29.08.2024
Things can only get worse
With three of the top five landlords in parliament Labour MPs, we are seeing a petty-bourgeoisification at the top of the party, writes Eddie Ford
With Sir Keir Starmer saying things will get worse before they get better, claiming that the Tories left a £22 billion black hole in this year’s budget, you might be wondering what happened to that ‘crisis of expectations’ touted by the more stupid sections of the left. It is certainly a far cry from the official optimism we got with Tony Blair’s landslide in 1997, when you could hardly escape D:Ream’s ‘Things can only get better’ - maybe the band can do a new remix to get with the times.
You might be wondering even more when you look at the profile of Labour MPs in the new parliament, some of whom are not exactly horny-handed sons of toil - as revealed by an analysis of UK parliament’s register of interests. Parliamentarians are obliged to declare how much income they get from various sources, and amongst the requirements is to declare if they get more than £10,000 a year from renting out properties.
Numbers
This shows that the rentier class is a force of its own in parliament, with 85 MPs now classified as rentiers, representing 13% of parliamentarians - owning 184 rental properties between them. The biggest group of rentiers comes from our very own bourgeois workers’ party, Labour, which has 44 such landlords under the official definition, equating to 11% of the parliamentary party. The Tories have 28, just under a quarter of its MPs. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats have eight among their 72 MPs.
This is when the statistics start to get interesting. In the last parliament, Labour had 18 landlord MPs and the Conservatives had 83. Meaning that Labour more than doubled its rentier presence in the Commons following its crushing victory in July. Of course, the Tories are much diminished in numbers, but landlords still amount to a significant percentage of its parliamentary presence. However, even more to the point, three of the top five landlords in parliament are now Labour MPs.
There is Gurinder Josan, MP for Smethwick in the West Midlands, who owns eight rental properties alongside members of his family, and Southend East MP Bayo Alaba, who owns seven, also with family members. But very top of the list is Jas Athwal, the Labour MP for Ilford South in London. He rents out 15 residential and three commercial properties, all co-owned with a family member - a collection that outshines that of shadow chancellor Jeremy Hunt, a multi-millionaire who owns nine rental properties, according to the register.
There are also a large number of MPs, 158, who declare second homes or land from which they do not receive a rental income. One is Tom Tugendhat, the Arabic-speaking shadow minister for security, now running to become Conservative leader, who co-owns four flats and some agricultural land in France with various family members. Not forgetting those MPs under investigation for failing to declare rental income, like Tulip Siddiq, a treasury minister and MP for Hampstead and Highgate - apologetically saying it was an “administrative oversight”.1
Jas Athwal himself became leader of Redbridge council in east London in October 2011, and he rose to prominence, such as it was, in 2022, when he defeated sitting Labour MP and Socialist Campaign Group member Sam Tarry, in a contest to replace him as the party’s candidate in Ilford South, Athwal’s home constituency. Tarry was dismissed from his shadow cabinet position after a high-profile appearance on an Aslef picket not long after Keir Starmer had issued an edict instructing shadow cabinet members to stay away from strikes. He was deselected in a trigger ballot, because rightwing unions like Usdaw, Unison and Community threw their weight behind Athwal and Labour’s regional officials encouraged the right sort of members to turn out on the day - job done! The Financial Times describes Tarry as “a supporter of former leftwing leader Jeremy Corbyn”, but that is not accurate at all. At the time, Weekly Worker described his support for striking railworkers as “posturing”, suggesting that his rediscovery of industrial militancy was precisely because he was under threat of deselection - therefore needed to attract more support.2 Up until then, Tarry had been a fairly anonymous, if not typically spineless, SCG member and MP.
Rentiers
If we think about the Parliamentary Labour Party in the not so recent past, there would be plenty of MPs from a trade union background. This has massively declined over the years - a phenomenon that has been impossible to ignore. Instead, what you get is people more or less coming directly from universities and student unions. They might have served in a union office, but more often what they do is go straight into parliament as a researcher, a bag carrier, for some minister or aspiring minister.
However, there is this new element of what you can only call the petty bourgeoisie that have moved in to the Labour Party - Athwal being a perfect example. But in this context we must also mention the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Anas Sarwar. He owns a quarter share of his family’s cash-and-carry wholesale business, United Wholesale (Scotland), that was valued in 2016 as worth between £2.7 million and £4.8 million. Now, that sounds like quite a lot to you or me. Yet you need think about it in terms of what actual income he is likely to derive from it, especially as in 2017 he transferred his shareholding to a discretionary trust for the benefit of his three children, so that he could not personally access the assets or dividends. Naturally, his children attended a £10,000-a-year private school.
In other words, we are talking about the lower end of the bourgeoisie - which is why it is fair to describe it as the ‘petty-bourgeoisification’ of Labour. Of course, it has always been politically bourgeois, right from the very beginning - which is why Lenin described it as a bourgeois workers’ party. There was no leftwing golden age, as some deludedly think. But there has been an identifiable change in the sort of petty bourgeois layer that goes into the party. Shifting from trade union officials who live a petty bourgeois lifestyle as part of their role as an intermediary between capital and labour (historically an invaluable role for the ruling class) to people who actually live at least in part from renting and from capital - who clearly represent the bourgeois side of the party sociologically.
Regarding the likes of Athwal, it is quite legitimate to be worried about the possible influence they might exert over a government that has vowed to outlaw the practice of ‘no-fault evictions’ by landlords as part of its plan to reform the private rented market in England. In the run-up to the election, Keir Starmer also said he would “introduce a law” to prevent landlords from encouraging bidding wars between prospective tenants, with a Labour spokesperson recently saying it “will take the tough decisions that the last Tory government refused to, and we’ll give renters stability and security” - better protect renters “against damp, mould and cold”. Fine words, but will it amount to anything?
Billions
Going in a slightly different (but instructive) direction, it is still the case that Rishi Sunak is the richest MP in parliament. He has a combined wealth with his wife of some £651 million, at least according to the Sunday Times Rich List of July this year - putting them ahead of the monarch, who has to somehow manage on £605 million. We can only understand Sunak’s anger at those who suggest that his huge wealth puts him out of touch with voters or ordinary British people.
But what a lot of people do not realise, including some Weekly Worker readers no doubt, is that the second richest person in parliament - insofar as you can establish these things, as they are inherently murky - is actually the former Labour MP, Margaret Hodge, hater of everything that Jeremy Corbyn stood for. She was given a life peerage in August this year for service rendered, and now sits in the House of Lords as Baroness Hodge of Barking. A quick Google comes up with some estimates putting her personal wealth at $100 million as a result of her being a major shareholder in the family-owned steel-trading corporation, Stemcor. This is one of the world’s largest privately held steel companies, with an annual turnover of over £6 billion in 2011.
In June 2010 she was elected by MPs as chair of the Public Accounts Committee. Some quickly raised the issue of Hodge’s suitability for such a position, The Daily Telegraph running a story about how her family’s company paid just 0.01% tax on £2.1 billion of business generated in the UK. In the end, this led to an investigation into the tax arrangements of a number of American companies operating in Britain.
With the steady petty-bourgeoisification of Labour, its cash from private donors now dwarfing donations from unions, the party seems to be ever more pro-business in the narrowest possible sense. Many Labour MPs are pro-business because they are in business.