People who took this at face value were startled by the first act of the Conservatives on assuming power ??? a crackdown on the homeless. They immediately sold off 12 homeless shelters, handing them to large property developers. The horrified charity Crisis was offered premises by the BBC to house the abandoned in a shelter over the Christmas period at least. The council refused permission. They said the homeless were a “law and order issue”, and a shelter would attract undesirables to the area. With this in mind, they changed the rules so that the homeless had to “prove” to a sceptical bureaucracy that they had nowhere else to go ??? and if they failed, they were turned away.

David Cameron calls this council a model of compassionate Conservatism. This article in The Independent tells a different story.