Thangam Debbonaire's bizarre fallacy-laden and deeply disingenuous 'Landlords above Workers' diatribe

One of the huge problems in modern political discourse is political inertia.

Even though it's obvious that a mistake has been made, people, and especially politicians, are incredibly reluctant to admit their errors. So they just keep on doubling down on shocking errors of judgement and catastrophically ill-considered policies, rather than taking the ego hit and just admitting that they were wrong.

Labour's new shadow housing minister Thangam Debbonaire has provided an absolute masterclass in this kind of political inertia with an absolutely laughable, disingenuous, fallacy-laden, post-hoc, bad faith, straw man jumble of gibberish to defend her widely derided policy proposal of 'Landlords above Workers'.

In this article I'm going to offer a point by point examination of the muddled thinking and fallacious reasoning underpinning her attempted justification.

Here's the original article detailing Debbonaire's lamentable speech if you want to read it in its entirety first: ‘Cancel the rent’ policy would be “un-Labour”, says Debbonaire

Assuming the coronavirus shutdown lasts for six months, a two year rent arrears repayment schedule would require a 25% increase in payments on top of already extortionate rents, for the entire two year period.

What kind of Labour Party proposes people pay up to 125% rent for two years during the worst economic downturn in centuries?

Just when the economy needs extra economic demand the most, to boost production and keep people in work, Debbonaire wants to introduce a policy to erode away the disposable income of millions of private tenants, and stymie economic demand in the process, purely in order to ensure landlords are practically the only economic demographic in post-Covid Britain not to lose a penny from this crisis!
When she announced it people rightly called this 'Landlords above Workers' policy out as the absolute drivel it is, but she's now doubling down and using some ridiculously duplicitous and fallacious reasoning to defend it.

The other four points on the plan range from good, to OK. Eviction bans are good. Universal Credit is an unsalvageable mess, but an increase in payments in the absence of a complete replacement is a fair enough proposal. Increasing Local Housing Allowance makes sense, but it's hard to account for where the money comes from if the devastating Tory austerity cuts to local government funding aren't reversed.

The big problem people are having is with her 'Landlords over Workers' policy proposal to extract workers' disposable incomes for years after the crisis is over, purely to ensure that landlords are completely insulated from any of the economic consequences.

It's the criticisms of this particular policy that her speech is supposedly aimed at addressing.

To describe this proposal as just "controversial" is somewhat of an understatement.

Within weeks of her appointment she's created such a mess that she's united two of the three main Labour factions (socialist left, and soft left) against her, and landed an open letter with 4,000+ signatures on her new leader's desk!

Fantastic work eh?

At the time of her appointment I asked whether she was up to the task of handling what would obviously be one of the most important briefs in the post-crisis economy, but I had no inkling she'd be spectacularly proving my concerns justified within a matter of mere weeks.

In the early days of its history the Labour Party led the 1915 rent strike. Their major electoral breakthrough came in 1922 on the back of years of campaigning on housing policy. Over the following decades the Labour Party has imposed rent restrictions, championed tenants' rights, cleared slums, and built millions of affordable social housing units.

The idea that it's "surprisingly un-Labour" to defend tenants from impoverishment and exploitation is an extraordinarily ahistorical claim.

It's somewhat of a straw-man position to claim that everyone opposing her 'Landlords over Workers' policy is demanding an across-the-board cancellation of all rents for everyone, and with no compensation whatever for landlords.

Some of her many critics may adopt this more radical position, the majority certainly wouldn't, and the actual "Cancel the Rent" letter proposes no such thing, so it's an incredibly cheap shot to attack the much more radical stance because she thinks it's the easiest to deride, rather than the actual contents of the letter that she's apparently railing against.

But even if we ignore the bad faith, is the fact that some people might get what they don't really need a reasonable argument in favour of literally millions of people suffering a severe economic punishment that they absolutely don't deserve?

Why is a few wealthier people potentially getting what they don't need such a shocking concern that it justifies dumping millions into rent arrears, destitution, and the penury of onerous repayments necessitated by crisis they absolutely didn't cause?

Ah yes! What could be more representative of the kinds of desperate situation ordinary people are facing than ... erm ... an MP on a six figure salary renting a flat in London that's entirely paid for at the public expense anyway?

I'm sure this personal anecdote will really chime with the millions of people thrown into economic turmoil by this crisis, who have been left desperately trying to figure out how to pay the rent, the rip-off utility bills, the food, and all the other expenses.

They turn to Labour for a sign of hope and a promise of support, and the Labour Party housing minister is blethering on about a purely hypothetical scenario involving her grace and favour flat in London in order to elicit sympathy for her landlord!

Then there's that bad faith deceptiveness again. The "Cancel the Rent" letter actually asks that rents and utility bills are cancelled 'at the tenant's request' if they're suffering a coronavirus 'drop in income'.

In order for her rent to be cancelled under such a scheme, she'd have to fraudulently make a claim, knowing that her income hasn't actually dropped, and that the cost of her rent is immaterial to her anyway, paid as it is from public funds!

Alack! Alas! why will nobody think of the sanctity of contracts? is the kind of drivel you'd expect from the opaquely funded hard-right think tank wonks who are on perpetual rotation on the BBC politics circuit, not a Labour Party shadow minister!

The idea that the sanctity of contracts over-rules the public good isn't just 'un-Labour', it's positively Tory.

Just think about the assertion that "even if it's a rubbish contract, with a rubbish landlord who is charging far too much, it's still legally binding" and consider how awful that must sound to potential Labour voters.

And the bit about "no such thing as cancelling contracts" is just legally illiterate gibberish (which is sure to impress her new boss Keir Starmer QC!).

From the Tory government's retroactive redrawing of student loan conditions, through their cancelled contracts for Chris Grayling's imaginary ferries, to their emergency renationalisation of the railways just a few weeks ago, there are countless precedents for governments amending or tearing up contracts.

Once again, a "general waiver" is simply not what the "Cancel the Rent" letter is actually calling for.

"You have to think about who you are going to target" - if only the authors of the "Cancel the Rent" letter had thought of that eh?

And as for compensation, there are several potential solutions. The most obvious is to just give landlords a mortgage holiday for the duration of the rent cancellation.

For landlords who own properties outright, they should surely be declaring their rental income to the tax man anyway, so it would be fairly simple to create some kind of compensation scheme similar to the measures for self-employed people, so that losses up to a certain limit are covered.

It's quite frankly bizarre that she's so sympathetic to the idea of landlords suing their impoverished tenants, and suing the government, in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, rather than incandescent with rage at the very idea of it.

Once again, it's shockingly disingenuous to claim that the "Cancel the Rent" letter is talking about an across the board rent cancellation, however it is fascinating to learn that wealth extraction out of the legitimately productive economy via landlordism has soared to the incredible sum of £7.2 billion per month!

Here it is in black and white. Don't expect anything even remotely radical from a Labour government to deal with the UK's ridiculously dire housing crisis.

Their housing minister is profoundly reluctant to help struggling tenants even in the midst of an unprecedented economic meltdown, and she's busy salting the policy garden and deliberately lowering expectations of what any future Labour government would offer in terms of housing policy.

Well yes, in an ideal world we'd like to ensure everyone has enough money upfront to pay the rent, but we're not in an ideal world, the government is not ensuring this, and the proposal people are criticising Debbonaire for involves extracting tenants' disposable income, over the course of years, to cover their coronavirus rent arrears.

It's beyond obvious that these arrears simply wouldn't accrue at all in this ideal-world scenario she's just conjured out of nowhere, so the policy she's attempting to defend with this ludicrously disingenuous diatribe wouldn't even be necessary!

Once again, more disingenuous drivel. The proposal she's railing against isn't an across the board rent cancellation, and nobody has suggested leaving social housing landlords high and dry with no compensation.

But even if they had suggested this, the houses don't simply disappear if the housing association goes bust. Take the homes back into public ownership, turn them back into the Council Houses most of them were built as in the beginning, and pop, her imaginary problem is solved!

"It's the private rented sector where we've got a problem" - the first accurate thing she's said in this entire diatribe isn't it? 

God-damn it! We're back to this again!

If the proposals to "deal with it upfront" are competently administered, then there is simply no need for the two year arrears extraction programme at all - You know, the issue that huge numbers of people got upset at her about in the first place! The bloody reason she's giving this speech at all!

Well "evil" is a bit strong, but there's basically no way you can argue that landlordism isn't "exploitative" unless you position yourself significantly to the right of figures like Winston Churchill and Adam Smith, who both railed against the exploitative practice of landlordism.

And if you're so far to the political right that Churchill and Smith are reduced to mere distant specks over your left shoulder, what the absolute hell are you doing as a Labour Party housing minister?

OK, for the sake of argument let's say there's absolutely no scheme to compensate landlords, and the most recklessly over-extended ones (who didn't even keep a few months worth of rent in reserve in case of emergencies) end up deservedly going bust.

The house doesn't just disappear does it? It ends up with the reckless bank that recklessly lent the money to the reckless buy-to-let speculator in the first place.

The government could just step in, compensate the reckless bank for a proportion of their losses, and transfer the property to the local council or a local housing association (which, by the way, should be the policy whenever a private landlord goes bust, shouldn't it?).

She's catastrophising about "even greedier landlords" rather than proposing a humane solution to the traumatic busted landlord situation that significant numbers of people face each year, through no fault of their own (coronavirus crisis or no coronavirus crisis).

This "it could be worse" rather than "here's a proposal to make it better" stance just goes to illustrate how dreadfully unfit this woman is for her position.

This is just a very crude reworking of the "just think of poor old Granny" Tory argument against Mansion Tax isn't it?

Forget about the primary problem of millions of exploitative buy-to-let landlords greedily hoarding all the affordable housing in their local areas so that they can then get the poor saps they just priced out of the housing market to pay off their speculative property loans for them, let's humanise landlordism by invoking the much rarer and less problematic scenario of poor Terry and Jean who rent out frail old Marjorie's house to supplement their meagre salaries.

Instead of dishonestly pretending that "Cancel the Rent" is a proposal to just expropriate this house on behalf of the tenants, with no compensation, why not go the whole hog and pretend the nasty lefties want to shove poor old Terry and Jean and Marjorie into a pit and burn them alive?

Wouldn't that be even easier to argue against?

The oddness of this Tory-style 'pity the poor old landlords who are just scraping by' tactic makes it seem as if her speech was just written for her by some die-hard Tory from the Landlords Association. I wonder who did actually write it, and where they got this weird Tory-style persuasion tactic from.

Once again (and thankfully for the last time) the proposal in the letter she has been railing against is not a "general waiver", and it's staggeringly disingenuous of her to have pretended that it was for her entire speech.

The ideal-world scenario she invokes is lovely, but it simply doesn't explain the need for a punishing two year arrears extraction programme (which is what this speech was supposedly intended to defend).

And even though a "general waiver" clearly isn't the policy proposal in the letter she was railing against, it's still alarming for her to keep screeching "regressive" at the concept just because some wealthier people might benefit from the hypothetical scenario she's invented.

The reason it's alarming is that anyone who thinks like this would surely be howling "regressive" at the creation of a "free at the point of need" NHS if it were proposed today, on the absolutely appalling basis that richer people should never be allowed to benefit from public policy.

There's absolutely no way Labour adopts anything like the policies this country needs if Debbonaire's shockingly disingenuous, anti-universalism, sanctity of contracts, screw the economy, save the landlords diatribe is representative of the rest of the shadow cabinet.

Conclusion

It's not like workers chose not to work, they were compelled not to work by the government, so it's about as blatantly 'un-Labour' as you can get for Debbonaire to propose a policy of forcing people into penury in order to ensure that landlords are amongst the only economic demographics who end up not suffering any Covid-19 losses at all.

Yet she derides her critics with ludicrously fallacious and downright disingenuous arguments, and then accuses them of being the ones who don't understand Labour values!

It's enough to make you wonder what on earth is this woman doing in the Labour Party, let alone on their front bench.

Her rant is one of the most profoundly disingenuous diatribes I've ever waded through, and it's deeply concerning that it's not one of the usual suspects like a Tory liar, or a Brextremist, or an far-right hatemonger, or one of those viral lie copy n' paste social media propaganda campaigns ... it's a speech by a Labour Party shadow minister!

She was either too lazy to even read the "Cancel the Rent" letter from 4,000+ of her Labour Party colleagues and just formed this entire attempted rebuttal based on the title alone, or she did read it and decided to create a ridiculous straw-man interpretation because she figured it would be easier to attack that (incredibly ineptly as it turned out) than addressing what people actually said.

Either explanation is utterly contemptuous towards her fellow party members, and towards anyone who believes in basic competence or good faith political discourse.

She's clearly rendered herself unfit for the important responsibilities she's been tasked with, but it would simply be too embarrassingly soon for Starmer to sack her (rather understandable political inertia on his part), so we're stuck with her for the foreseeable future.

If Starmer was going to be decisive and nip this absolute nonsense in the bud, I'd suggest replacing her with Richard Burgon, but showing her the door within weeks of her appointment is obviously going to be far too much of an embarrassment for the party, so it definitely won't happen any time soon.

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