I had a perfectly coherent post typed out regarding this, but I can’t really get the words out, it keeps coming back to THIS IS FUCKING DISGUSTING over and over again:
Fergus Wilson, who with his wife Judith owns nearly 1,000 properties around the Ashford area of Kent, made headlines at the weekend when the Guardian revealed he had sent eviction notices to 200 tenants who paid some of their rent with welfare payments.
On Monday night he told Channel 4 news that the decision was purely based on financial reasons, and that rent arrears were running at more than 50% in the homes he let to those receiving benefits.
“If I am heartless all the other landlords are heartless, because we’re all doing the same,” he said. “All the landlords will tell you that there is so much default now with housing benefit tenants that you are just simply better off with somebody working.”
Wilson admitted he did feel guilty about the people he was evicting, suggesting that some could be in dire circumstances. “It is very, very sad,” he said. “Particlarly, I feel sorry for battered wives who have come to us because we are very much consigning them to go back to their husbands to be beaten up again, but the situation is it cannot go on.” [x]
This man and his wife own nearly a thousand properties in the UK, are number 453 on the Sunday Times Rich List, and they are deliberately and cold-heartedly throwing people out on the streets knowing some of them will have to return to abusive spouses. And they don’t care, or they wouldn’t be doing it. (They also once attempted to sue a gas engineer for reporting that one of their properties was dangerous).
Fuck them. Fuck what this country’s becoming.