 Here's a question. What do landlords actually do? They don't build houses. They don't ensure a supply of affordable homes by keeping rents low. And for the talk about the expense of maintaining properties, it's not like landlords are stomping up the cost from the pay packet of their supermarket job. It's their tenants' rent and deposit that's paying for all of it. Here's your new monthly payment. Let's face it, landlords are kind of bums. You want to buy properties in cheap areas. You want to rent them high and you want to have systems in place and property managers that can make it passive income so that you can have financial freedom. That's called property investing. That's equity. According to Shelter, 45% of private tenants in England are victims of illegal behaviour. One in four have had landlords enter their homes without permission. 22% of tenants reported essential safety or household appliances like smoke alarms and competing or even water broken when they moved in. And 9% have reported violent, threatening or harassing behaviour from their landlord or letting's agent. What about us? Okay, what about you? Stop relying on me to pay your food. But maybe you're not one of the bad landlords. Maybe you're a nice landlord. You fix everything on time. You let your tenants keep pets and you've never asked anyone to just live with the black mold creeping up the bathroom wall. Does that mean you're doing a good thing for society by being a landlord? Despite the last 17 years having seen the biggest squeeze on wages since the Napoleonic Wars, rents in the UK are at record highs. Meanwhile, if you want to own the home you live in, you'll need an income of at least £64,000 or £104,000 if you live in London in order to have a hope in hell of doing so. The average house price is between 8 and 14 times the average annual wage. But good luck saving up for a deposit while you're renting. Rents have doubled in the 10 years following the financial crisis and gobbles up an average of 49% of tenants' incomes in London. It's estimated that by-to-let landlords have locked 2.2 million households out of home ownership altogether. And according to Shelter, evictions from private tenancies are the single biggest cause of homelessness. One in 10 people who faced homelessness in 2018 to 2019 were kicked out because their landlord just wanted to sell, re-elect the property or avoid making repairs. We used to have a cheap supply of rental properties in this country. It was called Council Housing. In 1919, the Addison Act was passed placing on councils a duty to provide homes for the working classes. In the following 20 years, public housing accounted for 26% of all homes built in England and 67% in Scotland. After the war, governments plowed money into public housing and set ambitious goals for building. In 1954, councils built nearly 200,000 homes, a total not matched in a single year since. Not all of these homes were good. High-density tower blocks built outside of city centres weakened family and kinship ties of working-class communities. Meanwhile, poor construction of prefabs led to poor quality and sometimes even dangerous housing. But the simple fact is there was affordable housing, built by the public for the public. That all changed with Margaret Thatcher. The 1980 Housing Act introduced a double whammy of restrictions on council building and gave tenants the right to buy their council homes. This choked the supply of affordable housing and drove up the costs of rent. Nearly half of all council houses bought under right to buy became buy to let. So the house you could once rent for cheap off the council, you now pay many hundreds or even thousands of pounds to rent from a private landlord. The average buy to let landlord earns more than twice the average salary. The recipe is simple. Buy up the housing stock and hold it hostage because the choice for those without property is either to rent or simply go homeless. Then when your tenant is done paying off your mortgage, you can either just keep renting it out or you've got a lovely asset you can sell off for much more than you paid for it. It's a win-win for the landlord and a lose-lose for everyone else. So why doesn't anyone do anything about it? Just 2% of the UK population are landlords but about a fifth of MPs are private landlords. Which means that a few years ago we were treated to the site of 72 landlord MPs voting down a bill which would have legally required them to make homes fit for human habitation. Landlords have no obligation to their tenants to put or keep the property in a condition fit for habitation. In 2015 the Daily Mail even ran a competition where the prize on offer was a buy to let property. We live under a system where rent pays more than wages where you can be financially rewarded by being able to leverage the fact that you own stuff to extract money from those who don't. Don't talk to me about welfare recipients. The real scroungers are landlords. Living off of other people's work. It's time that we make landlordism obsolete. Get a real job. How is that?