2023 is a new gilded age where renters are in danger of becoming a permanent underclass.

Today was rent day. If you are like me where over 50% of your income goes to keeping you housed-everyday feels like rent day. Keeping housed is as precarious as treading water in the North Atlantic after your ship sinks.

You do not need to be an economist or a historian to know that our era is an epoch of enormous class inequality. It's a new gilded age where renters are in danger of becoming a permanent underclass.

Affordable housing is extinct in Britain, Western Europe, Canada and the USA for the average wage earner.

The world's wealthiest nations abandoned their many to enhance the wealth of corporate and individual landlords. The rise of fascism is not a coincidental occurrence during this housing crisis but a symptom of it. Homeownership is the ultimate consumer good in a society driven by consumerism. For people to be denied that possession because it is unaffordable is fertile ground for the Elmer Gantry's of fascism. Yet centrist pundits and politicians whose pockets are rich with property assets refuse to ameliorate the rise of intolerance, racism, anti-migrant rhetoric and right-wing populism by ending immediately wage poverty or housing insecurity.

 It is not bad planning, natural disasters, the climate crisis, or Putin causing this struggle for people to pay their rent or keep up with their mortgages. It is outright greed from the 1% sanctioned by governments. If that is not corruption, on the scale of the mafia what the hell is it?

From this year to last, rents in England rose on average 13%. Why are rents going up? It is to feed the need for yearly higher returns of investors or the gluttonous avarice of an individual landlord who has five properties as their retirement golden goose.

Londoners pay an average of 40% of their income to keep a roof over their heads. A recent housing study in Canada showed minimum wage workers were at least five dollars an hour shy income to afford rental prices in 2023 in all but 3 Canadian cities. So if you are wondering why unionised workers are striking in larger numbers than in years previous or why food banks can't keep up for demand, there is your answer. In Germany, a land once known for rent controls, 1.6 million Germans pay over 50% of their income to housing.

Politicians who should have the backs of tenants don't. They have too much skin in the landlord game including owning multiple homes that will make them a hefty profit upon sale. Over 100 MPS at Westminster earn income from owning rental property. The House of Lords is packed with peers made rich from rents.

In Canada, 40% of its MPs own outright or have partnerships in rental properties. Local politics is no different because city mayors & council members are, in many cases, landlords. You can't expect a housing crisis to end if your politicians profit from the crisis or have friends and family profiting from our misery.

Is there a solution to the housing crisis? Of course! But it requires us to lose our fear of total financial ruin and ridicule by the press or our employers.

A 21st-century social and economic revolution doesn't require blood on the streets. Only unflinching resolve to change how we live and prosper is necessary. The political landscape of 1945 was transformed this way and it built a Welfare State for all of us.

It was a brilliant and peaceful achievement. But it was taken for granted when we forgot how our ancestors struggled to create it.

Neoliberalism dismantled the welfare state and replaced it with a scaffold of inequality where our democracy hangs like the corpse of a wrongfully convicted prisoner. We walk by the place of its hanging each day as we grub for our living in an age of diminished expectations. Only taking ownership of our working-class past will allow us to own our future outright rather than renting it for an inflated price from the 1%.

Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and me housed. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Take Care, John