ABSTRACT
What greater source of injustice could there be, that while some people have no home, others have two? Yet the vampire trade in second homes keeps growing … uninhibited by government or by the conscience of the buyers… The real problem is that almost every MP with a constituency outside London has two homes or more, and there is scarcely a senior journalist who is not sucking the life out of a village somewhere, or a paper which does not depend on advertising by estate agents. Two weeks ago the Sunday Times revealed that the Labour MP Barbara Follett, who owns a £2m house in her constituency (in Stevenage), a flat in Soho and homes in Antigua and Cape Town, has claimed £76,357 in Commons expenses over the past four years for her London pad. Perhaps it isn’t hard to see why MPs aren’t clamouring for something to be done.
