MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
The right to live
MARTIN GRAHAM recommends an excellent starting point for unions and the wider movement for discussion of the housing crisis
Protestors take part in a demonstration, United for Education, marching along Piccadilly in London, over access and quality of higher education, November 2016
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Against landlords – how to solve the housing crisis
Nick Bano, Verso, £16.99
HOW can we solve the housing crisis? The government is set on relaxing planning restrictions in the hope that the private sector will step in and build the houses we need. Nick Bano disagrees.
In his book Against Landlords – how to solve the housing crisis he argues that there is no shortage of houses – it’s simply that the prices are too high and this is caused by the high level of rent that landlords can extract with impunity from renters.
He introduces his book with an apposite quote from Marx: “Poverty is a more fruitful source for house-rent than the [silver] mines of Potosi were for Spain... One section of society here demands a tribute from the other for the very rights to live on the earth.”
More from this author
MARTIN GRAHAM welcomes a comprehensive history of the national debt, while regretting that it is neither up to date, nor has a class-based analysis
MARTIN GRAHAM recommends a book that makes a critique of neoclassical economics and attempts to envision a sustainable global future
Powerful exposition of Marxist political economy
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JOE BESWICK of the London Renters Union talks to the Morning Star’s new Left on Record programme
The Welsh government is shying away from the obvious answer to a spiralling rental market and increased housing precarity – well-designed and implemented rent controls, writes LUKE FLETCHER
