Vice:
It all begs the question: What would actually happen if we abolished landlords altogether? Just like, outright said, it’s illegal to buy a house and to then charge people to live there?
There are a few possible methods for this, but making all housing social housing is the most probable – and least likely to end in bedlam – at least according to the experts who talked to us. This would involve the state buying up properties that are now owned by private landlords and turning them into social properties that are priced fairly.
Richard Murphy, a professor of accounting practice at Sheffield University, doesn’t think this is an impossible feat. “If we change certain tax rules, many landlords will be desperate to sell out at a reasonable price – and to fund buying the houses, we’d simply issue new government bonds to pay for it,” he says.
Yes-i-do-have-a-sense-of-humour. Though maybe Murphy doesn’t.
If it was my house, I’d just burn the thing to the ground. But I’m easily pissed off.
The fact that Vice would seek out Richard Murphy for an opinion tells you all you need to know about both Vice and Richard Murphy.
In zones one and two of London, the average room rents for around £800 a month. Quality can vary. Sometimes it’s alright: a double bed with enough space around it for a desk and a wardrobe and no damp behind the headboard in the arse end of winter. Sometimes, this money gets you a fucking shithole.
London is a fucking shithole, but people who “live” there deserve everything they get.
“If we change certain tax rules, many landlords will be desperate to sell…”
Like the Housing Act a hundred years ago. The resulting mass sell-off of rented property was the principal reason that owner-occupation become so prevalent in Britain relative to the rest of Europe.
Make it illegal to buy a house and to then charge people to live there, and then social landlords buy houses and charge people to live there. Hold on, but you’ve just made it illegal to buy houses and charge people to live there, so how do you stop people buying houses and charging people to live there buy buying houses and charging people to live there?
And what about charging people to live in houses that you haven’t bought?
And what about charging people to live in houses that are an integral part of some other house? I can’t buy my flat from the shop downstairs because my electricity supply comes from the shop. If I approached them about it, they’d probably decide to just simply cease renting the flat out, and kick me out instead. My mate can’t buy his house on the farm he works at because the farmer dooesn’t what to shop up his farm buildings and give any old random stranger access rights across his land.
Expert in stump thinking branches out!
Well, Prof. Murphy, let me tell you a little something about Section 8 housing…
As a private Landlord I’d get any tenants need to register as Limited Companies, and then make a lease agreement with the company. That way I’m not charging a person.
So the people that gave us Grenfell Tower will fare brilliantly with a new responsibility for hundreds more houses?
Not quite sure where this desire to return to the 1970s in almost every aspect comes from. Am I presuming this was Murphy’s ‘heyday’ and he’s looking to recreate it – by my reckoning he’s in his early 60s now so he would have been 18 or so in 1978?
We still have a vast national supply of crappy system-built council estates built in 1960s and 1970s. Which the local authorities paid over the odds for and then failed to maintain so that we have spent the last twenty years knocking them down and starting again.
Does Spud fancy that he can be a T. Dan Smith on a national scale?
He really is a nasty, vindictive piece of work. Landlords are doing what any other service provider is doing: providing a service that is needed in exchange for money. Every single one of us does this at some point. Murphy is merely displaying his naked spitefulness for all to see, and Vice, being likeminded is happy to give him a platform. Truly a marriage made in Hell.
What is it with the left that drives them to call for policies that have failed every time they have been used in the past? I’ve just been listening to Paul Mason calling for price controls, amongst other tired policies.
As V_P says, its as if they’ve forgotten the ’60s and ’70s already.
No doubt if challenged we’ll be told that this time it will be different, because reasons.
Einstein’s definition of madness spring to mind.
I do think house prices are insane and deleterious to the health of the nation, but this isn’t the answer (obviously). We do need to watch these slippery twats though – housing is a special case because we all need somewhere to live. Lose on this and it will be food next – though it wouldn’t surprise me if they try and take over food first, on some sort of national emergency pretext.
“It all begs the question”: oh no it fucking doesn’t, you uneducated twat.
‘As a private Landlord I’d get any tenants need to register as Limited Companies, and then make a lease agreement with the company. That way I’m not charging a person.’
Nice Bongo. So much more sensible than my approach.
“I do think house prices are insane and deleterious to the health of the nation, but this isn’t the answer (obviously). We do need to watch these slippery twats though – housing is a special case because we all need somewhere to live. ”
Well we could stop importing 250k people per year, that might just have an impact on the availability of housing. And we could reduce the controls on where and (more importantly) how one can build houses as well, that might result in cheaper housing options becoming available.
And if you really want to turn the clock back you could get women out of the workplace, because thats how things were in the the perceived nirvana of the 60s and 70s, when the ‘working man’ could buy his fabled mansion with sixpence down and tuppence ha’penny a week mortgage.
@van patten – he was born in 1958. I was at college with his twin (who wasn’t a cunt like his spudness)
People who build houses can sell all the houses they build at the prices they ask. Buying a house costs much the same as renting. Some people want to rent and not buy. The market is in fact working.
Although houses cost way more than they used to, low interest rates mean the proportion of income used to pay a mortgage isn’t so much different. I’d like to be able to quantify that but it would be anecdotal.
If landlords are abolished, it begs the question, given that they are the most evil people on the planet, MrsBud and I included, what other immoral activity might they get into as an alternative, selling bread to poor people, selling sanitary products to women (those with a vagina and those with a penis) or charging sick people for medicines?
Landlords are Kulaks comrades. They are hoarding … er … land. They must be deported to Siberia where there is … hold on … a lot of land.
OK, I’ll have another think about this.
Would that not mean that instead of ‘abolishing landlords’ the government would be the landlord?
Why is it evil when someone else does it but noble when done by someone employed by the council?
Yes, that’s what makes it so sad. I at least didn’t peak until my mid-30’s;)
Moqifen
Cheers – that makes his angry nature comprehensible. However, either he has made some truly shocking investment decisions or he got taken to the cleaners by the family courts. That level of grift from someone who is 64 really is almost shocking to behold
@Longrider
Landlords are doing what any other service provider is doing: providing a service that is needed in exchange for money. Every single one of us does this at some point.
Maybe every one of us on here, but I can think of many examples who have never provided a service that is needed or wanted at any point in their lives. His Spudness being one of them.
OT but I think Spud has better things to do right now:
https://www.elystandard.co.uk/news/major-model-rail-exhibition-ely-cambs-8959912
A woman of my acquaintance, having successfully switched her gas, electricity, phone and TV suppliers, decided in all seriousness that she was going to switch her landlord.
She was most miffed when the Council told her that doing that would involve moving house.
I know that sounds like a joke, but it really did happen.
Rhodda at 09:15.
I did some quick googling a day or or so ago and it may not be 100% kosher…:
Average house prices:
1975 = <12k,
1980 = 23k,
2022 = 277k
Interest rates:
1975 = 11%,
1980 = 15%,
2022 first time buyer fixed 2 years = 1.8%
Mortgage on average house:
1975 = £118 per month
1980 = £295 per month,
2022 first time buyer = £1147 per month.
In todays' money:
1975 = £748,
1980 = £1018.
So not massively more expensive and also considering:
Inflation during the 70's / 80's peaked at 24%,
Basic rate income tax was 35%
Top rate income tax was 83% with a surcharge of an additional 15% for incomes over £20k (£69k today).
Jim
Yep, stop importing people who hate us and build more houses. I’d agree with both of those.
Didn’t Thatcher try to get rid of the landlords by selling off council housing to the people living in the housing?
Why not keep the landlords and get rid of the council? OK, brainstorming it now, and may not have worked out all the repercussions but I can’t see a downside.
“Didn’t Thatcher try to get rid of the landlords by selling off council housing to the people living in the housing?”
The “Right to Buy Scheme”, yes. Very popular it was, too. Even in Scotland, where the nationalist régime has now reversed the policy.
Right to buy = right to buy at a discount = right to free state from responsibility of maintenance on a property where the rent is at a discount anyway. The discounted house price reflected the discounted rent and the lifetime tenancy, which people failed to understand. Hence all the comments about selling off the houses at less than market price.
They didn’t scream when Brown did that to Gold at greater cost. Hmm.
@ philip
I think the claim is that they are hoarding houses (although if they are letting them out they are *not* hoarding – it is those who buy houses and refuse to let them out who are hoarding but don’t expect Murphy to be influenced by logic).
So Yes: he would like to deport them to Siberia but not to allow them to buy a house there (because he’s banned them from buying any more houses).
You should go and look for them in April when the snow starts to melt …