Where Is The Sympathy For The Greedy?

The Daily Mail ran a story yesterday about the Cole family, pictured above, who were once very wealthy and are now virtually destitute. The story itself is depressing enough. Mr Cole inherited what he calls a modest property that he sold for £600,000 and then used the money to fund an investment portfolio that included 84 buy-to-let properties in Huddersfield generating £150,000 per year in income. With that he bought his country mansion, valued at £2.5 million and paid for his four children's private education, leaving him with "only" £35,000 to live on. His problems arose when he invested in Romanian land that, he was assured, would get planning permission to expand his property empire. The land was going for a song and the seller appeared to be both stupid and desperate to get rid of it. In fact the seller was in such a hurry to sell the land and was so stupid that Mr.Cole moved quickly to take advantage of this person without making the necessary checks. But he had been caught in a fraud known in Romania as "the beautiful flower" - a deal too good to be true and entirely dependent on the greed and arrogance of the buyer. The land cannot and never will be developed - it is set aside for agricultural purposes and nothing else. Mr.Cole has now lost all his money, is about to have the rest of his properties repossesed and his children have had to leave their private schools. Oh well, you might think, they'll just have to get jobs. Unfortunately it turns out that every member of the family is incapable of real work and are trained only to use money as a means to take advantage of those less fortunate than themselves. Now the money is gone and they find that they are the "less fortunate" and their only effective response is to bemoan their fate and hope for sympathy from the rest of us. Unfortunately, that sympathy seems to be in rather short supply, as a look at the comments from readers of this story demonstrates. Why is this? Because Mr.Cole and his ilk have had the free run of this country for 30 years now and, during that time, they have never shown any sympathy for anyone else. They have taken advantage of a system that allowed them to use their money to further enrich themselves at the expense of others and has driven up house prices to levels that are now beyond the reach of most people. The "News In Shorts" cannot imagine that Mr.Cole and his wife have ever voted anything other than Tory and have probably spent many a cosy evening in front of their inglenook fireplace discussing the "feckless unemployed" and moaning that their taxes are being wasted on "benefit scroungers." Why no sympathy? Because prey animals rarely have sympathy when they come across a dead predator - they are merely thankful that it won't be hunting them and their offspring anymore.