Labour MP questions landlord role in tackling tenant anti-social behaviour

Reply to the comment left by John Milbank at 01/06/2026 – 14:28
I’m not a fan of Tony Blair but at least he just came out and said that Labour are not growing the economy and they are damaging young people’s prospects:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/03/01/labour-is-damaging-the-economy-says-tony-blair/?msockid=0b8a4155c7db6ba1058955b1c6196a07

He is absolutely right and the government IS damaging young people’s prospects. This is because this government is obsessed with politics, not policy, obsessed with re-allocation of wealth, not generation of it, and because collectively they don’t have any real understanding of business.

During the Tony Blair years they were trying to give every young person the chance to get to University. The result was the creation of a lot of non-courses trying to teach things that were better learned in the workplace. I don’t know what other landlords find, but I find that these people are now cleaning and painting my property because within a couple of years of graduation their Computer Sciences Degree or Social Media Studies Degree from the University of Central Labourshire that hadn’t given them the skills they required in the workplace in the first place became completely obsolete.

Another long-term legacy of the Gordon Brown labour years and Harriet Harmanesque diversity policies is the fact that if any student wants to identify as a Meerkat then you’ve got to respect their rights and allow them to do it even if their behaviour is disruptive or ‘antisocial’. Not only do you have to respect their ‘rights’ (their rights to be disruptive) whatever powers you have to address the disruptive behaviour are removed from you whether that’s in education, the workplace, or in the provision of housing. Labour encouraged students to expect the world to adapt to them, rather than equip them to adapt to the world and that’s probably why some now vote for a non-green Green party.

But Labour missed the point about diversity entirely. What is important is a diverse economy. In a diverse economy there is a job, or a place somewhere in business for everybody even if they are a bit different, on the margins. And in that kind of economy everyone gets the chance to learn the skills they need in entry-level jobs.

What this labour government has done is to harm the economy and cause it to retrench with their Up the Workers Rights Down With Employers and Employment Politics. As Angela Rayner headed south from rainy Tameside to her flat in sunny Hove, a lot of the entry-level jobs went south with her.

The same is happening with the Labour Renters Rights Act. Housing provision needs to be diverse with a healthy PRS and lots of tenant choice. Younger people and people on the margins are going to find it harder to find places to live, because the accommodation is not available in the social housing sector, and The Labour Renters Rights Act just created an environment in which landlords cannot risk taking a chance on the high-risk tenants. That’s not the fault of any landlord. It’s more Labour Ivory Tower nonsense from people who completely out of touch with the real world and have no significant experience of business.

It’s why this government has made so many U-turns…it’s the only thing that they are good at, apart from pretending that everything that goes wrong is somebody else’s fault.

PS: If a POLITICALLY competent (as opposed to economically competent) prime minister wanted to find someone to work with who was good at making everything that goes wrong somebody elses fault then an ideal candidate for chancellor would be somebody who had run the complaints department of a bank. As anybody who tries to make a payment from a bank finds, if something goes wrong it always has to be somebody elses fault.