General Ramblings 
Love is Blind
Love is Blind
Tuesday, 16 February 2010 15:02
I should never have fallen for it. When Love Productions proposed four Channel 4 programmes to show what a dirty deal councils tenants – and particularly those in multi storeys – get, I should have turned them down. All the smarter Labour MPs did.
Naively I accepted. Here was a chance to put the case for council housing.
Big mistake. Love didn’t want to plead for improved conditions for council tenants but to humiliate MPs. It’s easy to show us as greedy (although they didn’t pay us), out of touch (though we knew more about the people than them) and incompetent (almost as much as their production techniques). They duly did so.
So five MPS – and particularly me – were allowed to make fools of ourselves and council tenants were mobilised to do that, being helped to put their own case. Iain Duncan Smith was the smartest. Sensibly he got out on day one.
Their press releases briefed against us from the start. The poor TV girl at the Sun was told that “disgracefully” we’d gone out to dinner with friends. She reproduced their brief (with some deterioration in the style and grammar) but with the subs cut out “disgracefully”
Result? A deluge of abuse about MPS but nothing said about the neglect of council estates, the betrayal of council housing, the need for new builds and innovations, the plight of tenants penalised by poor facilities or the betrayal of Bevan’s vision of mixed communities by turning them into dumping grounds.
A disgrace. To channel four for putting it out. To Love for its cynical distraction of the real story. To me for taking part in the first place. The bastards
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