Latest updates: Daisy Goodwin says she struggled to make official complaint about Korski allegedly groping her in Downing Street 10 years ago
Momentum, the leftwing Labour group, has criticised Lisa Nandy for opposing rent controls and mortgage relief in her speech this morning. (See 10.59am.) A Momentum spokesperson said:
Millions of renters and mortgage holders are struggling to make ends meet. With the Tory government shrugging its shoulders, Labour has both the opportunity and the obligation to set out the decisive action needed.
It beggars belief, then, that Lisa Nandy has criticised calls for rent controls, which she herself backed just months ago, and mortgage relief.
Nandy said there was nothing “Tory” about Labour wanting to be the party of home ownership. Referring to Keir Starmer’s plan to get home ownership levels up to 70% (it was 63% in England towards the end of the last decade), she said:
Frankly I was astonished by the reaction of some people in my own party who said this was Tory lite.
They argued home ownership and social housing were a zero sum game and we were making the wrong choice.
She defended the “right to buy” (council homes), saying it was originally a Labour idea and that it only went wrong under Margaret Thatcher because the proceeds were not used to build more homes. She said:
The right to buy – whose abolition has come to be a totemic issue for many on the left – was originally a Labour policy.
It was the decision of the Thatcher government to fail to replace the council housing stock that was sold, pitting the rights of the individual against the rights of the community.
Continue reading…
