Labour has become the party of landlordism

It is complicit in the class war on renters.

During my 15 years of living in London I moved house 15 times. Some of that was on me: like when I gleefully left a flat-share to move in with a girlfriend, with the Eastenders-style breakup following months later. But, for the most part, my peripatetic lifestyle was formed by forces beyond my control. Rents increased more than wages each year over a decade and a half, and landlords favoured short-term tenure. It made me miserable, contributing to a serious bout of depression.

I am confident saying that about housing, and the effect it had on my mental health, because, within weeks of buying a home, I felt a burden lift from my shoulders. It’s hard to convey the immediate sense of calm that housing security gave me, particularly given my parents rented throughout my childhood. Soon, enthused by a newfound lightness of being, I was doling out “good mornings” to strangers, obsessively picking litter while walking the dog and becoming friendly with neighbours and local businesses. In short, I became acquainted with that much-venerated phenomenon: “community”. More than much of our political class, I know it’s an impossibility when your life is shaped by rentierism. It is all the more disappointing, then, to see the Labour Party so firmly tied to that same economic dogma.

I was never sold on Starmer’s Labour delivering sunlit uplands. He doesn’t have a theory of change, or policies commensurate with the challenges he often acknowledges. But even I was shocked when it was revealed that Rushanara Ali, the now former Minister for Homelessness, had evicted four tenants from her East London property only to re-list it for an additional £700 a month. Besides that, the agents acting on her behalf initially tried to charge the evictees nearly £2,000 to redecorate, and an additional sum for professional cleaning. Under the Tenant Fees Act, passed under the May government, neither was permissible.

Ali resigned shortly after the i newspaper broke the story. That was inevitable given the Renters Rights’ Bill, which Ali herself claimed would “tackle the root cause of homelessness”, included the minor detail of prohibiting what she had done. Ali could, of course, have put the property on the market with the tenants remaining in situ. That is, after all, what normally happens.

The house in question is presently listed at £894,000, and is one of three Ali owns across the capital (one is jointly held with a family member). Other Labour MPs who are also landlords include Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, who lets her former South London home for £6,000 a month, and David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary. Two ideological stalwarts of the party’s Labour First faction, Jas Atwhal and Gurinder Josan, allegedly own more than 20 properties between them. As of the last election, three of the leading five landlords in parliament are Labour MPs.

All this stands in contrast to most of Labour party history. Even before a party for organised labour existed, trade union leaders expressed a commitment to liberalism precisely because it opposed the Conservatives as the party of the landed interest. Part of the appeal of David Lloyd George was his critique of landlordism – with the then Chancellor including a land tax in his “People’s Budget” of 1909 (rather predictably, this was rejected by the Tory-dominated House of Lords). Following in the Welshman’s footsteps, Philip Snowden, Labour’s first Chancellor, promised to introduce a land value tax in 1924, declaring in a Christian-socialist incantation: “Land was given by the Creator, not for use of dukes, but for the equal use of all his children.”

These instincts remained integral to the party until well after the Second World War. The ambition of the Atlee government was to essentially replace private landlords with local authorities as housing providers. In 1962 Anthony Crosland, that quintessential party “moderate”, wrote how “private landlordism is not an appropriate form of home-ownership in an advanced society”. Two years later, in the 1964 election, “Rachmanism”, coined after the infamous London slumlord Peter Rachman, became a campaigning shorthand to decry Tory Britain. The word would later enter the Oxford dictionary.

Today, however, Rachmanism is practised by Labour MPs too. Last year Jas Atwal, the MP for Ilford South, was found to be letting flats wracked with black mould and insect infestations. Tenants told the BBC how they had been warned, by the agency acting on his behalf, that any complaints would lead to an eviction. Rushanara Ali is far from alone in personifying some of the worst aspects of our housing system on Labour benches. Starmer’s cabinet is the most state-school educated of the post-war era. Yet, given the extent of the housing crisis, and the situation confronting renters, does that matter when both the Chancellor and Foreign Secretary are landlords? And how can a party so shaped by the experience of landlordism – to the extent that the now former Minister for Homelessness is one themselves – hope to address the housing crisis?

There are some Marxist insights few can outright deny. One is that conditions determine consciousness. Once you fly business class, economy starts to look a little shabby. Similarly, a Labour party where landlordism is seen as normal can never hope to be on the side of renters. And that is electorally significant because renters tend to be younger and live in larger cities. In other words, they are one of the few solid voting blocs the party has left. These people are more likely to rent than previous generations, particularly their parents. Yet one can’t help but feel that Labour takes their votes for granted and, as Peter Mandelson once said of working-class voters, “they have nowhere else to go”.

Except they increasingly do. Britain is set to become an eight-party system – with Reform, the Liberal Democrats, Greens, SNP, Plaid and a new party of the left making hay while the duopoly crumbles. Renters are a large and under-mobilised block who are less likely to vote than homeowners – despite them being on the receiving end of a historic political failure. If Labour doesn’t start sounding authentic on the issue of rising rents, and addressing its clear hypocrisy on landlordism, some of its most instinctive supporters will simply look elsewhere. Who knows, we might even see the lingering melancholy that nearly all renters feel finally directed into political consciousness.

[See also: The landlord stranglehold]