Almost a third of Tory MPs trying to weaken tenant protection bill are landlords, the Guardian complained almost a month ago. Landlord MPs leave Gove’s rental reform bill ‘close to collapse’, the Telegraph reported yesterday.
Good for them for killing Gove’s Bill, and I care not a whit that they are doing it because killing the Bill would be good for them. Adam Smith explained all that in The Theory of Moral Sentiments:
“The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor; and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency,….they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants; and thus, without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.”
Gove’s so-called reform would have been very bad for tenants. The Telegraph article explains a few of the many reasons why:
Critics argue that it is not only landlords who stand to lose out. The black mark on a tenant’s record following a court judgment would prevent many from finding somewhere else to live, according to another landlord Tory MP backing the amendments.
He said: “An inadvertent consequence of abolishing section 21 [no-fault evictions] is the risk of tenants who fall into arrears getting a court judgment against their name and ending up on the streets.
“Local authorities won’t help them and this will only add to the homelessness problem.
“The advantage to tenants of section 21 is that it’s no-fault, so even if they haven’t paid that won’t get written down.”
Jessica Parry, a partner at law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, said that as well as increasing the risk of homelessness, forcing evictions through the courts would end up costing tenants more.
She added: “Currently, landlords just write off arrears if they evict a tenant. Now landlords will claim arrears as they’re going to court anyway.
“[Going to court] will be slow. If a tenant stops paying it could take a year to get the property back. It’s a massive risk for landlords.
“From a tenant’s point of view, there are already supply and demand issues – not enough housing – and if you put landlords off it’s only going to make that worse.”
The thing that a lot of these anti-landlord types seem to miss is that once they succeed in turning property into a bad investment risk… Won’t be nobody investing in property anymore.
Which has the follow-on that what property there is for rent will become exceedingly expensive. And, rare. Ever-increasing spiral, there…
Ah, well. They won’t learn, because they’re essentially incapable of working out effect from cause. These are the same people who set themselves afire, and then wonder at how they wound up in the burn ward…
Rental means four walls here and now. Sweet dreams of home ownership are not a lot of use to young couples, by the time they have raised a deposit the children will have grown up.
The war on landlords has already made things pretty desperate.
Or, rental property will all descend into state control, and you will only get an apartment if you’re on the government’s “good” list.
Which is their goal. Some people will always be short of housing (until we build a ton more), and the woke would rather the selection be based, not on how much money you have, but on how many friends you have in government.
A society in which everyone wants to hang out with the cool guys, but the cool guys are all government, will be hell.
Perhaps rather the tenant class will descend into state control, and the rest will be up to their eyes in debt.
Round our way the investment is in rabbit-hutch towers.
The thing a lot of the “brights” miss about the “old ways” was that property ownership imposed a certain sobriety upon the homeowner… They had to be careful, hard-working, and responsible in order to buy a house and keep it. It wasn’t a magical dirt sort of thing, in that home ownership made them responsible citizens (which was the fallacy that led to the original 2008 crisis), but that only careful, responsible people could buy a house. As usual, they confused effect with cause…
Now, the problem is, you bring about a society where most people are not property owners, but are mere tenants? You’re breeding instability into the system. Look at the various “estates” and “housing projects” of the UK and the US: You don’t own it? You don’t care for it, and you become liberated from all constraint. Why not go blow your paycheck on drink and pharmaceuticals? Your rent is covered… You won’t lose the roof over your head, so why not party, party, party?
You have to look at this as though it were a mechanism: Property ownership is a behavioral regulator, and it will only work so long as it has some sort of reward to go with it. You take away the reward, corporatizing it via either government or “private equity”? LOL… Guess what? That whole sub-structure of the social mechanism just caves in. What do you propose to replace it with, and what else will cave into the sinkhole you’ve just created?
Ain’t none of these people as smart as they think they are. I would hesitate to make even one of these proposed changes they’ve so blithely inflicted on the body politic, because you just don’t know where the hell that string you’re pulling on goes. It may be a mere loose thread; on the other hand, it may be one of the very seams holding society together. It’s like an ecosystem; you think “Yeah, I’ll just introduce this new cool species I like from home…” and watch as invasive starlings destroy your agriculture. Or, you kill off one predator, and watch the entire ecosystem collapse because nothing is there to control that one really efficient herbivore, any more.
You really shouldn’t screw with any of this, unless you are truly desperate.
So it turns out there is a field that politicians actually have some relevant experience with, and guess what, a better decision is the result!
It’s the plan. No spending outside state-controlled CBDC’s. No housing outside of state rentals. No working without state-controlled licensure. No building without state-controlled permitting. Soon, no retirement outside of state-run retirement accounts.
Better make sure the state loves you.
I’m just thankful the state doesn’t run my access to groceries.
Oh, wait . . .
https://jacobin.com/2023/10/chicago-municipal-grocery-store-publicly-state-owned
You really have to marvel at the sheer hubris involved with all of this, though.
They couldn’t make this work when it was feudalism, they couldn’t make it work when it was socialism (multiple times…) and they’re still sublimely confident that they can do it this time around.
I’ve got only one piece of advice to anyone seeking to domesticate humans: Don’t try it. You’ll get away with it for a little while, but after a bit…? They’ll be doing their own thing again, and you’re probably going to be decorating a gibbet.
The key thing that differed between the Brits and the French was that there wasn’t an aristocracy trying to hang on to power in Britain the way there was in France. Oh, they wanted to, but… It didn’t work, and they mostly allowed the Next Big Thing to happen. The French aristos, though? They fought hard, and mostly succeeded. Right up until it blew up in their faces. How many of them wound up meeting Madame Guillotine, again…? Along with their priestly enablers?
The same thing will just happen all over again, with different names and differing details. You reach for control? You lose it.
I really think they need to do a quick gene sweep on these assholes like Klaus Schwab, find out what makes them different. Then, start culling those genes from the population. We’d all be a lot better off… Be better for them, too: No prolonged torture if the idiot with the rope doesn’t get it right when they get hung. Just a quick edit of the genes after conception…
The will to power exists in all populations. Keeping the people with it in check is just common sense… How much better off would Macedonia have been, had someone had the wit and wisdom to off Alexander before he got most of them killed trying to conquer the world? Macedon never quite recovered, as a nation.
Lesson to be learned, there…
As a friend over in Northern Ireland recently reminded me, if this Bill destroyed small independent landlords (who would get out of the market as they could not be sure of getting their properties back) the properties would either be bought up by the state, or by vast corporations (backed by Credit Money created from nothing and dished out to them). The idea that this Bill would “benefit renters” is absurd – it would, as regulations always do, concentrate economic power in the hands of the state and partner corporations (who could afford the legal costs that this Bill would impose).
The idea of ending fixed term tenancies, and taking away the right of ordinary landlords (human beings – not vast corporations based who-knows-where) to get their property back, is horribly unjust – it is “Spanish practices” (as such endless regulation used to be called) in spades.
Sadly even if Conservative MPs rightly black this madness – the next Labour government will bring it in, and independent property owners will be ended in the rented market – everything will be concentrated in the hands of the state and partner corporations.
It is NOT really about most people not being property owners – it is about Collectivist doctrine (ideas) in the “educated” elite.
That has always been true – statism is always imposed from above by an “educated” elite, ordinary people do not wake up one morning and decide they want XYZ “Social Reforms” (Collectivist evil) – that is not how things work.
If you try to stay in the market, you get taxed to the hilt, if you try and exit the market, you get taxed to the hilt. I keep looking at the figures wondering if I should pack it in and sell my shop&flat, but every time I do it’s clear I’d be bankrupt within five years due to the government taking so much off me.
….which is, of course, the entire target.
This is good, we’ll at least be able to get use of the hotels when the government moves the ‘migrants’ out of the hotels and into the new stock of Local authority housing.
At last, after three years, the British will be able to rent a hotel room in the own country again.
The big real estate corporations are having their own special problems at the moment, I’m not sure they are in a position to buy up anything, just now.
jgh – sell, for whatever you can get. Taxes will go up under Labour – and the property market will crash. What you do with the money you get is a hotly debated matter – old men like me think in terms of gold and silver, the young swear by Bitcoin, but there is agreement that the fiat currencies (such as the Pound) are going to enter their death agony soon.
APL – it would indeed be interesting if the “partner corporations” of “stakeholder capitalism” (the Corporate State) went down. A similar thing was seen in Fascist Italy in the 1930s – a lot of the partner corporations went bust, the assets becoming state owned (I suspect that was Mussolini’s plan from the start – he was always a person of the left, the business people who allied with him were always going to get crushed).
From watching reality shows following bailiffs you quickly learn that many landlords are not Duke of Westminster types but people who downsized and chose to rent out their old home as income to pay for their new (smaller, cheaper) house.
And as someone who rented out their house just to get through a negative equity patch, there’s not a lot of profit in it once all the expenses are paid for.
Seeing some blatent freeloader get chucked out and watch as they pile all their useless crap on the pavement which was effectively paid for by their long suffering and largely innocent landlord who has had to economise often over a year does make you think again about the real situation.
Paul: I’m in the insiduous position of being 55, so I’m too young for old plans, and too old for young plans. If I’d known what I know today when I was 25 (sigh…) I’d never have got into this malarky of planning for a sound financial base for my future, and would have just pissed everything up a wall as most of my contempories were doing.
I heard a Sky News report earlier quoting a charity that said section 21 evictions are up by about a third this year. I wonder what could possibly have caused that? Of course, it was presented as a reason to pass the bill, not a rational reaction to the possibility of the bill being passed…
jgh
You are younger than me – and you are in a better position (my COPD makes even doing a bit of gardening rather difficult)
You will survive Sir.
Indeed you will live to see this lunatic Credit Bubble nonsense collapse – and come out the other side into what Winston Churchill called “the broad sunlit uplands”.
You will Sir – so be of good heart.
As I type these words the people of Chicago are voting on a measure that would massively increase Property Tax on large scale property – if they vote YES then the commercial property market in Chicago is likely to collapse.
Chicago is already a declining place – this measure could kill it, and be the spark that starts the blaze that destroys the American Credit Bubble economy.
Chicago is full of teh stooopid.
The Army sent me to a suburb, once upon a time, to be a recruiter. Got to know the locals, and it was… Interesting.
I mentioned something about corruption to an acquaintance, who proceeded to lose their sh*t at me, wagging fingers and everything. First time I’d ever seen anyone do that, or foam at the mouth and project spittle. No, there was no corruption in his Chicagoland!!! None, whatsoever.
Same delusional asshole had made a point of telling me, a week or so earlier, how he got his cousin who worked for the township to pave his mile-long driveway with county materials and county equipment, for pennies on the dollar… Which his cousin then pocketed as a “bonus”. He was supposed to be paving country roads with that material…
Nope, no corruption in Chicago. All is squeaky-clean and above-board.
Yes Kirk – the corruption is institutional in Chicago, and in the basic mentality of many of the people. In Chicago – and Illinois generally (people who do not like the corruption leave – and many people are leaving).
To be fair – the old Mayor Daley (the first one – who became Mayor back in the 1950s) was corrupt but efficient (the roads got repaired and so on) – but since he went (since the 1970s), everything has fallen apart – gradually at first, now all at once.
But Chicago is still big – millions of people in the Cook County area. It is a big enough spark to light the fire to burn down the whole Credit Bubble economic (and political) system.
People often do not believe me when I say I have a lot of evil in me – but I do.
For example, I have a dark hope (born of anger and despair) that they do vote “Yes” – let the whole institutionally corrupt system collapse.
Guess where the Democrats are holding their Presidential Convention.
Chicago – the only American city mentioned in “The Red Flag”.
Most likely they will nominate Michelle Obama – in her home town.
Most voters in Chicago have voted NOT to commit suicide – they have voted NO to “Bring Chicago Home”.
But the decline of Chicago will continue.