Let’s Be Honest About Housing Associations

This post is a revised version of an article that recently appeared in Cambria magazine

When I was growing up in Swansea in the 1950s most of the people I knew lived in terraced houses owned by people we didn’t know. For our house, the rent was collected by a chain-smoking bottle blonde from Mumbles who would enter the payment in her rent book with the kind of yellow fingers that persuaded me to become the only 10-year-old in the area who smoked his Woodbine from the other end of a cigarette holder. (Well, I was too young to give up smoking.) Despite our rent-collector’s aesthetic shortcomings, her caBuddy Hollylling was considered a steady job, and quite respectable. There were a lot of them about. Another I recall was a man with a bicycle that had a small motor affixed to the back wheel, which I found fascinating. I can see him now, tackling hills with the tails of his long, drab mac flapping behind him.

Some of these rented properties would then be sub-let, or lodgers would be taken in to help pay for a ‘telly’, or a week in Tenby. One such sub-lettee was ‘Old Sam’, who lived in someone’s front room across the road from us. Sam had piles of pennies (he had piles of just about everything, come to that!) and I’d be sent across the road when the gas meter was running low. Then, some tme in 1958, my father decided to join the property-owning classes. This rise in the status of the Joneses was not without disruption; for example, our new home needed a bit of work, things like a kitchen and an indoor lavatory.

So while the builders were in I was farmed out to my maternal grandmother over on Pentregethin Road. And it was from there, walking through a building site to Penlan School one bitterly cold February morning, that I overheard a trio ahead of me talking; “‘Ave ew yerd, mush – Buddy Holly been killed”. There’d been a light snowfall and the wind had blown the snow against the piles of builders’ sand. It was so cold that the snow didn’t melt, yet the fall had been so light that I could almost make out the individual flakes. That’s how I heard of the death of my idol, though the rest of that day is lost.


Those of our acquaintance that didn’t live in privately rented properties tended to live on council estates, such as Penlan, through which I had walked that dreary February morning. Penlan belonged to a new generation of post-war council estates, supplementing those Swansea had constructed in the inter-war period – Lloyd George’s ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ – most noticeably the massive Townhill-Mayhill estate, collectively and colloquially referred to as, ‘The ‘Ill’. As in, ‘Whe’ by do ew live, luv?’ ‘Up on the cowinʽ ‘Ill!’. (I’m making myself quite homesick here.)

Despite the allocation system for council tenancies being, theoretically at least, needs based, it was a decided advantage if one was a Labour Party member, trade union official, or friend / relative of a local councillor. Of course, as a young lad the complexities of this allocation system were beyond my ken, though it must be said that many of my elders were also confused. Especially those who thought they had enough points to put them near the top of the waiting list, only to find that they had been queue-jumped by a woman no better than she ought to be whose only ‘points’ seemed to be . . . no, let’s not go there, or I shall be accused of picking on the Labour Party again.

Yet it’s worth remembering that prior to World War One there had been very little housing built by local authorities; in fact, I’m not sure there was any council housing built in Wales. Before the Great War housing had either been built by the big companies and mine owners or quarry owners for their workers, or else the need for rented property was met by speculative developers. (In the village where I now live most of the properties over 30 years old were built by the owners of the local quarry in the 19th century to be rented to their workers.) But the fact was that just about everybody had a home, even if it was a little room like Sam’s, piled high with pennies, newspapers and God knows what else in a permanent fog of stale urine. Well into the 1950s unmarried adults (and many young married couples) lived with their parents, the elderly invariably lived with their adult children, while single men and young women who left home to work ‘took lodgings’ or found a ‘bedsit’.

So we can safely say that council or social housing, despite our familiarity with it today, has been a feature of Welsh life for less than a century. With its hey-day probably already in the past, for today most Welsh local authorities have lost their housing stock to housing associations. Another big difference between 1915 and 2015 is of course that most people today are home owners, and many more aspire to be, which is another need being met by housing associations with ‘shared ownership’ schemes and other imaginative arrangements. All of which makes housing associations worthy of closer inspection.


Despite self-applied labels such as ‘social enterprises’ and ‘not-for-profit organisations’ most housing associations are registered as Industrial and Provident Societies; registered with, but not regulated by, the Financial Services Authority. And unlike companies limited by guarantee they have share capital. Then, and despite wanting us to believe they are public bodies, housing associations are not covered by the Freedom of Information Act 2000. (Your local council is of course covered by the Act.) All that being so, and it suggesting they are not public bodies, why have housing associations in Wales received billions of pounds in public funding since the arrival of devolution in 1999? And why is so much of this Welsh public funding seeping over the border in the form of maintenance contracts and sub-contracts for English companies?

If you think I’m exaggerating, just remember that thirty years ago the housing departments of our councils provided many tens of thousands of jobs, making this sector one of the biggest employers, especially in our rural areas. There were those employed in building and maintaining the hundreds of thousands of council properties, and there were also jobs in administration, allocating properties, collecting rents and dealing with all manner of queries. Thirty years ago local authorities were big players in the economic life of the country. ‘But surely’, you ask, ‘the council staff simply transferred to the new owner of the properties?’ Well, usually . . . some . . . and to begin with . . .

To explain what’s happening now I shall use an example I have studied on my own door-step – literally from my own door-step! In 2010 Gwynedd council’s housing stock was transferred to Cartrefi Cymunedol Gwynedd (Gwynedd Community Housing), and to begin with, things seemed to carry on much as before. More recently, worrying changes have been apparent. The contract for maintaining the properties was awarded to Lovell, a major English company which has its ‘local’ branch office in Cheshire. Lovell in turn sub-contracted to smaller companies over the border. Let me explain how this works in practice.

In 2013 Lovell’s sub-contractors were working in the Tywyn area and my next-door neighbour waited months for his bathroom and kitchen to be re-tiled. The tilers travelled every day – when they bothered to turn up – from Wigan. Their day worked out at roughly four hours of travelling and five hours of work! And this lunacy, remember, is being perpetrated with Welsh public funding and at the expense of Welsh sub contractors!

More recently we have seen the controversy over CCG’s attempts to bring in English managers. Defended and disguised with arguments such as ‘unable to find suitable Welsh-speaking applicants’ and ‘seeking the best for the job’, when the truth is that it’s a move to better ‘integrate’ CCG with the Englandandwales social housing setup. Those it is hoped to recruit will have contacts in England that will ensure Cartrefi Cymunedol Gwynedd secures more tenants from the lucrative – but damaging to the host community – ‘vulnerable’ sector. The real question is, where did this diktat originate? Because CCG’s chief executive, Ffrancon Williams, seems to be just a mouthpiece in this, and the acquiescing Board member nothing but a smokescreen. The decision was certainly taken elsewhere.

The table below (click to enlarge) shows the amounts of funding given to Welsh housing associations in just one six-year period and from just one funding stream, the Social Housing Grant. Couldn’t that seven hundred million pounds – and all the rest! – have been better used?

Social Housing full

There are just so many problems attaching to the current arrangements for social housing. The one I have just dealt with in Gwynedd is replicated across Wales, resulting in thousands of jobs being lost and billions of pounds of Welsh money flowing over the border – Welsh public money that is supposed to be used to boost the Welsh economy! In addition, Wales is locked into an Englandandwales system that means a large family of English social misfits (or worse) can qualify for social housing in Wales ahead of locals; as can criminals, drug addicts, paedophiles and other who qualify as ‘vulnerable’, and therefore generate more income for whoever houses them. With such rich pickings on offer no one should be surprised to learn that many housing associations are building properties in numbers that cannot be justified by local demand – especially in some rural towns – and are only being built at all to meet the lucrative demand from England. As an example of what I’m talking about let’s remember the paedophile gang housed by Gwalia in Cydweli, which generated a lot more income than if those properties had been used to house law-abiding locals.

STOP PRESS: Just before posting I learnt that police in Haverfordwest are warning interested parties (schools, etc.,) that convicted sex offenders are now being housed in the centre of the town.

I don’t wish to paint an overly depressing picture (recalling ‘The Day the Music Died’ has already had me reaching for the Kleenex!), but social housing in Wales is an indefensible system. To conclude this section, and expose the lunacy from another angle, consider this. Apart from hundreds of councillors worried about losing their allowances just about everyone else in Wales believes we need many fewer local authorities. That being so, why does our ‘Welsh’ Government encourage the proliferation of housing associations – actually funding them to compete with each other? Or to put it another way: why should an area deemed too small to have its own local authority have half a dozen or more housing associations on its patch fighting like ferrets in a sack over the social housing racket?


The day of council-owned social housing is clearly coming to an end, dealt its death-blow by Margaret Thatcher’s Housing Act of 1980 and its ‘Right-to-Buy’ provisions. I would like to believe that we are approaching the end of social housing altogether and heading towards a system in which all rented accommodation will be provided by private sector. Housing associations are obviously a half-way house towards such a system, and were probably designed to be just that. What I would like to see in the next few years is their full privatisation. The writing may be on the wall, and it’s in David Cameron’s own hand.

In January 2012 the UK Prime Minister announced new legislation (due in 2015) for the governing of co-operatives (including Industrial Provident Societies), and he said, “We know that breaking monopolies, encouraging choice, opening up new forms of enterprise is not just right for business but the best way of improving public services too”. What I’ve underlined is a strange term to use in relation to what purports to be nothing more than legislation to consolidate earlier Bills and iron out anomalies. ‘New forms of enterprise’ in the same sentence as ‘public services’ should also have raised a few eyebrows.

Then we have the Housing (Wales) Act of 2014. On the one hand this seeks to further integrate Wales with England but it also has a lot to say about the ‘Regulation of Private Rented Housing’, with little of it aimed at your average ‘Buy-to-Let’ investor. My reading of Part One of the Act (by far the largest of the nine Parts) is that it sets the ground rules for a major shift in the provision of social or rented housing. And why not?

Housing associations already borrow money from banks and other institutions, so why shouldn’t they be allowed to look for commercial investors and shareholders? They would have little trouble in attracting them given that they have solid assets in the form of their housing stock. Housing associations would be ideal investment vehicles for pension funds, and socially acceptable for the more ‘ethical’ investor. Fully privatised social housing, with the right legislation in place to guarantee secure tenancies, prioritising locals, fair rents, etc., would not only provide investment opportunities but such an arrangement would also relieve a great burden on the public purse.

And there is of course another great advantage to handing the provision of rented housing over to the private sector. There is unquestionably a housing shortage, not in Wales, but in England. Despite the platitudes and promises, there is no intention of ever meeting the needs of all those wanting to own their own home, because to do so would reduce the value of millions of other homes people have invested in. So the demand remains. So why not meet it by letting the private sector build decent homes for rent, dwellings with – as on the Continent – more cachet than social housing and its connotations of problem families, pit bulls and sink estates? Give people a decent home, solve the housing crisis, and create jobs in the process, something that could be done without causing revolution in the suburbs.


Those buffoons down Cardiff docks who persist in masquerading as the ‘Welsh’ Government need to decide whether they want to start living up to their billing, or whether they continue allowing Wales to be run by English civil servants taking orders from London and doing little more than feeding the parasites of the Third Sector. If they choose the former, then one of the most convincing ways of showing their newly-grown gonads would be to devise Welsh laws for Welsh needs, rather than being bullied into accepting English laws with ‘(Wales)’ inserted into the name. Social housing might be a good place to start.

The table below shows that the fastest growing hoising sector in Wales is the private rented sector. Much of this is accounted for by ‘Buy-to-let’ mortgages but, increasingly, major companies and corporations are moving into the sector. Again, why not? As I’ve said, the demand for home ownership will never be met because to do so would lead to a collapse in property values; so why not allow private and commercial landlords to provide more salubrious accommodation than is currently provided by housing associations?

Housing by tenure

As I hope to have persuaded you, the current, Twilight Zone model of publicly-funded quasi-private companies is an unsustainable nonsense resulting from Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Right-to-Buy’ legislation. The irony being that it is currently sustained by ‘Welsh’ Labour and it’s right-on cronies in the Third Sector. This situation leaves us with two options. The first would see a new model of publicly-owned social housing, serving Welsh needs, employing Welsh people, and giving contracts to Welsh companies. The second option is to cut housing associations adrift (from public funding) and say, ‘Right you’re on your own now, behave like private companies, find shareholders and raise your own funding using your massive assets as collateral’.

The first option takes us back to that system we were once comfortable with (and so proud of); whereas the second option takes us back to private landlords (but without the bottle blondes with nicotine-stained fingers). Either option will be an improvement on the absurd system we know today; which sees far too many housing associations in Wales, and too many of them wanting to employ English staff, give contracts to English companies, and take in English tenants – and do it all using Welsh public funding!

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dafis

you make a valid point in your comment of 19.12 on the 8th.

If Councils had not got tangled up in all sorts of other interventionist nonsense they could have retained the social housing mandate and made a decent job of it. They could have been driven solely by local demographics – measure the need and then cater for it with a build programme. They would have got it right to within a tolerable + or – margin, and could have broadened their mandate slightly by collaborating with their immediate neighbouring councils, only, without engaging in speculative activity.

However the creation of housing associations with “ambitious” management blew a hole in any focussed community based approach, and the goals were shifted irreversably to “scale”and “growth” leading to mergers, acquisitions etc that merely fed & inflated the egos and salaries of the directors, yet funded out of the public purse ! . Which is where we are today, with fat cats boasting about the scale of their estates when many of those do little or nothing to satisfy the real priorities of the local population but do a thriving business in the trade in displaced dysfunctionals.

Janet Howell

04/01/15 Sunday Times had an article on p17 “,Locals and workers go to front of housing queue ” I quote

Local authorities are reacting to high demand for council houses by giving priority to those in work and insisting that would be tenants have lived in an are for up to 5 years before they become eligible”

Why can’t this be done in Wales?

treforus

Most interesting. Large scale Council Housing was introduced after the First World War to enable area slum clearances in the inner parts of the old towns and cities (sometimes called “congested areas”) so that the populations could be rehoused. In the case of Swansea, there was a deliberate policy to keep communities together so that those displaced from the old town centre (the most anglicised part) were rehoused on Townhill/Mayhill before the war and Port Mead /Blaenymaes after the war. To this day people from the centre and the Hill both have that distinctive “townie” accent.

In contrast rehousing from the valley area (Hafod, Landore, Brynhyfryd, Plasmarl, Morriston) went to Cwmrhydyceirw, Penlan and (post war) Clase. These areas remained more distinctly Welsh for many years. Of course, once established the Council “waiting list” took over and the population mingled.

It’s depressing to think that our forebears seemed to possess a great deal more foresight and plain common sense than those in charge now.

Incidentally I was amused to see that you’re a fellow Penlan OB. Sends you out in life with a broad mean streak and the knowledge that the world doesn’t owe you a living.

adarynefoedd

Good post Jac but what is to stop private landlords acting as the importer of problems? See Rhyl, Llandrindod, Llanelli for examples of that.

I wholly support going back to basics and restarting public housing via local authorities but it has to be linked with jobs otherwise we are just building problem estates again. In our small town, most of the provision was built for new factories and this worked OK whilst the factories were still open.

The early history of social housing is that it was highly paternalistic, had lots of visiting by housing officers (see Octavia Hill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_Hill and others) and was for families in work.

I think a modernised version of this would work if the jobs were there. We could also buy back many of the good LA houses some are shamefully neglected by BTL landlords.

One industry we could kick off again is clothing (which was big round here) and some of the EU funding could go into retooling and training (though there are a lot of trained machinists still around) but we would have to get the contracts again. Our factory did M and S till it closed in 2000. Another would be a whole hearted effort to insulate the thousands of Victorian houses, again an ideal scheme for LAs to lead. As it is, most of the young men here work ‘off’ generally ‘on the poles’ with disastrous effects on family life.

Obviously the right to buy and the homelessness legislation would have to go or we would end up with the same problems. The issue of what to do with homeless families is a hard one, but again the Victorian reformers struggled with this issue as well.

Brychan

You are right that council-owned social housing was mortally wounded by Maggie Thatcher’s Housing Act of 1980, but the ‘right to buy’ principle was introduced into Wales by the Labour Party. This included an ethnic cleansing provision. The New Towns Act of 1946 provided for tenants of publicly funded new builds to apportion their rent as a purchase of the freehold, and this first appeared in the new town of Cwmbrân in the 1950s and 60s. To qualify for a cheap purchase “corporation house” you had to be employed by a firm signed up to the development scheme. In the case of Cwmbrân, this included British Nylon Spinners at Pontnewydd and the local GKN factory. It allowed for thousands of families from bombed out cities like Coventry to be given a cheap house along with a job move. This was above and in front of the existing housing needs of the existing population still slumming it in tenements in Pontypool and in the Sirhowy and Ebbw valleys. There was actually an ‘inward migration target’ set to release funds for various stages of the house building. I hear a similar scheme was later run by the Development Board for Rural Wales.

Brychan

Exchange between Donelley (Pembroke) and Sparks (Acton) in the Westminster House (Commons), 31/03/1952.
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1952/mar/31/new-towns-bill
Specific reference to provisions in the legislation to use government funds to relocate factories and ship-in ‘skilled workforce’ from elsewhere into the housing provision funded by New Town corporations.

Exchange between Lord Mancroft and Lord Burden in the Westminster House (Lords),19/01/1954.
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1954/jan/19/cwmbran-new-town-compul-sory-purchase
Reference to backlash on compulsory purchase and evictions of natives at ‘The Garw’, to make way for housing of incomers.

Exchange between Abse (Pontypool) and Brooke (Hampstead) in the Westminster House (Commons), 24/01/1961.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=1961-01-24a.23.3
Reference to previous undisclosed target of 35,000 households when the corporation may have been wound up. This was important to Leo as under the legislation unused land that had been acquired under the Act would be sold with proceeds going to the Treasury in London and not to the local authority in Wales who would maintain and administer built housing stock. By 1961 the target had risen to 55,000 households.

daley Gleephart

So, Thatcher passed the legislation but it’s really Labour’s fault for suggesting it in 1959 ! It probably seemed like a good idea before home ownership and property speculation became an obsession. Anyway, good old Osborne is now giving tax relief on Buy-to-Let mortgages so, everything will be all right won’t it?

treforus

DG

1. Local Authorities (including Labour) had the power voluntarily to sell Council stock before 1979 and frequently did so.

2. It was permissible to deduct mortgage interest against rent for BTL mortgages for income tax purposes between 1997-2010. Have these years disappeared from Labour Party history?

3.Security of tenure was abolished for new private sector tenancies in 1998. Which party was in power that year?

Daley Gleephart
Cleddyf Arian

“In the case of Cwmbrân, this included British Nylon Spinners at Pontnewydd and the local GKN factory. It allowed for thousands of families from bombed out cities like Coventry to be given a cheap house along with a job move.”

That explains their ugly Brummie twang and Torfaen’s ‘No’ vote in ’97 😉

Brychan

It should also be noted that both the 1945 and 1950 Labour governments continued the ‘direction of labour’ policy right into the 1950s as it had applied to reserved occupations like steel and coal mining imposed during WW2. This excluded much of the existing population in the eastern valleys under the occupations directive from getting jobs in the subsidised ‘new industry’ factories. This effectively excluded them from the lease-purchase scheme run by the Cwmbran Corporation. It was also the case that if you or your family owned an existing private title deed like the typical valleys turn of the century house, you were ineligible to apply (unless you were in a defined skill). However, those displaced from the cities of the English midlands, not just the bombed out, but also displacement due to post-war reductions in housing density in the town planning of English cities you would, automatically, be eligible to apply.

It is evident that by the 1960s, even Labour MPs were asking awkward questions about the situation, a migration policy which they had initiated, especially when the ‘profits’ from disposal of housing stock when the lease-purchase scheme matured went to London to pay off national debt. Profits on sales were being exported to the treasury, leaving the bad quick-build pre-fabs in the hands of the council and the better stock now wholly owned or sold off, many in the hands of incomers.

No doubt these new ‘housing associations’ will encounter such a financial crisis, too. In the near future. The need for mega associations (often the ones with a cash cow of social care in England) need to swallow up the well intentioned smaller associations or get more loans/grants to new-build to a requirement that doesn’t actually exist. They do this in order to survive as their revenue stream from existing rental doesn’t cover debt. Indications suggest this is already happening. Pouring Welsh government cash into them doesn’t solve the problem, just feeds their merger frenzy until they’re too big to fail.

dafis

must confess – never dawned on me that the DBRW, who I found to be a feeble, sluggish outfit most of its life, was an instrument of covert policy. I thought it was just a piss poor attempt at economic recovery, but if one looks at it from this different angle I have to conclude that you are pretty much spot on.

I still find it hard to imagine that Glyn Davies, at that time, was in on it, because despite ( or because of ) his views he was very much a man of his community.

dafis

excellent stuff ! and as a post script – a briefing note to editors – in future refer to scum like this as , for example, “Essex pervert resting/hiding in Blaenau…..”. Must emphasise nothing to do with Gwynedd, no tolerance, no hiding place .

dafis

Youe side bar item : http://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/gwynedd-paedophile-handed-himself-after-8278099

With a name like that he’s obviously moved or been moved to get away from his previous hanky panky ? Seems like a prime candidtae for the old tar and feather procedure with final warning that his nuts come off if he’s ever caught at it again within the borders of Wales. He might then shift east and settle on the Wirral or points further into England . If his relocation was facilitated by an Anglo organisation then they too should be given a dose of rough justice – wankers all of them !

dafis

either way, you have to suspect motives – his and thos of any justice/social engineering racket with whom he had contact. Let’s be honest, Blaenau might appeal to us perverse Welsh on a sunny day, but a kiddy fiddler from Essex would only go there if he was doing a Butch Cassidy, or looking for new playgrounds !

Daley Gleephart

The Court was told that Batterham was said to be of previous good character. Am I right in thinking that even police cautions are revealed post verdict and pre sentencing? Are all those who download child porn actively engaged in the physical molestation of youngsters? If they aren’t, the term ‘kiddy fiddler’ should only be used when children are harmed specifically by the paedophile. That doesn’t mean that the crime of watching children getting abused isn’t serious. Vigilantes are a serious problem and they have been responsible for murdering men who have no record of child abuse.

Housing Associations are fine when they start up. The HA gets builders to erect new properties to a specification acceptable by the Council or Welsh Government or Parliament. New properties need very little maintenance and major defects are covered under insurance so, most of the rent is income. The problems arise when the units age and more of the rent money goes on making repairs. Gwalia, Wales’ oldest housing association, is experiencing the same problems with its stock that local authorities have.

Daley Gleephart

My reference to Gwalia was made as an example of how housing associations end up in the same position as local council landlords.
Was Colin Batley convicted of any crimes before he and the others moved to Wales? Links, please.

Daley Gleephart

So, there are no Court records and we are supposed to read something hidden in the Judge’s statement?
Apparently, Batley’s parents moved to the street in Kidwelly years before their son turned up.

Daley Gleephart

The fact remains that you are blaming Gwalia for not knowing something that they had no means knowing.

I read about his parents whilst searching the web for information this afternoon but I did not copy the link.
Those who have studied Satanism as part of academic work claim that Batley wasn’t a true worshipper of the devil but used the writings of Crowley to scare his victims. A bit like nutters who use religion as an excuse for their atrocities.

Daley Gleephart

I tried again but I cannot find it. Anyway, Batley wasn’t the first one to arrive amongst those who were convicted. The number grew over a period of 4 years.
It seems that the victims were scared of the so-called satanic powers that Batley claimed to have. If the victims had understood that their attackers were perverse sickos and nothing more, their disgusting activities may have been reported earlier.
The devil worshipping bit was ideal for our low-grade newspapers though.

dafis

you might wish to tolerate these dodgy bastards in your community, but why on earth import trouble from elsewhere when there is a waiting list of people within the county lining up for social housing. As for the use of the term “kiddy fiddling” it is perfectly admissible where the offender is showing a perverse interest – like stocking up images. Now you may be right, he could be a “passive” who “takes his pleasures in strange ways”. However I would not want it to be my little son or daughter that stimulates his transition from “passive” to “active”, as often happens some time down the track.

I do not condone murder as a remedy/solution but a scale of physical deterrence may be admissible as the perps seem not to be too bothered about the pain they inflict on others. Curiously murder of offenders is most often commited by other ( petty )criminals who see this type of victim as “fair game” until they too get locked up.

Vigilantes become an issue when there is a vacuum in public protection, when the social and justice agencies become preoccupied with covering their own asses and shovelling embarrasments under the carpets by contriving elaborate schemes ( scams ) rather than tackling real problems. The present situation increasingly looks just like that.

Daley Gleephart

But what about the innocent who are attacked and murdered by people who think that they’ve caught a paedophile? Is it: “The end justifies the means / Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” and ‘co-lateral damage’ is a price worth paying?

Daley Gleephart

Does that pass for humour near Ruthin? Puke ‘n’ Barf out loud.
29,300 results.

Daley Gleephart

btw: What part of “That doesn’t mean that the crime of watching children getting abused isn’t serious.” don’t you get?
I’m not exactly tolerant of people who watch and download beheadings but I don’t label them ‘murderers’.