Friday, August 29, 2008

Norfolk & Holmes – the estate agent of choice...


I watched a great programme on BBC3 last week. It was the sort of programme the BBC used to make years ago before the age of spin doctoring, inter-liaisonal projects with the resident party in power and the creation of BBC’s ‘Number 10 Brown-nosing unit’ (Motto, we’ll get so far up Brown’s backside, he’ll think we’re piles). It was part of the ‘Mischief’ series in which presenter Alex Riley had set up a new estate agency with a difference – ‘Norfolk & Holmes’ (not to be confused with the bookmakers ‘Norfolk & Chance’ and the Fat Friends Club – ‘Norfolk & Weigh’).

Who’d have thought it? Anglo Saxon irony on Auntie Beeb! Heads are sure to roll at the BBC when Gordon’s McStasi work it out.

Riley’s remit was to travel the length and breadth of England, finding just a small fraction of the estimated 1 million empty homes that blight our land –and then asking awkward questions to Council Dons and Government Lackeys as to why so many houses were being left empty and derelict while our glorious leader keeps banging on about the need to concrete over England with 3 million new rabbit hutches....

The most obscene part of the show was in Liverpool – row upon row of fantastic Victorian houses, some as big as five bedroom dwellings boarded up and awaiting demolition. It was a surreal site, Riley strolling around entire streets, no people, no cars, nothing. Every house empty, every community destroyed...... I mean, who could be responsible for such an arse up? Who do we know who’s as thick as pig sh*t, as dyslexic as a cooking funt and likes to have a Jag’ to transport his mighty corpulence to places where he just isn’t wanted...

There can be only one. John Prescott and his Pathfinder project.

In all, some 15,000 houses in the Anfield area of the city are empty. It’s the result of the Lib-Dem council (voted the worst run council in the entire country) trousering the cash from central government to help the moron Prescott realise his cretinous ‘Pathfinder’ dream . Anfield is now a ghetto, a suppurating monument to a shambolic cretin of a man and a money grabbing, no-honour cabal of local little Hitlers. And there they stand today. Street after street of brick husks – a gaunt, empty tribute to the consequences of the credit crunch and Labour’s continued obsession with the worst kind of unsocial engineering.

Riley interviewed a former resident of the community. She sort of hit the nail on the head, when she said the council told her the existing houses were jerry-built death traps – and it would be best if they were all knocked down to be replaced by bright, shiny new ones. The only problem was that the bright shiny new houses would be way out of the reach of the displaced community – so God knows where they would end up.....

Riley got a team of surveyors in to have a look at the state of the boarded up houses. They poured scorn on the claims of the council, stating that the quality of the existing houses, even in their abandoned state could not be matched by new build replacements. They took Riley round to see a street that had repulsed the unwanted attentions of Prescott’s chipolata fingers. Each house had been done up at around 20 grand each. The builders had sold them to locals – the place, as they say in Liverpool, was buzzin’....

And so it was ever thus. Agendas, no matter how bizarre, no matter how flaky are pushed by an administration so wrapped up in their own demented agendas, that everything they touch degrades England just a little more . In order to find out what the bloody hell is going on, Riley tried to have a word with the brassy hagged Minister for Housing, Caroline Flint.

In a nanosecond, gobby Flint became coy Caroline. She slipped out of a side entrance at the Ministry for Housing so she wouldn’t have to meet him.

Pathetic.

You can watch the show, here.

1 comment:

Thud said...

I have made a great living from building and renovating in Liverpool...for vqarious reasons we have a great stock of old houses....and from a builders point of view they are truly great houses...as you say a disgrace.