Insensibly Positioned

Over the past decade, as we all know, Britain's main party of crooked financiers and slum landlords has made monumental efforts to tackle crooked financiers. Many of the more blatantly irresponsible chancers and dodgers nowadays can barely sit down from all those ministerial tongue-lashings. It should hardly be surprising, therefore, that the efforts by Britain's main party of slum landlords and crooked financiers to deal with slum landlords are characterised by an almost equivalent degree of determination. Asked during a debate to consider seizing properties from landlords who are unfit to rent, the housing minister's incomprehension was such that she failed to respond and only later remembered to blame local authorities. A Conservative member of the parliamentary committee on housing, communities and blaming local authorities observed that the idea of criminal landlords being caught and banned in one place and then allowed to go on committing crimes in another place does not make sense. As with the hapless Baroness Warsi on the matter of her party's inherent racism, one senses, somewhere amid the roiling cranial smog, a penny beginning to teeter.