Is it too much to ask that Labour sides with tenants and workers, not the idle and exploitative landlord class?

The UK economy has been thrown into the worst crisis since 1709, following hot on the heels of the 2008 financial sector insolvency meltdown, and the decade of wanton economy-stagnating Tory austerity ruination that followed it.

Under these circumstances it's the responsibility of the opposition to come up with bold progressive solutions to aid the economic recovery and to protect the most vulnerable and exploited people in society for being lumbered with the costs.

But instead, Labour's new shadow housing minister Thangam Debbonaire has come up with a truly awful proposal.

Instead of demanding radical action to cancel rent arrears and clamp down on the exploitative private rental market, Labour have actually proposed a policy of forcing private renters to pay back their coronavirus rent arrears over two years.

If the coronavirus crisis lasts for six months, a two year repayment schedule would mean an additional 25% on top of private rents that are already inflated to absolutely ludicrous levels, during a period of mass unemployment to boot!

One of the very few potential benefits of an economic crisis for ordinary people is the prospect of deflation in housing costs, but Labour insist on siding with the landlords to ensure that they get their rent arrears by lumbering the full cost onto their tenants.

Let's not forget that people haven't just stopped going to work because they wanted to, they were forced to by the government. A government that then implemented an absolute bodge-job of workers' support measures full of holes and arbitrary cut-offs, purely because of their ideological opposition to implementing emergency Basic Income measures.

Thus millions of the most vulnerable workers have been left without income for a significant period, through no fault of their own, but instead of siding with them, Labour is insisting that they must pay the entire cost of their rent arrears themselves. And to top it off they're pretending that this policy of prioritising landlords' profits above ordinary people's living standards constitutes "help"!

Even if we ignore the plight of individuals who face being loaded down with housing debts that they simply can't afford to pay, there's quite clearly a macroeconomic cost to making the poor pay for the crisis in this way.

In order to find an extra 25% in rent over a two year period, huge numbers of people would have to pay off these debts by spending all of what would have been their disposable income (which is what people have left after essentials like rent, utility bills, childcare, and food).

This means no trips to bars, restaurants, theatres, pool halls, cinemas ... no days out, no saving towards setting up their own businesses, because the exploitative landlord class must have their extra monthly pint of blood to ensure that the coronavirus crisis costs them absolutely nothing.

The workers must pay so that the idle retain their privileges is an economic policy that will lead to reduced demand in the economy, a slower recovery, and fewer jobs.

In the depths of an economic downturn the last thing needed by people who run real businesses (those who do real economic activity rather than just rentier parasitism) is even fewer customers, because their potential customers are spending their entire disposable income servicing debts to the idle rentier class, rather than spending it on real economic activity.

Instead of facing the issue head on and saying that it's completely unfair to force people to repay debts that were accrued through no fault of their own, that it's awful for social welfare to enforce these debts, and extremely bad for the economy too - Labour has somehow decided to revert to the worst kind of 'centrist' slop, positioning themselves a couple of millimetres to the left of whatever horror show they expected the Tories would come up with.

Labour don't want to instantly evict tenants (hooray), but they want to financially cripple them for years, purely for the benefit of private landlords, and they're trying to dress this pathetically weak sauce up as some kind of wonderful favour they're doing too!

If the government says you mustn't work, the idea of loading the full cost of this enforced layoff onto low-income workers and private tenants is absolutely abhorrent.

If the government is going to force people not to work, it has a moral responsibility to ensure that they're not driven into debt, especially when the servicing of these debts will obviously have negative macroeconomic consequences for the post-crisis recovery.

This policy is so incredibly bad it transcends the usual left-right conflict between what's best for society and what's best for capitalism, because it elevates landlordism above both!

Screw what's fair, and screw what's best for the capitalist economy too, because our primary objective is ensuring the idle landlord class get their pint of blood!

What an extraordinary position for Labour to be taking.

And who is this policy meant to appeal to other than private landlords? Would it be enough to convince any private landlords switch allegiance from Tory to Labour? And how many dozens of natural Labour voters will it end up chasing away per "soft Tory" it attracts?

I don't want to blame Keir Starmer for this, but he can't have not foreseen how important the shadow housing brief was going to be, because the coronavirus crisis was well underway when he made these appointments, and yet he still handed it to Thangam Debbonaire anyway.

Just when we needed radical principled proposals from the opposition, we're back to the kind of flaccid, directionless, and shockingly unappealing weak sauce politics that marred the Miliband era, and handed the 2015 General Election to the Tory austerity wreckers.

If Labour can't even bring itself to stand up for ordinary workers who were ordered not to work by the government, because they're too busy prioritising the financial interests of the landlord class, then what the hell is the point of Labour at all?

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