Was there ever a less convincing scandal than the revelation that a landlord who rents houses to G4S for housing asylum-seekers in Middlesbrough chooses to paint all their doors bright red? This, apparently, is ‘apartheid’, according to a hyperbolic Times headline yesterday morning. As if that were not enough, Ian Swales, former Lib Dem MP for Redcar, said the firm’s decoration policy reminded him of Nazi Germany.
Presumably, tomorrow’s paper will divulge the devastating finding that the Duke of Devonshire paints all the doors at Edensor, the village on the Chatsworth Estate, a rather fetching shade of dark blue. Or on Friday the explosive revelation that Jesus College, Cambridge, paints the doors of its student houses green.
There is a very good, and mundane, reason why all these landlords like to use one colour of paint for all their properties: it saves a lot of money. It means that you only need to keep one shade of paint in your maintenance shed, and that when the time comes to repaint the whole lot your painter can move from one property to another without having to wash his brushes every time. The idea that Jomast – the landlord who lets his properties to G4S – is engaging in some sinister exercise to identify asylum-seekers in the way that Jews were identified with yellow badges in Nazi Germany is preposterous. Even if he had no feeling for his tenants, why would a landlord want to help racist thugs defile his properties?
Public ire should surely be directed at the thugs, who are said to be smearing doors with excrement and throwing eggs at the houses. But no, G4S – the company which bungled the Olympics security contract in 2012 – makes a far more convenient whipping boy. Red Door Gate has been elevated into a scandal because there are a great number of people who oppose the very idea of a private company being awarded a government security contract. I am not sure why the Times has been attracted to give the story such prominence, but many of the commentators who have piled in would lose no opportunity to attack any form of outsourcing, be it in prisons, housing or anything else. For them, the job that G4S is doing should be done by a public authority with a good old unionised workforce, while all social housing should be owned by councils.
Social housing in Middlesbrough, by the way, was transferred to a housing association, Emirus Housing, in 2004. Like so many other landlords, it likes to stick to limited range of door colours, too – a brochure gives tenants a choice of white, red, black or blue for their front door. Yet for some reason I haven’t heard anyone trying to accuse them of stigmatising their tenants in the manner of Jews in Nazi Germany.
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