From Dinghy to Dormitory: How our Government and Councils Sold Us Out

The Clown of the Year

Moral fibre is no longer optional. Courage is no longer negotiable. And silence is not neutrality—it’s complicity.

Welcome to Great Britain — Now With 22 Beds Per Room and No Questions Asked

You there — yes, you with the mortgage, the council tax bill, and the quaint belief that local democracy might actually mean something. Allow me to disabuse you of such adorable naivety. Welcome to 2025, where immigration policy is crafted in smoke-filled Home Office corridors, planning law is rubber-stamped by absentee bureaucrats on mental health leave, and local councillors respond to crisis by embracing their true spirit animal: the ostrich.

Let’s start with the HMO plague — a policy decision apparently made by nobody, endorsed by silence, and executed with bureaucratic flair. Oswestry’s charming Smithfield Hotel is the latest sacrifice to the god of “urgent housing need” (translation: speculative property goldrush). It’ll now become a 22-bed HMO under the watchful gaze of Jassy Sidhu and his West Midlands investment network — the only group more prolific than rats in a landfill.

You may recall the ancient tradition of councillors *representing* the people. How quaint. Let us reintroduce the cast of our local Punch & Judy show:

• Cllr Duncan “The Last Green in the Village” Kerr – ever the master of optical concern, recently suggested trimming the 22 beds to 14. Because nothing says resistance like negotiating with the developers over how many bunk beds per cubic metre are palatable. So, he’s apparently willing to negotiate with the BLOB — that amorphous mass of bureaucrats, developers and legal vagueness — but not with the very people who voted him in. Democracy by clipboard, not by conscience. (see below)
• Cllr James “Captain House-Share” Owen – whose tenure as Housing Portfolio Holder has seen more communal kitchens installed than IKEA’s spring catalogue. A champion of “managed decline,” he’s become the unofficial patron saint of passive planning approvals.
• Cllr Heather “Our Lady of Permissive Planning” Kidd – silent as ever, perhaps confusing HMOs with ‘Housing for Migrant Opportunities’. One suspects she’d green-light a tenement block if it came with a carbon-neutral flowerbed.
  
• Cllr Duncan “Retweet and Retreat” Borrowman – Oswestry’s answer to a Twitter emoji. If likes were legislation, he’d be Prime Minister. But alas, his opposition begins and ends with finger exercises on social media

Now, just in case your blood pressure wasn’t high enough, may I present some stats:

– Over 50 council houses in Oswestry stand vacant — some empty for more than 800 days — while developers declare an urgent housing crisis. Council-owned family homes rot behind locked gates, yet every ex-pub and derelict inn is magically HMO-ready overnight.
– The Castle Inn in Highley will soon host 17 migrants in en-suite glory, because what every village really needs is a £650-a-month bunkbed chamber of dreams.
– In Shrewsbury, 142 residents objected to a 10-bed HMO behind White House Gardens. Council response? “No adverse impacts.” Translation: “We skimmed the summary and Joe Salt says it’s fine.”
– In Oswestry, over 210 residents signed a petition against cramming a 4-bed house into a 9-bed HMO on Hawthorne Grove. Result: proposal refused — for now. But we all know how these things come back as ‘revised’ plans.

Ah yes — Joe Salt of Creative Planning Ltd — a Shrewsbury-based architect and planning consultant who appears to be the go-to guy for presenting HMO applications to the Council. A man so familiar with the system, he may as well have written the Planning Portal’s login screen. He’s become the preferred architect for turning awkward garages and closed-down pubs into golden geese of rent-by-the-room revenue.

Meanwhile, central government continues its Kafkaesque masterpiece. As asylum hotels descend into chaos — The Bell Hotel in Epping, The Phoenix, the Thistle City Barbican — the public is treated to PR masterclasses in euphemism: “reassuring presence,” “appropriate accommodation,” and my personal favourite, “community engagement.”

Let’s recap:

– At The Bell Hotel, a guest was charged with three sexual assaults within days of arrival. Essex Police deployed officers, not to investigate the assaults, but to escort counter-protesters who turned up to oppose a peaceful demonstration by concerned parents. And just to add farce to tragedy, those same officers then reportedly offered the anti-protesters a lift back to the station. Because nothing says community reassurance like chauffeuring agitators while the public gets molested.
– In the Barbican, asylum seekers charged with over 90 crimes in one hotel — from rape and arson to robbery and strangulation. One threw a TV out of the window. No, not a metaphor.
– At Canary Wharf’s Britannia International, taxpayers fund rooms at rates outpacing most London salaries. We’re told three to a room is the new standard — a £15 billion policy triumph.
– A Daily Mail audit of just 70 hotels (a third of the total) found 312 migrant residents charged with 708 criminal offences, including rape, knife crime, robbery, and sexual assault. That’s not policy — that’s chaos on direct debit.
– Oh, and let’s not forget the Metropole Hotel in Blackpool, where, while being used as a taxpayer-funded asylum hotel, it was used to film a pornographic movie. Yes — your taxes at work, starring in the background of something that would make Channel 5 blush.

And still, ministers and civil servants take to their long-term sick leave with gusto. In Starmer’s Britain, productivity is a relic and accountability a dirty word. With public servants vanishing under piles of “fit notes,” perhaps they’ll reappear around the same time as transparency.

The reality is stark: thousands of undocumented illegal immigrants, mainly young men of military age, have arrived in this country by rubber dinghy and, after a brief sojourn in a very nice hotel, been shipped out to places like Oswestry, and housed in Housing for Migrant Opportunities HMOs. These are young men of an entirely different culture, whose values often diverge dramatically from our own. And when our children are molested on their way home from Marches School, after the summer holidays: remember — WE TOLD YOU SO.

And that, dear reader, is what they’re truly scared of, but that is the reality.

And another gentle reminder:

You stood for election. You bombarded us with your fantasy leaflets. Now have the courage to stand up to be counted, and represent us.

And remember:

Moral fibre is no longer optional. Courage is no longer negotiable. And silence is not neutrality—it’s complicity.

Transparency, it turns out, is the one thing our councils and ministers truly fear — because when the lights come on, the cockroaches scatter.

Call in the Clowns: Oh, they’re already here.