By Mark Langabeer, Newton Abbot Labour Party member
Thangam Debbonaire is Keir Starmer’s choice for Shadow Housing Minister and she has suggested that the idea of rent controls during the pandemic is “un-Labour”. In a zoom meeting with young Fabians, she explicitly argued that “The landlords, whether we like it or not, would have a legal case against either the government or their tenants or quite possibly both… So, you have to think about who are you going to target it on and how would you compensate landlords for that”.
Debbonaire seems to be in complete ignorance of the Labour Party’s own history on housing policy. She is effectively calling for the abolition of any controls over landlords and this represents a demonstrable shift to the right from the Jeremy Corbyn era, where Labour called for strict controls on landlords in the private and social sectors.
Glasgow rent strikes
In fact, the Labour Party – or at least parts of the party – have a fine history of struggles against exploitation of tenants by unscrupulous landlords.
A historical document published on the Global Nonviolent Action Database, describes the campaign by Glaswegian Women for rent controls in Scotland in 1915. John Wheatley, a member of the ILP who eventually became the Health Minister for the minority Labour Government in 1924, was one of the leaders who organised a rent strikes and helped support these women.
There was the instance of a landlord who tried to evict a woman whose husband was serving as a soldier in the Great War, because she had racked up a debt that amounted to a pound. John Wheatley, along with a dozen angry neighbours, blocked the apartment and successfully pushed back the bailiffs from trying to remove the woman from their home.
Organisational help from labour movement
The ‘Labour Party Housing Committee’ formed was in Glasgow during 1913 and in 1915, 25,000 working class families refused to pay their rent because of inequality and were able to do this because of the organisational help from the Labour movement. The audacity of Debbonaire to suggest that the Labour Party is inherently non-committed to striking against landlords is false. The early pioneers and the real founders of the labour movement on which Debbonaire has based her career were determined to block the activities of landlords trying to evict tenants.
There are many more examples. An article written by Phil Child from the University of Portsmouth entitled ‘Landlordism, Rent Regulation and the Labour Party in mid-twentieth century Britain, 1950–64’, examines the policies that were developed by The Labour Party to abolish private landlord sectors. It states “the vehemence with which the party attacked private landlords in the 1950s far exceeded anything that had gone before. The decade saw an assault on ‘landlordism’, closely connected to what the party perceived as the Conservative government’s failure in housing”.
Morally abusive to tenants
Labour MPs saw landlords as archaic, leaving the houses in the private sector to become irreparable and morally abusive towards its tenants. Nye Bevan backed a CLP motion in 1954 claiming ‘...private ownership of rental property…results in a progressive deterioration of an invaluable part of the social equipment’. With how much the Labour Party institution praise Nye Bevan for his creation of the welfare state and the NHS, you would think that they would keep his legacy intact when it came to his discussions on social housing and an abolishment towards private housing.
It is now becoming quite clear that the Labour Party has always been on the side of the renters and the abolition of private landlords. The history of criticising and attacking the lack of rent controls proves that it is not only “characteristically labour”, it actually shows that some of the foundations of the Labour Party were built into the struggle of the renter’s movement.
Fast-forward to 2019, Jeremy Corbyn released the Labour Manifesto which called for the introduction of open-ended tenancies, the abolition of Section 21 (no-fault evictions) and new rent controls, to limit rent increases to inflation as well as offering cities the powers to bring in further caps. It called for limits to the amount of damage that private landlords can do to tenants.
Polls showed support for Labour’s policy on rents
The Ipsos Mori poll, which was conducted on the 11th December before the general election, showed that 71% of people supported rent controls on private landlords. One fifth of the UK population rent their homes from a private landlord and the fact that there had been very little or no control over rent and private landlords is quite astonishing. This was completely over-shadowed by Brexit during the election and that led to Labour’s defeat as has been analysed consistently.
It is interesting to note that neither the public nor the historical transformations of the Labour Party would see controls on private tenancies as an particularly radical policy. Yet the right-wing press, Tories and members of the PLP would seem to see it as such. Fast-forwarding again to the coronavirus pandemic, Keir Starmer’s Labour have suggested that renters be given a deferment over a period of time, but that it would have to be paid back at the some point by tenants, effectively racking up huge debts. This is in sharp contrast to Corbyn’s view that payments should have been suspended out-right. This goes to show the what the shifts to the right at the top of the Labour Party mean. Their view of being “realistic” is what is best for the capitalist economy, not working class people.
Stripping back Labour’s radical history
The result of all this will be a resounding backlash. The membership is already in my opinion starting to feel that Starmer’s Labour is shifting to the right and that their policies resonate with the ‘austerity-lite’ days of Ed Miliband. This is all true, but what is even more worrying is the complete disregard of Labour’s even recent past by opposition frontbenchers such as Thangam Debbonaire. This is not ignorance nor complacency. This is a stripping back of radical history and an attempt to destroy the socialist values that once underpinned the Labour Party’s policies on social housing.
What we cannot let happen is a reshaping of history by the right-wing. We must keep discussing the historical values of the Labour Party and call MPs to account when they are warping the history of the movement. Most important of all, these kinds of austerity-lite policies will be presented at conference after the pandemic is over. It is important that members stay in the Labour Party to be present at conference and to put forward motions that combat these half-baked measures. Momentum have been critical of the policy and are becoming a prominent voice with the renters strike campaign group. We must be supportive of them and allow ourselves to criticises MPs such as Thangam Debbonaire, who has completely misrepresented the Labour Party and failed to deal with the demonstrable crisis that has effected the majority of renters in Britain during the Covid-19 pandemic.
May 18, 2020
