I normally despair at what the media in the UK has become. It upsets me to see that we now have a media that doesn’t want to do or pay for the unglamorous but highly important journalistic grunt work, the court, local democracy or crime reporting or the sort of difficult and challenging investigative reporting that that we all need and deserve if we are to be considered as informed citizens. All these things are expensive and might get less eyeballs on pages than images and words about Katie Price’s latest tits therefore investigative reporting gets less resources.

Investigative reporting is particular expensive. It’s especially so if a publication has spent months or even years gathering evidence and cultivating sources, marshalling the facts, chasing down the veracity of quotes to tell a story that might get spiked at the very last moment before the paper goes to press because of some legal issue that whatever or whoever is the wrong’un at the heart of the story might exploit. This might be because of something the journalists have missed or it might be because a wealthy or well connected individual will have the fiscal and social capital to bring a libel case that could destroy a publication. Britain’s libel laws are fearsome things and reform of these laws is something that I believe should go hand in hand with any future Free Speech Act passed hopefully by some future government. For the record I believe that British libel laws should be more like those of the United States where the person bringing the libel suit must prove malice on the part of the publication if they are a public figure or negligence if they are a private citizen. I don’t believe that British libel laws as they are now could co-exist or even be compatible with any future British free speech regime.

As I said libel laws are fearsome and I believe I’ve told before of the time when I was mixing with crime and court reporters for the national Press and got to hear numerous scurrilous stories about the DJ Jimmy Savile. These stories were not about child abuse, this aspect of Savile’s depravity came out after Savile died, but the rumours I heard were ones alleging that Savile was a very great enthusiast for necrophilia. Savile carried out his disgusting necrophiliac activities in NHS hospitals where using his celebrity he had acquired free access to hospitals, including their mortuaries. These rumours about Savile and necrophilia turned out to be more based in fact than fiction but it was impossible for the journalists that I was mixing with or their publications at the time to publish anything about this because of Britain’s libel laws. As soon as this story was published Savile would have sued the publication into oblivion. He was wealthy, well connected and could have brought in all manner of Establishment figures as supporters of his case along with their florid denials that Savile was ‘not the sort of person who would ever do such awful things M’lud’. Also all it would have taken to bankrupt a newspaper was for any doubt whatsoever be thrown on the story by way of a wrongly taken down note or a source who suddenly, maybe due to a fiscal or other inducement or threat, changes their story weakening the newspaper’s case.

As I’ve hopefully managed to convey, investigative journalism is difficult, expensive, risky and fraught with danger, some financial and some reputational or even physical.

Because I know and understand just how difficult investigative journalism is I have to stand up and take my hat (a bowler is my choice as you might have seen in a recent video on here) off to Peter Apps of Unherd magazine for his incredibly hard hitting piece on the growth of the market for bedsits or Homes in Multiple Occupation (HMO’s) as they are now called. This fantastic piece looks at this market and finds much that appears murky or at the least not good for British society.

It’s a story of how British families are being eased out of long standing tenancies in order that their properties be converted into lucrative HMO’s. It’s a story of how parasitical capitalism feeds at the teat of inefficient, overstretched and overburdened local authorities and how the winners are the large corporate landlords and the losers are ordinary Britons. This isn’t the small scale landlordism that we’ve seen in the past, which has been good for some tenants as well as for those landlords that might only have a few properties, what’s happening now is corporate landlordism on a huge scale and that is turning out to be maybe worse for tenants than having the private rental sector overwhelmingly made up of small landlords. It looks to me like we might be entering a new period of Rachmanism but this time instead of the slum landlord being a seedy brothel keeper it’s a corporate with a shiny plush office.

The Unherd piece is one of those that I do not wish to excerpt from because there’s nothing that I believe I can excerpt from it that sums it up, it’s all bloody good, there’s little or no filler here, it’s all story. I’m so impressed with this fantastic example of good old fashioned investigative reporting that all I’m going to do is put the link up and beg readers of this blog to go and read it. I read it and it made me ashamed of how my country is run and that so many people, many of who might be vulnerable in some way, are housed and housed by what are starting to look like Corporate Rachmans.

Here’s the piece

https://unherd.com/2026/08/how-hmos-took-over-britain/?edition=us

Other links

Peter Rachman for whom ‘Rachmanism’ was coined by a Labour MP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rachman

An essay on libel laws in the USA and the UK

https://ejlt.org/index.php/ejlt/article/view/173/261

Guardian article on Jimmy Savile’s depraved conduct in hospital mortuaries

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jun/26/savile-bodies-sex-acts-corpses-glass-eyes-mortuary