Chris,

I would never, ever, dispute the fact that the vast majority of council house residents are hard-working and decent. I'm a little hurt that you would assume I think otherwise.

I'll grant that my use of 'offered' was wrong. I understand that council house has to be applied for and I sent out the wrong impression - that was a mistake on my part.

I'm right in thinking, though, that one is refused a council house if one has serious behavioural offences? And that anti-social behaviour, it is made clear, results in eviction?

As for prices, all I can say is that they seem to be considerably lower than average rents in my area. Perhaps indeed that is a reasonable rent for the housing here, and prices are different elsewhere. Personally, I find many rental prices very unreasonable (and I won't even go into how much my London flat sucks out my bank balance every week!).

Thank you for posting those articles. I find this quote sums up my feelings well:

'Most residents on our housing estates are decent law-abiding citizens who will have been sickened at the scenes they witnessed on their TV screens this week. Many will have seen their places of work trashed at the hands of these rioters. As much as anything else we owe it to them to send out a strong signal that this kind of violence will not be tolerated.'


I’ve been debating this on facebook too – I think the decent folks who receive benefits, council housing, whatever, would be appalled to think that those who have rioted, and shown such lack of care towards their communities, are entitled to the same level of help as them. When I worked in the charity shop, plenty of people I got to know well only bought their clothes from us, because they couldn’t afford high street prices. Would they thus go and smash up the big brand stores, out of spite? No, since they have dignity, something which is exclusive of class, IMO.

As for the ‘middle class’ rioters, they deserve the book thrown at them just as hard. University students? Take away their student loans and grants. The children of well-off families – well even they receive some degree of child benefit, which I believe they should then lose for that child. There’s got to be ways of punishing these people that sends out a message of zero tolerance across all levels of society.

All these people, regardless of their place in society, have demonstrated that they do not respect their fellow man, our communities, our police force, and our government, and have gone about their gripes in a most despicable and shameful way. Thus, I believe that none of them are owed anything by the society which they have chosen to spurn.