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4 Homes Blunkett

Mark Barnsley | 28.01.2005 13:42 | Analysis | Repression | Sheffield

After my piece 'Shed No Tears For Blunkett' was published on Sheffield Indymedia, one of Blunkett's cronies, who happens to be the councillor for Blunkett's Sheffield Brightside constituency, came (alone) to his defence. This went along the lines of 'You're all middle-class, not like me and my good working-class pal David', and part of this ludicrous argument was the supposed low-cost of the houses they both own in Sheffield. What Blunkett's pal forgets to mention is that Blunkett doesn't just have 1 home, but 4! And either Peter Price has been playing down the value of Blunkett's Sheffield house - or Blunkett has been on the fiddle again!


Blunkett’s pal, Councillor Peter Price, who recently accused me of being “middle-class” (see ‘Shed No Tears For Blunkett’ comments on Sheffield Indymedia) reckons that the prolier-than-thou ex-home secretary’s Handsworth pied à tierre is worth £60,000. Now I don’t know much about house prices, I’ve never owned one, and my parents paid £500 for the Sheffield terrace where I was brought up. I’m not a great mathematician either, having left school at 16 (to work in Sheffield Works Department’s Manor Lane garage – so much for me being middle class.) But if Cry Baby Blunkett’s place is only worth £60,000, isn’t it a little ‘strange’ that in the past three years alone he’s claimed £54,000 from the taxpayer in maintenance for it?

Blunkett’s certainly been responsible for making more than a few people homeless in his time, but that’s something unlikely to happen to himself – being as he has no less than 4 ‘homes’ to choose from! Even getting his corrupt snout stuck in the trough didn’t lead to him losing the luxurious £3 million Belgravia mansion which comes as a public-purse perk of the home secretary. His crony Blair, decreed that even though Blunkett was forced to resign he can still keep it – along with his official limousine, and all his ‘security privileges’. And just to make sure that this so-called ‘working-class lad’ doesn’t have to struggle on his £57,405 MP’s salary (about 30 times what I have to live on Peter), Blair is giving him a third of his previous £130,347 home secretary’s wage as a ‘redundancy payment’. We can’t have little David blubbing again can we?

In case Blunkett fancies slumming it a little, there’s always his Wimbledon property. He currently rents it out (for around £15,000 a year), but David’s no stranger to evicting people from their homes, or even out of the country for that matter.

Which brings us to Blunkett’s own little place in the country, the cottage he rents from the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire on their Chatsworth Estate. Almost a stone’s throw from the streets of Brightside Peter? A little further than that I think. To claim that a man with 4 homes, a limousine, a vast income, and a wealth of middle-class cronies is ‘working-class’ is an insult not only to the people of Brightside, but to everyone having to read such rubbish. When it comes to investigating Blunkett’s finances though, I doubt the Child Support Agency will let him off the hook as lightly as the Budd Inquiry.

Mark Barnsley
26th January 2004

Mark Barnsley

Comments

Hide the following 2 comments

big up to mb

28.01.2005 14:50

good stuff mark -- this is an excellent piece. if you can make it to an imc-sheffield meeting sometime, i'll buy you a pint!

[i've also taken the liberty of correcting a couple of typos :-)]

r7
mail e-mail: r7@aktivix.org


There's More!

02.02.2005 12:19

Not only has grasping Blunkett, the Vampire Of Brightside, managed to hang onto his £3 Million Belgravia mansion – But he won’t have to pay any council tax on it! A spokesman for the Cabinet Office was quoted in yesterday’s ‘Independent’ as saying, “If the official residence is declared by the minister, or former minister, to be a second home [or FOURTH home in this case], then council tax is not payable on it.” Furthermore, “The cost of maintaining it including the cleaning and all the bills would fall to the Government, with the possible exception of telephone bills, where sometimes the minister might make a contribution.” – Unless of course he ‘forgets’. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

Cat got your tongue Peter Price? Or have you brought some snow back from Kilimanjiro to throw on your mate?!

Mark Barnsley


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