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Dean Conway has written a supportive article for Central Bylines about the Green Party’s eye-catching new housing policy:
Green Party policy ‘Abolish Landlords’: solving the housing crisis
The Green Party’s ‘Abolish Landlords’ policy could end the housing crisis with a number of measures that will benefit tenants
“The Private Rental Sector has failed”, reads the Green Party’s statement to ‘Abolish Landlords’ motion, adopted as party policy at October’s Green Party Conference. Key elements of its plan to tackle the UK’s endemic housing crisis include:
Abolishing Right-to-Buy legislation and introducing Rent Controls.
Levying more taxes on landlords, including Land Value taxes and national insurance on rental income.
Ending Buy-to-Let mortgages.
Subsidising councils to buy back properties that have not been insulated to EPC rating C or have been vacant for more than six months.
Speaking to Alex Mace by email, Worcester City’s Green Party councillor and co-sponsor of the motion, he told me that ‘Abolish Landlords’ “takes actual concrete steps to solve the housing crisis that are largely how our original stock of council homes were built through the 50s, 60s and 70s”, including establishing “a state-owned housing manufacturer … to deliver housing at scale”. While the motion does not actually outlaw landlordism, it “seeks to make it significantly less attractive to be a private landlord”.
I’m getting a “defund the police” vibe. Tell the base that the slogan means exactly what it says, while telling the rubes that it doesn’t, with scope to row back on either position when convenient.
By the way, here is the Greens’ policy on migration, as stated on their website:
The Green Party in government will:
Implement a fair and humane system of managed immigration
Treat all migrants as if they are citizens
Give all residents the right to vote
Help families to be together
Dismantle the Home Office
Abolish the No Recourse to Public Funds condition
Abolish the ten year route to settlement
Stop the profiteering from application fees
Stop putting people in prison because of their immigration status
Accept our responsibility for the climate emergency and support the people forced to move
That policy would increase the need for rented housing rather a lot.
Taylor Lorenz is the one who doxxed Libs of TikTok, who came this close to lionising the murderer Luigi Mangione, and who for some reason habitually lies about her age, but she makes some excellent points in this article: “The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all”.
Excerpt:
While social media bans may seem like a prudent measure to protect children, they are not only ineffective, they endanger both children and adults. There is little evidence that social media is driving any type of widespread mental health crisis in children. Studies have repeatedly shown the opposite. Removing anonymity from the web, which will inevitably happen when tech companies are required to identify and ban children, allows for easier government tracking and censorship of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, who rely on online anonymity.
And while some claim the laws would curb big tech’s power, only the largest tech companies have the resources to shoulder the extensive costs of age verification systems. Non-profit and indie platforms could be forced to close, consolidating big tech’s power further. Mass surveillance systems, once constructed, could also be easily leveraged by governments and bad actors.
If we want to fix the problems with social media, the place to start is through comprehensive data-privacy reform and consumer protections. Governments could also take action to break up big tech companies and prosecute them for anti-competitive behaviour. Lawmakers, who claim to care about children, could pass broader social and economic policies that we know would meaningfully improve children’s lives. Social media is a lifeline, especially for marginalised youth such as LGBTQ+ teens. Any policies that limit online access should centre on the most vulnerable children and adults.
To enact the social media bans being proposed around the world requires some system of age verification, which inherently means expanding surveillance technology. Because algorithmic systems cannot accurately estimate age, verifying a user’s age also requires collecting highly sensitive data or government documents to support the biometric data harvested. The laws being considered don’t all stipulate which system will be used, but there are significant privacy and safety concerns with all of them.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton
@realLandsEnd
Sanism names a deep, pervasive belief that ppl who appear out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis are not trustworthy, less human & fundamentally disruptive to social life. It’s a hierarchy of credibility and belonging, where visible distress = danger/contamination
1:59 AM · Feb 23, 2026
https://x.com/realLandsEnd/status/2025752283435196882
This tweet by Beatrice Alder-Bolton, co-author of Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, has been garnering interest, as it was intended to do. As the title says, while I never doubt the humanity of people who appear “out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis”, I do think that while they remain in this state in public places they are disruptive to social life. I also think that while in this state they are untrustworthy.
Beatrice Alder-Bolton would like us to believe that she trusts them. If she had said that she sympathised with people visibly in psychiatric crisis, I would have believed her. I also sympathise. If she had said that she tries to engage with such people in order to help them, I might have believed her. I have met a few kind souls who habitually respond in this way. I admire them (the kind souls) from a safe distance. But when Beatrice Alder-Bolton implies that she thinks the man having a psychiatric crisis in front of her on public transport is trustworthy, I do not believe her. Her body goes onto high alert just like anyone else’s. And speaking for myself, you bet I don’t trust the crazy guy. You bet I think he might be dangerous. And if he has just emptied his bowels or his bladder in the carriage I do indeed fear contamination.
But in order to be worthy of trust myself, I cannot simply dismiss Beatrice Alder-Bolton as a high-functioning mad left-winger of the sort that even other left-wingers are beginning to realise are poisonous to their cause (“I am begging leftists and liberals to not do this again. It is normal and smart to be nervous and on high alert when someone behaves in a profoundly anti-social way (peeing on the subway) and/or a threatening way (screaming on the subway). The more cities tolerate this, the fewer people ride public transport, the worse that transport gets, and eventually it gets to a breaking point and people wind up voting for right-wing politicians who come in and crack skulls and way over-police.” – Jill Filipovic), I have to acknowledge that when Alder-Bolton’s way of thinking is described as “left libertarian”, the “libertarian” part is perfectly real.
I wrote about the influence that the libertarian writings of Thomas Szasz had and continue to have on me in a post called “Ideology and Insanity on the New York Subway”. Just as certain chemicals are harmless in themselves but dangerous in combination with others, the way that Szasz’s* libertarian ideals combined with the dominant suicidally empathetic ideals of our time has produced results like the random murder of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown.
There are ways to respect the equal humanity of those who cannot function in society while, well, continuing to have a society. Private property is one, and if that is too much for modern sensibilities, the rediscovery of the right to exclude mad people from public property. To use Ms Alder-Bolton’s word, sanism. The rediscovery of proud, unapologetic sanism.
*You say it “sasses”. In Hungarian the digraph “sz” has the same function as the English letter “s” and the letter “s” on its own is pronounced the same way as the English digraph “sh”. Confusingly, Polish is the other way round.
Our judges will bend over backwards to find ways to allow people who ought to be deported to remain, and will connive with charities performing strategic litigation in order to allow this to happen. And their genuflections have become so convoluted that it is almost pointless to try to subject them to careful doctrinal analysis. We simply need to cut to the chase: the problem is not a legal, but a political or even sociological one. It is an issue concerning the makeup of the judiciary itself.
– David McGrogan
Read the whole thing.
Under the Bank Secrecy Act, one of the most common reasons for filing a suspicious activity report (often abbreviated as SAR) is because someone deposited or withdrew nearly $10,000 in cash. That’s all it takes for you to get labeled as “suspicious” in an official report to the government.
These reports rarely catch actual criminals. Yet, each report is like a red mark on your banking record, nonetheless. And getting too many of these reports filed on you can quickly spell trouble. If you rack up multiple reports (often as few as three), banks will close the account. The bank might know you are likely innocent, but the risk of regulators punishing them for inaction is too high. Fines for failing to report real criminal activity can reach into the millions.
It’s much safer for the bank to close the account than risk fines later, especially if it is a smaller account.
– Nicholas Anthony
Soon Brits will need Starlink + VPN to read the news. Like Iran
– Douglas Carswell
Officials with the lowest approval ratings in the world (Macron, Starmer, Merz, Sanchez) are the loudest champions of social media bans for teens and ‘misinformation’ crackdowns.
– Pavel Durov
“The First Amendment doesn’t stop at the water’s edge just because a foreign bureaucrat sends a threatening letter. If you’re in Wyoming, you speak freely. Period.”
– Daniel Singh
Although the pandemic response is much too late to fix the medieval plagues used to justify it, it remains of great relevance to Pharma investors who see unbeatable advantage in converting taxation dollars into rising share valuations. Governments supporting the CEPI 100-day vaccine initiative are giving public money to support the research and maintain manufacturing readiness of private companies who will then sell their products back to the very same taxpayers, ideally mandated by those governments. This will occur in response to disease surveillance that the same hapless taxpayers are funding. A whole army of global health bureaucrats is positioning to run this – these officials only need a theoretical risk to recommend lockdowns. The 100-day mRNA vaccines will return freedom. The business case here is simply irresistible.
– Dr. David Bell
The highest* criminal court in England & Wales, the Court of Appeal, has come up with a judgment holding that what is called ‘jury nullification’ isn’t permitted, it’s called ‘jury equity’ by some here. The duty of the jury is to return a verdict on the evidence, jurors (who are compelled to serve and take an oath to deliver a true verdict according to the evidence) must follow the law and the judge’s directions. The proceedings arose from some environmental criminals who vandalised a bank and sought to defend their actions on the basis of something like that the bank’s shareholders would have consented to the damage if they’d known it would protect the environment. This is technically a defence in English law, but on the facts, none of the accused mentioned this in interview, all raised it in court and it may well have been found to have been a contrived defence, we don’t know why, because juries do not give reasons or discuss the case afterwards.
The case considered the landmark decision of Bushell’s Case from 1670, the juror who refused to convict Quakers William Penn and William Mead and his writ of habeas corpus was granted, after the trial judge fined and imprisoned him for not returning a guilty verdict.
Since Mr Bushell wrongly did porridge for saving Quakers, the law has moved on and in England, it is forbidden to mention jury nullification in court.
The Court of Appeal’s judgment held that whilst jurors have to give verdicts according to the law and the evidence, there is no mechanism to punish them if they do not do so (provided they actually follow the rules and are either split with no verdict, or acquit). The Court said this:
Bushell’s Case may be best understood as recognising an immunity from punishment in respect of their decision as to what verdict to return, rather than a right to return verdicts in defiance of the evidence.
A distinction that might be lost on some, but it means that the concept of nullification cannot be raised in court as part of a defence.
And would it be wrong to think that in the States, ‘jury nullification’ is seen as a pro-liberty stance as a check on an overly powerful State, whereas ‘jury equity’ in the UK is seen as a way to undermine property rights and allow socialist violence to go unchecked?
* The Supreme Court is based in England, but it sits as a ‘UK’ court. It could yet hear an appeal from this case if an appeal were brought.
Britain is also eerily emulating a pattern of democratic backsliding; from India to Mexico, authoritarian governments “test-drive” what they can get away with at local level first. By conveniently delaying elections at a time when council tax is set to rise, Labour risks setting a wicked precedent for “taxation without representation”.
– Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph (£).
Keir Starmer is mulling a ban on X, formerly Twitter. This would be a shocking, draconian move, bringing the UK into line with states as authoritarian as Russia, China and North Korea. Yet the only real surprise here is that he hasn’t tried it sooner. As I argue today on spiked, the PM’s claim that this is about protecting children from X-generated AI deepfakes is incredibly weak sauce. Every man and his AI companion knows that X and its owner, Elon Musk, have been a constant thorn in the side of this loathsome Labour government. Starmer holds X responsible for reviving interest in the grooming gangs and even stoking the Southport riots. We should take his threat to ban it incredibly seriously.
– Fraser Myers
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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