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

Irene Handl and David Warner at Karl Marx's grave

From the film Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966).

Neal Ascherson and fables of the reconstruction of Germany

This blog's hero Neal Ascherson writes on the former East Germany in the current London Review of Books:

Travelling around Mecklenburg in 1991, in what had been the GDR six months before, was a disorienting experience. Again and again, I was reminded of Reconstruction in America, the traumatic aftermath of the Civil War. Here again was a sullen, defeated society. 

There had been no gunfire, but West Germany felt as victorious as the American North must have done in 1865. Here once more came the carpetbaggers, smart operators from Frankfurt or Düsseldorf pouring into East Germany to loot its collapsing industrial and service economy. While silent locals stood with their bicycles in the rain, gleaming black BMWs swept past carrying Treuhand officials on their way to privatise or close more state factories. 

As in the old South, a whole ideology justifying the power structure had been switched off, and its guardians – in this case, the SED, the National People’s Army and the immense web of the Stasi and its informers – found themselves out on the street.

Since then the gap between living standards in the former East and West, though still 26 per cent in 2020, has narrowed. And yet, just as sophisticated Manhattanites despair at the South’s refusal to forget a past that would be better forgotten, West German ‘Wessis’ are unnerved to find how many ‘Ossis’ insist on remembering a disconcertingly ‘other’ life in that phantom Germany.

Ascherson writes beautifully and is endlessly interesting. Another point he brings up is that the East German Communists saw themselves as the true heirs and interpreters of Karl Marx's thought, and thus morally and intellectually superior to the ruling party in the Soviet Union.

In which Karl Marx takes my side against Jeremy Corbyn

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During the 2017 general election campaign I blogged about Jeremy Corbyn's cordial relations with the Provisional IRA.

Though they had not been the trump card that the Conservatives expected - it was all too long ago for most voters attracted by him - I still found them hard to forgive.

I quoted an earlier post where I wrote of the Provisionals' bombing campaign:

I was working in London at the time shoppers and workers were being killed by it. 

The very least I expect from the party of the workers is that it condemns those who murder them. 

Rather to my surprise, I have discovered that Karl Marx agrees with me.

Last night I came across the Clerkenwell Outrage of 1867 - an explosion caused by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (or Fenians) in an attempt to spring one of their leaders from Clerkenwell Prison.

It failed in its objective, but caused the deaths of 12 people, and injured 120, in the neighbouring houses.

One of the men behind it, Michael Barrett, became the last man to be publicly hanged in England, despite his defence that he had been in Glasgow at the time of the explosion.

Well, we English weren't very good at convicting the right people for Provisional IRA outrages in the 1970s, so who knows?

But what interested me was the reaction of Karl Marx. He is widely quoted across the interent, though I can't find where he wrote is, as arguing:

The London masses, who have shown great sympathy towards Ireland, will be made wild and driven into the arms of a reactionary government. One cannot expect the London proletarians to allow themselves to be blown up in honour of Fenian emissaries.

Quite.

Six of the Best 697

Fintan O'Toole dissects the fantasy that is Brexit: "Theresa May is a classic phony Brexiter. She didn’t support it in last year’s referendum and there is no reason to think that, in private, she has ever changed her mind. But she saw that the path to power led toward the cliff edge, from which Britain will take its leap into an unknown future entirely outside the European Union. Her strategy was one of appeasement—of the nationalist zealots in her own party, of the voters who had backed the hard-right UK Independence Party (UKIP), and of the hysterically jingoistic Tory press, especially The Daily Mail."

The Liberal Democrats finished far behind Kate Hoey and Labour in Vauxhall. Our candidate George Turner offers his reflections on the campaign there.

"Since the Great Recession, Polanyi has become something else: a totem for social democracy, much like Marx for communism or Hayek for neoliberalism." Daniel Luban on the elusive Karl Polanyi.

"The Berlin Wall had stood for decades as the most tangible symbol of the intransigence of Cold War politics. Then, quite suddenly it was gone, but not through any of the battle scenarios the generals had war-gamed. On the day, it happened because some border guards refused to use lethal force." Rod Duncan on political change and fantastical fiction.

Tabish Khan has been to see Grayson Petty's new exhibition.

"On this morning of great doubt and uncertainty, I think we should consider things of far greater interest like the lookers' huts on Romney Marsh in Kent," says Peter Ashley,

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Alwyn Turner paints a portrait of Tom Watson - "an overfed Che Guevara".

"I started out drawing clear lines linking schoolmates to flatmates, Bullingdon buddies and policy wonks, but pretty soon exactly the same people started popping up in new guises — as fellow MPs, cabinet colleagues, party donors — and the lines started to veer into ever more deranged spirals as everyone turned out to be linked, several times over, to everyone else." Emily Hill on the rise and full of the Cameron chumocracy.

Ferdinand Mount reviews a new biography of Karl Marx: "By the end of his life, his was a name to strike terror into bourgeois hearts across Europe, which gave him no little satisfaction. Yet at his funeral in Highgate Cemetery there were only eleven mourners."

In 2013 the poet Geoffrey Hill, who died earlier this year, was interviewed by Sameer Rahim.

"As soon as I saw those huge rust-coloured bridges stretching across the Tyne I knew this was Jack’s manor. Tough, ruthless and uncompromising." Mike Hodges talks to Adam Scovell about Get Carter.

John Fleming tells the sad story of the fallen Blue Peter presenter Christopher Trace.

Paddy Ashdown says it's 1992 but it feels more like 1983 or 1975

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Paddy Ashdown tells Total Politics:

"There is a really big issue that needs to be addressed by the left, which is how do we now put together a sensible force of those who are the modern progressives? 

"The left is a sort of smoking battlefield. I think we are facing the short term prospect of a government unconstrained by an effective opposition which is very bad for the country - and bad for the Tories too. And we’re facing in the long term the question I faced in 1992, which was are we looking at the Tories forever?"

A smoking battlefield it is, but it seems to me that the situation we face is more like 1983 than 1992.

By 1992 Labour had lost four consecutive general elections and had finally grasped that they were going to have to change if they were to win again.

That is not where Labour is today. We are now in a strange alternative 1983 where they have just elected Michael Foot rather than just got rid of him.

Paddy also suggests that the European referendum may be key in bringing about some sort of realignment of anti-Conservative forces:

"I think this begins with a conversation about ideas. My guess is that if you’ve got sensible modern progressives in all the political parties in the room, and you started a day’s conference, debate, conversation, you would end up with five key points that you can very easily agree with. 

"So I think that’s the way it begins. I think it begins on an informal basis. I think it begins around ideas, not structures. I think it begins with conversations. I think it can then develop, probably through the medium of the referendum, and it’s after the referendum that you begin to address the issue of how do we give this political force."

He is right to call for conversations across party lines and it may be that the European referendum will encourage them. But that takes us right back to 1975.

Karl Marx adds: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

Nottingham Liberal Democrats' Winter Mini-Conference

I spent this afternoon at Nottingham Liberal Democrats' Winter Mini-Conference.

It was an excellent event and could well provide a model for other local parties. Liberal Democrats can be so concerned with campaigning that they seldom make the time to discuss policy or the party's wider philosophy. Meanwhile, our national party conferences can be prohibitively expensive, are increasingly managed and require you to give your passport number, inside leg measurement and a DNA sample.

So there is certainly a role for more local events that enable party members to learn about and debate policy questions

There were three speakers: William Davidson from ALTER (the Lib Dem group Action for Land Taxation and Economic Reform); Dr Corinne Camilleri-Ferrante, a consultant in public health medicine, and Bill Newton Dunn MEP.

William  Davidson gave a good summary of the case for taxing land values. This is an idea that has been around in the party since the 19th century - indeed, suggested that Henry George's classic work on the subject from 1879, Progress and Poverty, outsold Karl Marx's Das Kapital in the English-speaking world.

The basic idea behind land value taxation is that the state should tax the profits that private landowners make because of public investment - say a new railway station increasing the price of nearby houses - should be taxed so that the public gets the advantage instead. At the same time, the state would have less need to tax income, profit or economic activity in general.

Land value taxation was implemented to an extent by Liberal governments early in the 20th century, but abandoned in the 1920s. There has been a recent revival of interest in the idea and it is now Liberal Democrat policy to use a form of the tax as a replacement for business rates.

My concern, which I tried to frame in a question, is that the idea of land value taxation was developed in a era when the great villains, in Liberal eyes, were landlords who refused to allow the fullest economic development of their estates. Nowadays, Lib Dem campaigning is often predicated on the idea that it would be a good thing if land were not developed to its fullest extent, and I wonder how this fits with taxing land values. Anyway, there is plenty more about the idea on the ALTER website.

Corinne Camilleri-Ferrante made an impassioned case against Andrew Lansley's Health and Social Care Bill. You can read her view for yourself in a Guardian article published last week.

I was convinced that we should campaign to retain the duty of the Secretary of State for Health to provide services. This is particularly necessary if you are a good Liberal who wants to see more diversity and local management in the system, as there then needs to be someone at the centre who will act to fill any gaps that emerge. David Cameron's recent intervention on the quality of nursing care is a good example of what can sometimes be necessary.

Beyond that, I always find it hard to disentangle concern for the patient, the defence of professional interests and the resistance to change we all feel in our jobs in such contributions. For instance, Corinne was concerned that local government is to take more responsibility for public health, but that seems to me a thoroughly good thing.

The idea that we should just leave it to the doctors won't really do: as someone pointed out from the floor, the British Medical Association opposed  the setting up of the National Health Service ("...and Lloyd George's Health Insurance Act," I helpfully added).

Finally, there was Bill Newton Dunn - eloquent, patient, polite, as he always is. He gave us a master class on European politics and the current economic crisis.

Somehow MEPs sounds less like politicians than Westminster MPs. In part this is because so many of us know too little about European politics, so such talks always have an element of education about them. But it is also because there is something of a democratic deficit about the whole European project - see this week's election for a new President of the European Parliament for an example, though Bill told us that there are moves to make this process more open and to involve the public more in future.

He also, surely rightly, argued that David Cameron's problems with Europe have their roots in his decision to seek support in the last Conservative leadership by promising to take the party out of the European People's Party where is natural allies are to be found. More encouragingly, Bill suggested that Cameron has now realised the dangers of isolation and is trying to do something about it.

Oh, and this being a Lib Dem event, there was someone who wanted to solve the problems of interpretation at the European Parliament by forcing everyone to learn Esperanto.

Overall, it was a really good event and, as I began by saying, its format could well be copied by other local parties. It ran from noon until four o'clock, meaning that Nottingham people did not have to give up a whole Saturday and those of us who came from further way could travel at a civilised hour.

The venue was the comfortable surroundings of the city' masonic headquarters. There was a Wi-Fi network there, so I had thoughts of tweeting from the event, but I did not have the password (or perhaps the handshake) to allow me to use it.

Conor Cruise O'Brien and Edmund Burke

The newspapers have all carried respectful obituaries Conor Cruise O'Brien - the Daily Telegraph is a good example. The Guardian website, characteristically, has a piece attacking him for not sharing that paper's views. It is written by Roy Greenslade.

My own debt to O'Brien is for Edmund Burke - an abridged version of his book The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke.

Burke is often claimed by English Conservatives as their intellectual ancestor, but that suggests they do not know much about him. As Christopher Hitchens has said:

Edmund Burke was neither an Englishman nor a Tory. He was an Irishman, probably a Catholic Irishman at that (even if perhaps a secret sympathizer), and for the greater part of his life he upheld the more liberal principles of the Whig faction.
He was an advanced opponent of the slave trade, whose "Sketch of a Negro Code" was written in the early 1780s, and who before that had opposed the seating of American slaveholders at Westminster. His epic parliamentary campaign for the impeachment of Warren Hastings and the arraignment of the East India Company was the finest example in its day of a battle against pelf and perks and privilege.

More than that, Burke supported the American revolutionaries and was for many years the great political ally and intellectual support of the Whig leader Charles James Fox. They fell out after the French Revolution, which Burke condemned while Fox insouciantly looked forward to its spreading to Britain. That falling out took place, very publicly, during a Commons debate, and O'Brien description of the exchanges is memorable.

Burke's defection from the Whig campaign has generally been seen as apostasy, but O'Brien argues that Burke was consistent because of his Catholicism (or at least his Catholic sympathies). He sided with the Whigs because of their support for religious toleration, but joined the Tories because of the Jacobins anti-clericism.

Whatever the truth of this, one important fact stands out. Burke was right and Fox was wrong.

I had always assumed that Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was written as a response to French Revolutionary terror. In fact it was published in 1790, before the blood began to flow and when much English Whig opinion, like Fox, were broadly sympathetic to the Revolutionaries and their aims.

Burke's foresight - his realisation that terror would come in the wake of revolution - reminds me of the way that anarchist thinkers like Bakunin realised the dictatorship inherent in Marx's call for proletarian revolution.

British Liberals probably feel an instinctive sympathy for the French Revolution, but we should not forget that Karl Popper and Isiah Berlin, perhaps the greatest Liberal philosophers of the 20th century, were both profoundly anti-revolutionary thinkers.

Anyway, read O'Brien and read Burke. Hitchens quotes the unimpeachably radical William Hazlitt as saying:

It has always been with me a test of the sense and candour of any one belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Burke to be a great man.

Later. And read Lib Dem blogger Iain Sharpe too. He takes a similar line on reclaiming Burke from the Tories.

Charles Clarke: A joke

Yesterday Charles Clarke was rounding on press critics who accuse him of imperilling our civil liberties.

You can see his point. Today, says the BBC:

Home Secretary Charles Clarke says he will not resign after 1,023 foreign prisoners were freed without being considered for deportation.
He said he does not know where most of the offenders, who include three murderers and nine rapists, are.

If Clarke is looking to bring in a police state, it is a singularly inefficient one.

All of which reminds me of a joke reported in an article on Soviet humour by Ben Lewis. You can find it in the current issue of Prospect:

A man dies and goes to hell. There he discovers that he has a choice: he can go to capitalist hell or to communist hell. Naturally, he wants to compare the two, so he goes over to capitalist hell. There outside the door is the devil, who looks a bit like Ronald Reagan. "What's it like in there?" asks the visitor. "Well," the devil replies, "in capitalist hell, they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives."
"That's terrible!" he gasps. "I'm going to check out communist hell!" He goes over to communist hell, where he discovers a huge queue of people waiting to get in. He waits in line. Eventually he gets to the front and there at the door to communist hell is a little old man who looks a bit like Karl Marx. "I'm still in the free world, Karl," he says, "and before I come in, I want to know what it's like in there."
"In communist hell," says Marx impatiently, "they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil, and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives."
"But… but that's the same as capitalist hell!" protests the visitor, "Why such a long queue?"
"Well," sighs Marx, "Sometimes we're out of oil, sometimes we don't have knives, sometimes no hot water…"

Edmund Burke

I have added a quotation from my new hero Edmund Burke to Serendib.

I make the same point against Rousseau in Defending Families. Such ad hominem arguments often sound cheap - Paul Johnson filled a book with them in his Intellectuals - but Burke's identification of Rousseau's hypocrisy as a form of vanity lifts him above all that.

Besides I love the phrases "the tribute which opulence owes to genius" and "Thousands admire the sentimental writer; the affectionate father is hardly known in his parish."

The Conservatives claim Burke as their spiritual father, but I doubt if many of them read him. For most of his career he was the intellectual leader of the Whigs, only breaking from them over his opposition to the French Revolution.

Burke was right in that he foresaw the Terror that was to follow it, much as anarchists thinkers identified the totalitarianism inherent in Marx. He wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France, not as a reaction to the Terror, but in 1790 when the consequences of the Revolution still seemed benign to many British observers.

It is time that we reclaimed Burke. After all, the most important 20th century Liberals are also anti-revolutionaries; think of Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin. Only those with ideology envy - those who really wish they were socialists - will feel uneasy at welcoming Burke home.