Back in the mid-1990s there was an issue of Viz comic that featured a miniature porcelain house of the sort that features on the back of certain magazines aimed at the more senior, doddery citizens. The difference was that this was no cute country cottage but a dilapidated council house in a run-down estate. As the Telegraph wrote in a 2004 article about Franklin Mint:
” Viz captured the spirit of those promotions brilliantly in a late Nineties parody supposedly marketing a porcelain model of a decrepit council house. “No 22 Shit Street” was perfect in every detail, from “the fire-damaged, urine-stained mattress, carelessly discarded below the bedroom window, to the jauntily angled dustbin spilling its putrid contents across the path in a splash of repulsive colour”. “
I still wonder how much the UK establishment uses the threat of ending up at 22 Shit Street as a means to control the working- and especially the middle-classes and accept whatever draconian Neocon measures that are thrown at them. You know with a kind of sneer saying: “Be thankful for what you have, life could easily be a lot worse … get on the wrong side of us and we’ll have you in 22 Shit Street faster than a ned in a stolen Ford Escort.”
A Former Dundee Man 
Isn’t that what the whole ‘property owning’ scam is all about? Bear in mind thatall this crap came in just as the frontal assault on organised labour and workers’ rights commenced. Now this might be hypocritical of me, seeing as I own a small house that I paid off last year, but trust me, I wasn’t really thinking of that when I bought into the game in the ’90s. However, I was lucky that I had a job with a good pension scheme (remember them?). I got out early, despite losing a lot, simply because it meant I could get out of the mortgage trap and not be controlled by ‘The Man’ to that sort of degree any more. I’m not wealthy by any means and I back up my modest pension with a part-time minimum wage job, but I consider myself very, very lucky. I could have gone on as much as seven more years, but my health, spirit and conscience had had enough of prostituting myself to the Banksters so I took the opportunity and jumped whilst I could.