Lord Sewel: The True Crimes Of An Ordinary Wrong ‘Un

Lord Sewel has been led astray. Poor Lord Sewel has been led so far astray that he’s found himself caught on camera, wearing a bra, and hoofing gak off a hookers tits. This being England, a quivering, sweaty palmed mass of hypocrites from the ever reliable world of media and politics have clamoured to voice their disapproval of the Lord, lingering long and hard over the sordid details. All and sundry have expressed eye popping shock and heartfelt, horrified disgust that Sewell got caught, essentially getting up to much the same weekend hijinks as every other bored toff from here to Henley.

Don't worry. This is Ransom Note, and there’ll be none of that nonsense here. Like almost every media organisation in England, a fair whack of our staff- past, present, and, no doubt, future- have definitely be known to indulge a cheeky bump. And while we’re not really into paying for a shag (someone needs to tell his Lordship about Tinder), surely a better response to this whole affair would be holding an adult discussion about the place of sex work and drug laws in our society? Obviously that doesn’t sell scandal sheets, but fucks sake it’s about time. Who in Britain, at this stage, still thinks the War on Drugs is a good idea? Honestly, I want a show of hands. Come on, don’t be shy. Because it seems a fair bet that a healthy chunk of politicians who advocate for the WoD are almost certainly spending their weekends roaring and fist pumping whilst a tired brass blows Bolivian up their shrivelled bumhole. Obviously Sewel is as much of a pointless hypocrite as the people queuing up to give him a kicking – but that’s the problem. The UK is run by nutters stuck in a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do mentality that’s encouraging them to Humpty Dumpty their lives to un-glueable smithereens – just look at Reverend Paul ‘Crackhouse’ Flowers (on the subject of Humpty Dumpty, just how were the horses meant to hold the glue to put him back together? They’ve got hooves! Hooves! It’s no surprise they couldn’t sort him out! Unless they were made into the actual glue. Hmmm).

There is a real crime in the whole Sewel affair though. It isn’t that he gets up to the same recreational pastimes as 90% of his fellow Lords, or that he’s a bit of a dick about pretending that he maintains some sort of higher standard than everyone else – no doubt he’s been dribbling hypocritical shite for so long now he can switch between what he thinks, what he says and what he does as smoothly as a turd sliding round a sparkly u-bend. I don’t even think he’s aware he’s doing it.

The real crime lies in the one throw away phrase that’s been in most of the reports- here it is in the Mail: “Despite his complaints about the £1,000 rent of his Dolphin Square flat, it comes with a ‘protected’ rate which dramatically reduces what he has to pay. A similar flat in Dolphin Square costs almost £3,000 per month to rent.”

What the actual fuck! This fucker has got a rent cap! He is paying less rent to live in Westminster than I am to live in Brockley! Nahhhhh!

London is screwed when it comes to rent, completely screwed. Any pleas for the possibility of capped rent are being shot down before they can come close to getting off the ground. We’re in a surreal situation where every single political party have acknowledged that housing in the capital is a major, seismic catastrophe wrecking the lives of a generation- and none of them are doing a tap about it. There’s not been a single new policy to sort out affordable rent for Londoners. There has been no surge in affordable housing. There have been countless luxury flats vomited onto the skyline, bought by offshore bank accounts and kept as empty investments by people who contribute zero tax and less culture to our city. This has got so bad it’s even pissing off the most surprising of places – Comically, last month saw the Guido Fawkes blog, bastion of neo liberal free market ideology, crying into its pint because a block of luxury flats was threatening the existence of The Westminster Arms, a favourite Tory/ UKIP pub. The comments on the article are amazing, with more than one genius implying that the pub was facing closure, not because, as you might imagine, the deregulation of planning laws ensure that no community assets are safe, but because Muslims.

And in all of this shittery, the people who could sort housing out don’t give a toss because, despite earning wages far above national average, and despite being able to score expenses for anything from moat cleaning to jaffa cakes, they still don’t have to engage with the same rental nightmare that has led to living in London getting so expensive that the average cost of a room is deemed unaffordable in every single one of the city's postcodes for those earning the city's Living Wage.

It goes right to the top, not only is it increasingly apparent that George Osborne’s family business pocketed £6m in some dubious property scams, he also pays nothing, zip, zero for his current London pad at 11 Downing Street. Same as Cameron at No 10 – both houses are grace and favour properties, given rent free from the Queen’s extensive portfolio to the chancellor and the prime minister – perhaps if either of those two pricks had to cough up a smidgeon of rent they might start recognising that something needs to be done.

So, to conclude, people all round the country cheat on their partners, get stuck into narcotics, and pay for sex. But when they do it, they foot the bill. When Sewel does it, he gets subsidised by the tax payer. Here’s his crime; not the points where he’s the same as everyone else in the country, but the point where he’s very, very different.