The following is lifted from our new private tenant campaign site, which we hope to expand upon significantly.
[S]ome of the ingrates who fester in the dusty IB recesses have the misfortune to find themselves in exile in the deep south of Engerland, not that the situation we are highlighting is much better in our blessed home land (peace be upon it).
The situation under discussion, is the lack of rights and security of tenure experienced by citizens who choose (or who have no choice) to rent rather than buy a home, not to mention their obscene exploitation by a conspiracy of bankers, estate/management agents, landed politicians and other ‘landlords’ (what an obscene term). There is a cultural perception amongst the self-styled middle-classes that those who rent belong in some kind of sub-class. This is especially true in the bowels of the south of Engerland, where, of course, an Englisman’s home is is castle.
This perception is not helped by the subliminal link made in a formal context such as the direct gov private rental advice page. There is an automatic association with the term ‘social housing’, a once noble institution that sought to provide a decent home to hard working people who didn’t expect ever to be able to afford to buy. Sadly, the combined ineptitude of local authorities and Thatcher’s absurd ‘right-to-buy’ have destroyed this good intention and ruined perfectly decent neighbourhoods across these lands.
The genuinely desperate, including the weak of mind and body, the congenitally criminally minded, the socially inept in addition to the EU protected have been given first dibs over every vacant property in the nation’s dwindling housing stock; a social experiment that has succeeded in ghettoizing vast areas of our towns and cities, where crime breeds crime.
The irony being, in the context of this article, that the people living in these ghettos have most of the rights we lack in the ‘private rental sector’. We are not going to discuss the rights and wrongs of the former’s undignified de-humanisation here, or Cameron’s intention to dilute their rights. We are going to point out the shocking fundamental general iniquities and failures, an awareness of which has snuck so far below the castle dwellers’ radar that they need their faces rubbing in it.
So here goes:
UK plc is unique in the developed world, in that everywhere else the majority of those free peoples prefer to rent. In many 1st world countries it would never occur to huge proportion of the population to buy a property, despite the irony that they could often easily afford to. Surely, you think they would be better off not having to pay rent.
Remember, we are not talking about rip off Britain, where almost anybody in business sets prices according to what the market will bear, or up to the maximum the law allows, or what short-termist shareholders demand; we are talking about the free world, where people actually have power.
Unlike in the UK where a property ‘owner’, who is actually in hock to a bank or other lender for 25 years or more paying in the end more than twice the amount they borrowed, whatever the final ‘value’ of the house, where we are not free. They do this because that’s what our spreadsheet driven culture indoctrinates them to do and because they are convinced by the rhetoric that property is a safe long-term investment as opposed to simply being a home for an owner or a tenant.
So, when the happy squire decides to let his/her property they have to cover the cost of the mortgage and make an additional profit from the rent. The tenant pays thrice, once to buy the property on behalf of the ‘owner’ and twice to provide the ‘owner’ with an income and thrice to pay for the maintenance of the property. In what sane clear thinking planet is that ok? Here, in dumbed down Britain where generations of morons think it is OK to pay banks £100,000s in interest throughout their working lives, that’s where!
Let me just repeat that for clarity. Private landlords are paid by tenants the full cost of the landlord’s mortgage plus management costs plus a profit on their rental business, making renting far more expensive than buying. None of which is a cunning social engineering ploy on the part of succesive governments or their apointed agencies to encourage good citizens to buy. All of which is in fact a conspiracy to ensure money gushes into the the hands of bank shareholders (and the fat cats), management agencies and criminallymorally challenged landlords.
This is all possible because prospective tenants have virtually no rights or choice in a sector with no controls, protective laws or applied balance of judgement in a limited quality (in terms of property and landlord) marketplace.
Examples of what is systematically wrong:
Issues of further abuse and neglect by landlords and their agents is beyond the scope of this article. Here, we want to focus on the legal status of the tenant. Here is how the above inadequacies are prevented in many other countries and how they should be stopped in the UK:
Reading this for the first time, you may consider us ingrate to be truely deranged but that is because you are stuck in a culturally ingrained UK plc mindset that imagines owning a property gives you infinite rights over it. Instead you should try very hard to think of it as a human being’s home. If the above is unnaceptable to you then get out of the property rental business. It is the future.
