Rushanara Ali is everything wrong with Starmer’s Labour

To most on the left today, few things appear as evil as owning a second home and renting it out. Landlords are frequently seen as of a piece with private-healthcare executives, tobacco lobbyists and oil tycoons. Amid the UK’s ever deepening housing crisis, they have become synonymous with greed and exploitation.

This is a caricature of course. But as Labour’s own homelessness minister has reminded us, sometimes such caricatures are true.

Rushanara Ali, the Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Stepney, has now resigned less than 24 hours after it emerged that she had evicted the tenants of her east London townhouse, before raising the rent by more than £700 pounds per month. According to multiple reports, Ali kicked out the four tenants from her Bow property in November on the grounds that she intended to sell it. But instead of putting the house on the market, it was put up for rent at £4,000 per month – a steep rise from the £3,300 her previous tenants paid.

The term hypocrisy is thrown around often in politics, but Ali’s effort takes the biscuit. We now know the minister tasked with tackling homelessness effectively made four people homeless. Furthermore, in doing so, she has done precisely what her own government’s renters rights’ bill, due to come into force next year, seeks to outlaw – that is, a landlord evicting people on the grounds he or she’s selling the house, and then promptly re-letting it again, this time for a higher price.

Like most Labour MPs, Ali has often decried the injustice of ‘private renters being exploited’ and ‘unreasonable rent increases’. Yet these were practices she was clearly familiar with. As if things couldn’t get any worse, Ali’s former tenants also claim that the leasing agency tried to force them to pay £2,000 on eviction to repaint the home – a demand that is already against the law.

Ali, of course, is not the first Labour minister to be exiled to the backbenches with a question mark hanging over his or her probity. In January, we saw the similarly depressing spectacle of anti-corruption minister Tulip Siddiq resign in a corruption scandal, after an arrest warrant was issued against her in Bangladesh. The warrant alleges that Siddiq is implicated in the alleged corrupt practices of her aunt, ousted Bangladeshi leader Sheikh Hasina. The former anti-corruption minister was living in London homes gifted to her by her aunt’s unsavoury regime. Siddiq denies the charges, which may well be the witch-hunt that she says they amount to. But it’s still not a good look.

Or take the chancellor, Rachel Reeves. Unlike Ali or Siddiq, she is just about clinging to her job – although this seems to have more to do with the ‘optics’ of Keir Starmer firing a senior woman from cabinet, rather than anything to do with her abilities. Still, Reeves was close to being forced out last year when we learnt that her economic credentials were not as strong as she claimed. Not only did her CV say she had worked at the Bank of England for nine months longer than she in fact had, she had also been less than honest when it came to her role at the Halifax Bank of Scotland. She was not an ‘economist’ there, as she claimed, but a retail banker.

Ali’s resignation is significant for another reason, too. It captures once again just how estranged Labour now is from working people. Here we had a Labour MP who was not only a landlord. She was also oblivious to how her actions would appear. It all suggests she has no understanding of how difficult life can be for the millions who don’t own a home, who have to fight over overpriced rentals.

Ali’s rise and fall is another small case-study in the transformation of Labour into a party of the few not the many. An elite, technocratic formation that knows and cares little about vast swathes to the nation. Once the party of tenants, it is the party of grasping landlords. The Labour Party has never been so lost.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.