Proud to plead guilty to being Unlabour

BEAR WITH ME WHILE I tell you a personal anecdote.

In the 1992 general election I was the Labour candidate in Hayes and Harlington, the constituency where I live and which I now represent in Parliament. Neil Kinnock was the Labour leader and he undertook a range of visits in west London including to my constituency.

To meet the workers, and for a good photo opportunity for the local press, we decided to take him to Penguin Books as its main, massive printing factory was in the constituency, plus the father of the SOGAT union chapel (that’s traditionally what the print and NUJ union branches are called), Johnnie Barrow, was a friend and a strong Labour supporter. The company was also Labour supporting and was pleased to welcome Neil and myself. It was a tradition to give visitors a box of their favourite Penguin books. I asked for a box of George Orwell’s writings as Orwell once taught in Hayes and I was studying for a master’s degree under Professor Bernard Crick, Orwell’s biographer.

I arrived and to my pleasant surprise I was given a large box of everything Penguin had published by Orwell, including the famous dystopian novel 1984. I was reminded of this only recently when I heard a shadow minister use the term “UnLabour” to describe our policy of cancelling rents for renters who have been hit hard by the pandemic.

You will recall that in 1984 the regime created a new language called Newspeak, with a new vocabulary including words like “ungood” in the term “doubleplus ungood”, meaning something really bad, or “unperson”, meaning a person who had been erased from public memory. I don’t want to be accused of what Orwell described in 1984 as “crimethink”, which is the criminal act of holding politically unorthodox thoughts that contradict the regime’s interpretation of “Ingsoc”, its word for English socialism.

I desperately want a Labour government. I have devoted most of my life to that objective. I want to see Keir Starmer in Number 10 and my successor Anneliese Dodds in Number 11. Every contribution I have made since standing down from the front bench has been supportive of the new administration.

So I don’t want anyone making mischief of my position on the need for support for renters. We need and should welcome honest discussion and debate about our policies and our political strategies.

People should not mistake democratic debate for dissent. My reason for urging support for renters is best set out in the report by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) published on 4th May. Its findings are pretty stark. NEF estimates that 5.6 million workers are at high risk of losing their jobs or hours as a result of social distancing measures. More than 1.2 million are living in privately rented accommodation.

The report explains that many of these workers are likely to be missed by the government’s job retention wage support scheme and will be dependent on Universal Credit, waiting weeks to receive their full payment.

Even those supported on the jobs retention scheme will struggle to make ends meet. As NEF modelling has shown, employees on the median wage can expect to have a 16% cut in income. Renters spend on average a third of their income on rent so NEF argues that “a reduction in income by almost a fifth could rapidly make housing costs unaffordable.”

The NEF solution to prevent renters falling into hardship and an eviction crisis some time after the pandemic is a UK wide cancellation of rents and a mortgage freeze. It argues that this would have no significant additional cost to the government, though the Bank of England would need to cover lost liquidity for mortgage payments and some landlords would have to rely upon the jobs retention scheme like other workers. You can find the report on the NEF website: https:// neweconomics.org.

The argument that this policy is “UnLabour” is based on that traditional Tory view that people shouldn’t get something for nothing and that landlords need protecting. Actually, renters pay taxes like everybody else and at times of crisis deserve support like everybody else. On the “UnLabour” argument they wouldn’t be allowed access to NHS services and businesses currently being awarded tens of thousands of pounds in grants would be left to go to the wall. Under the NEF proposals landlords would also be protected.

So I end with a quote from Orwell in Animal Farm when the animals discuss overthrowing their oppressive farmer: “Remember also that in fighting against man we must not come to resemble him.”