Angela Rayner, the Housing Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister, has pledged to “turn the tide on the housing crisis” as England experiences the “most acute housing crisis in living history”.
So how does that measure up when she buys herself a holiday home – a £700,000 apartment in Hove? Rayner already owns a home in her Greater Manchester constituency and has the use of a lavish central London home that goes with her role as Deputy Prime Minister.
Buying second, third and multiple homes is taking away homes from families in desperate need. As Gandhi once said, “the world has enough for everyone’s needs, but not everyone’s greed”. So too the housing crisis has been exacerbated by those buying holiday homes and investment properties that are left dormant, while over 130,000 families in England alone live in temporary accommodation.
Like in the case of former housing minister Rushanara Ali, who resigned after details of her throwing out her tenants and raising the rent were exposed by The i Paper, Labour spokespeople have rushed to say “she followed all the rules”. But that only highlights how ineffective the rules are.
In the freebie scandal that rocked Labour in its early months of Government, there was little evidence of illegality or rule-breaking, but it posed a moral question: why do people on six-figure salaries think it acceptable to receive free gifts from millionaires – from holidays to concert tickets to clothes – and then wheel out defences like “there isn’t a budget for the prime minister’s clothes or the prime minister’s wife’s clothes”?
Rayner may well be paying the double council tax on her new seaside home that Brighton and Hove Council imposes on second home owners, but this episode shows that for those on six-figure salaries (like the Deputy Prime Minister) who can afford to buy a second home, it acts as no deterrent. As the rich and super-rich swallow up more and more property, so normal people just trying to get some housing security are priced out.
square BEN KENTISH The confected outrage over Angela Rayner's new property is nothing but snobbery
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If you’ve ever played the board game Monopoly, you know how this goes. Players are gradually priced out and forced into bankruptcy as one person gobbles up all the property and hikes rents. In England today, it feels like that for a lot of people. Monopoly was originally called The Landlord’s Game and was designed to show how an unregulated housing market resulted in a vacuum effect, sucking wealth into the hands of a few.
The Labour Party’s original Keir, its founder Keir Hardie, ran for Parliament with a pledge card promising: “No landlordism… healthy homes, fair rents”. Former Labour leader and four-time prime minister Harold Wilson asserted: “The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.” The party has used as its slogan, “For the many not the few”, under leaders as diverse as Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn (the phrase derives from the line from 19th century socialist Percy Shelley’s poem, The Masque of Anarchy).
Even now, the back of the Labour Party membership card envisions “a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few”.
So this is not a question of following the rules or abiding by the laws around second homes (though there is a strong case they should be toughened), but of what my Mum tried to drum into me: to “have consideration for others”. In our personal lives as in politics, we think better of people who show decency, act with fairness and behave with consideration, rather than proffer a textbook defence of “there’s no law against it” when confronted over the consequences of their actions.
Politics is, as Harold Wilson suggested, a question of morality. And at the heart of today’s Labour Party there is a vacuum. The leadership speak in a functional, cold, technocratic language which inspires no one, because it generates no vision of what our country could become. Confronted with an emboldened and increasing far-right political threat, this Government offers no moral counterpoint.
More problematically, a government that seeks to cut the benefits of pensioners and disabled people while its ministers buy second homes, throw out tenants and then raise the rent, get free holidays, suits and concert tickets from wealthy donors is not a “moral crusade”. It looks quite the opposite.
People have every right to expect better than the bare minimum from a housing minister (the since departed Rushanara Ali), and even more so from the Secretary of State and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner.
Like Ali, Rayner should be questioning her own judgement, if not her position. You cannot have credibility on tackling the housing crisis when you contribute to it.
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