THE new Renter’s Manifesto launched by campaigns including Acorn, Generation Rent and London and Manchester tenants’ unions must be used to build council housing campaigns across Britain.

We face a deepening housing crisis which cannot be resolved without large-scale public housebuilding. 

As the Morning Star’s own columnist Solomon Hughes has detailed, reliance on the handful of giant house-building firms that dominate construction guarantees that the housing shortage will continue. 

Scarcity drives prices up and “big five” housebuilders like Taylor Wimpey actually admit that the housing shortage is a guarantee of high returns. Their focus is on land-banking and “price optimisation,” not solving the housing crisis.

Britain’s 13 million renters have among the worst tenants’ rights in Europe, facing arbitrary eviction and unrestricted rent rises from landlords. Research by Homelet this summer found London rents were now 78 per cent of the average monthly salary in the city.

Hardly anyone is prepared to defend Britain’s broken housing system, but politicians aren’t planning on doing anything about it either. 

The Tory conference in Manchester this week was striking for ignoring almost every pressing social issue facing the country, and a parliamentary party stuffed with buy-to-let landlords has so far stymied even the modest reforms occasionally mooted by ministers, such as strengthening leaseholder rights. 

Labour’s Keir Starmer parrots the Thatcherite line that home ownership is crucial for working-class families to get ahead. If true, this is only because protections for renters are so poor that renting a secure, long-term home is impossible outside a shrunken council sector.

In any case Labour has no plans to significantly increase council house building and will therefore leave the housing shortage and the resulting abuses intact.

Housing is a mobilising issue and initiatives like that of Sheffield trades council that united the Sheffield Needs a Pay Rise union-led campaign with Acorn’s tenants’ rights activism can forge alliances with real local clout.

That will be key to forcing housing reform onto the political agenda. 

A decade ago, it was not Labour opposing David Cameron’s austerity cuts but grassroots campaigns like UK Uncut and the People’s Assembly. Their actions helped build the shift in political consciousness that erupted in the Corbyn movement from 2015.

With Labour letting us down again, it is once more at the level of community campaigning that we need to confront our rigged and exploitative economic order.

Smoking ban

LABOUR says it will back the Prime Minister’s proposed rising age ban on smoking, which would make it an offence for anyone born on or after January 1 2009 to be sold tobacco products.

As in New Zealand, this would see the smoking age rise by a year until legal smoking dies out.

The phased ban on smoking might seem a sensible approach. But we should be alert to the downside.

Current proof of age requirements merely establish whether a customer is an adult. Since this is usually obvious most adults do not expect to have to carry identification whenever they go out.

An age restriction that rises each year to encompass people well into adulthood would force people to carry proof of identity all the time. 

There is a creeping consensus behind such intrusive state monitoring: earlier this year Tony Blair and William Hague issued a joint call for Britain to impose digital ID cards on everyone. Photo ID is also now being imposed on voters.

Given the decline of cash payments and our unparalleled network of surveillance cameras, public policy ought to focus on how we protect people’s rights and privacy rather than finding more opportunities to demand we identify ourselves.