Latest Bill: Stoke 6 – West Ham 0

Bill Smith examines the Londoners who act more posh than Victoria Beckham & says he would rather hang out in Stoke

On Question Time Diane Abbott looked truly horrified. Newham Council were planning to send poor families to Stoke.

Google the story and the words dumped in Stoke or social cleansing come up. But I think it says far more about the arrogance of the Luvvie Londoners who can’t imagine living anywhere else but London.
If you want to do well in life as a rocker for instance Stoke could be pretty good. Robbie Williams, Slash and Lemmy all come from there.

If you want to be a footballer they’ve got a Premier League football team with great community support and the greatest ever English footballer came from there: Sir Stanley Matthews. Newham has West Ham!

So there isn’t much wrong with Stoke when you compare it with, oh let’s take Newham for instance. In fact, let’s take Hampstead or Kensington or Oxford for instance!

The Oxford years
I was brought up on a council estate and, as my oldest friend says: “you were clever from a very young age Bill” so I went to Oxford and sometimes I went to college. I say sometimes because I did PPE and my right-wing economics tutor was always banging on about how unemployment was good for the economy. It increases competition in the jobs market or some such heartless tosh disguised as economic fact. I didn’t turn into a raging left winger either as all the socialists were always telling me how great Trotsky, Lenin, Mao or Ho Chi Minh were and I had a friend locked up in Siberia. I was their token working class friend. They were all posh boys too who would rather die than be forced on the train to Stoke! I was a fish out of water.

One night stand
What I do know is I loved my years at my village primary school one hundred million times more than the Oxford years. It’s meant to be where the great and good go but neither was true. It was where the posh boys went, they had kindly allowed into their club a few poor kids, “scholarship boys” and a few girls!

Love is how you feel, it can’t really be explained, but if I’d had my way Oxford would have been a one night stand!

So yes, of course I’m against social cleansing and moving people if they don’t want to go. Sorry Diane, but who isn’t? The real story to me reinforced what I knew. Deep down the establishment, whether Ed or Dave or Diane, are posh. Now it’s posh boys and girls, but they still think they’re better than us, have a horror of ordinary working class England beyond the M25 and they think that London is better than Stoke.

It’s not living in posh London that matters. It’s where you come from and what and who you love that matters. I’d just as rather spend a weekend in Stoke as London. Who’s coming?

Bill Smith is Managing Editor of Latest 7/Homes magazine and
a director of Latest TV.