Rentiers' Rights

Those who maintain that there are no significant differences between Team Starmer and Britain's four or five other right-wing parties will once more be confounded by the latest announcement on housing policy. While the Conservatives and their Liberal Democrat accomplices were entirely uninterested in ensuring that homes were fit for human habitation, Team Starmer intends giving slum landlords barely a decade to clean up their act. The benefits of these new and robust standards will be palpable for working people who rent their housing, provided they have sufficient pluck and gumption to rent it to others. Team Starmer's in-house estate agent proclaimed that leaving tenants to rot a bit longer would mean more time and certainty for the real people; presumably because the new standards are so replete with British robustitude that not even a Farage Falange government would have much inclination to lower them.