committee, or any Tory councillor on the housing committee, or any Tory councillors for the local area, or the local Conservative MP Matthew Offord. But the answers to why everyone currently affiliated with the party in that area were so unwillingly to answer to their constituents become evidentially clear thanks to Brian Coleman, who gallantly stepped into the void and demonstrated with unwavering certitude that it is because they detest them.

Despite Barnet Homes having said it was “extremely sorry for the standard of the homes” to it’s residents, Coleman delivered a rendition of contempt so on the nose it felt like an actor’s workshop in how to play the role of a bloated sociopath.

Annie and many others on the estate are living on something called a “non-secure tenancy”, essentially meaning they can get evicted within four weeks and will not get a home on the regenerated estate. They say they are the victims of “social cleansing”.

Coleman remonstrated that the residents “knew the deal” and that living as a “non-secure tenant” somehow suggested they’d be putting up with the foul conditions as the council won’t spend “vast sums of money” on flats that are being “pulled down in two years time”, to which Annie responded that they clearly “didn’t know it was riddled with cockroaches” and weren't "aware our electrics were underwater”.

As Coleman continued to berate that the tenants “had a choice”, Derbyshire pressed him as to why he was so fixated on these being non-secure tenants, as if the terminology justified their squalor when residents like Annie had already lived there for four and half years, which even Coleman conceded is a "long time", before he felt compelled to offer the perspective and defence that some have lived in this loathsome situation for 10 to 16 years.

Coleman then unyieldingly pronounced all this was actually is inconsequential to the tenants because “the council owes them nothing at all”, a statement that rendered Annie "speechless".

Clearly the major issue with the Tory individualist mindset is that unfortunately it’s not just confined to some cunt called Sebastian complaining about having to unjustly pay inheritance tax to the state on the property portfolio his father worked bloody hard for, it also applies to their running of local and central government – Tories treat the public like they're swindlers for using the services we literally pay for out of the little cash they earn.

When the conversation turned back towards Annie, who reasonably enquired to Coleman as to why Barnet Houses couldn't make the doors lock, he scoffed, “the door systems have not worked for 25 years!” – as if this mind-boggling admission of the council's failings somehow made the request frivolous and not more pertinent.

Sometimes it feels you’ve got to say "fair play" to how fucking risible these people can get. On one hand, they accept the living conditions are unacceptable while on the other suggesting it’s actually the tenants fault for choosing not be homeless, before triumphantly declaring their own failings at the helm as a means to scold their constituents for their perceived whining.

Host Derbyshire then brought in Ken Loach, who had previously only offered an incredulous look across his face throughout the painful ordeal, into the conversation. He tore into Coleman and the Tory party for its lack of empathy: “To live with cockroaches, to live with damp, your kids getting asthma, to be told you don’t deserve anything, the council doesn't owe you anything, it's disgusting, Brian Coleman. It’s disgusting.”

In the week in which the long awaited Grenfell inquiry report was released, Loach drew comparisons to the Grenfell fire and the Conservatives' continued “contempt for people seen to have no power. Absolute contempt. Doesn’t care if they’re in a fire hazard. Doesn’t care if they live in the most squalid conditions… That’s Tory Britain. Disgusting.”

When Loach asked Coleman why the council aren’t maintaining the buildings, he replied: “It’s a little matter of budgets, Mr. Loach” as if the feeble minds of anyone who doesn’t want to see families to make house and home with a nest of bugs in an underwater electrified world can’t possibly comprehend the idea of a budget.

Watching this budging prick puffing away like Henry VIII after his third swan pie of the banquet, even Victoria Derbyshire feeling she had to step in and ask “Mr. Coleman, why are you so unsympathetic? It doesn’t make sense. Are you a human being?”

I’ll answer that one: no. He’s a total divy cunt.

As a farewell skidmark, Coleman said he’d only gone on the show to defend Barnet council who didn’t want to appear as they thought the BBC filming the grim living conditions of tenants was a “stitch-up".

Fucking hell, we're barely one week into the UK Election Christmas Special and we’ve already been treated to a taster of what the next five years might have in store for us if the Tories win, as we watch this comic book villain struggle to register as sentient while coming across as a massive grass to boot. It seems incomprehensible that Britain could lose another half decade to this untrustworthy gang of snitches, but like always, we will give it our best shot.

@MULLET_FAN_NEO