The Joy of Six 1501

Samira Shackle meets victims of successive governments that have sought to reduce immigration while insisting universities recruit more overseas students: "Each year, about 400,000 international students are granted study visas to the UK. A significant proportion do so with the help of education agents: middlemen paid by universities to find foreign students. In 2023, UK universities spent a total of £500m on education agents – but there is very little oversight of how these agents operate."

"In places like Kootenai County, where white Christian Republicans hold a supermajority, local politics is mutating into something undeniably extreme. North Idaho offers a particularly stark example. A decade after Trump took over the GOP, the Coeur d’Alene region finds itself beset by a ­vexing mix of far-right activists and white nationalists who are trying to drive moderate voices out of political life." Michael Edison Hayden talks to the locals who are fighting back.

"Does the democratisation of information and access provided by social media help or hinder women in political careers? Is it an essential tool for visibility and mobilisation or another obstacle that disproportionately discourages women, especially those from marginalised backgrounds?" Georgia Richardson reports on a discussion of these questions.

Michael C. Munger recruits an unlikely pair of thinkers to question naïve optimism about government intervention in the economy: Adam Smith and Michel Foucault.

"The newly exposed floodplain was cracked and parched, the slate river chugging along in its rediscovered course. I’d hoped to see a fish or two; instead, the river practically vibrated with them. Salmon skittered from pool to pool, shark-like dorsal fins waving above the surface, dozens of Chinook chasing and nipping and circling each other in ancient dance." Ben Goldfarb celebrates the rebirth of an American river.

Ryan Lambie on the importance of Professor Quatermass: "ITV didn’t launch until September 1955. As a result, The Quatermass Experiment was viewed by just about every British person who owned a television; it was reckoned that some 3.4 million people tuned in to watch the first episode, and that the figure steadily climbed to a staggering five million by the sixth and final episode, which aired that August."

BOOK REVIEW Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis by Nick Bano

This review appears in the new Liberator. You can download the whole issue (it's issue 429) free of charge from the magazine's website.

Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis

Nick Bano

Verso, 2025, £10.99

The idea that British industry is held back from fuelling a golden age of economic growth only by excessive regulation used to be a staple of right-wing think tanks. In recent years, however, it has become increasingly popular in left-wing think tanks too, with the planning laws seen as the particular enemy.

One reason for this is that people who work for left-wing think tanks have more in common with people in right-wing think tanks than they do with the rest of the population. They live in the same city and went to the same schools, for instance.

And creating a new folk-devil, the Nimby, does save an awful lot of, well, thought. Once you have given people who disagree with you a label, then you need only invoke that label to invalidate their arguments (see also ‘woke’, ‘remoaner’, ‘terf’, ‘boomer’ and many others).

So you can condemn Nimbys and sound left-wing without asking whether planning laws are really the problem when approaching 90 per cent of all planning applications are approved; without asking whether the building industry would be able or willing to participate in a boom large enough to reduce house prices noticeably; and without asking why some children go to the sort of schools that produce people who work for think tanks and some don’t. 

Nick Bano, in this short and readable book, argues that our problem is not a shortage of supply but the scourge of landlordism. Fifty years ago, private landlords, from Rachman to Rigsby, were derided and the breed seemed to be on the way out. Now daytime television shows have would-be buy-to-let landlords as their heroes.

The problem, as Adam Smith and Karl Marx both argued, is that rented housing is a natural monopoly. The level of rent is set, not by competition between landlords, but by how much tenants can afford to pay for shelter. So, rather than look to more house building to solve our problems, Bano argues, we need more tenant activism and legal reforms.

At last year’s general election, the Liberal Democrats advocated an increase in house-building to 380,000 a year across the UK, but in calling for this figure to include 150,000 social homes, delivered through new garden cities and community-led development of cities and towns, we did show some concern about the form of tenure and the quality of what is delivered.

Oh, and Bano offers a neat label to use in retaliation. If someone calls you a Nimby, call them a Supply Guy in return.

Jonathan Calder