Guaranteed shelter, afforded to hundreds of thousands of renters by the COVID-19 eviction ban, has now come to an end. In its wake comes a rising tide of eviction and homelessness. If a recent string of interviews exposing the derangement of the rentier class is anything to go by, it’s a moment over which landlords have been salivating: over the past two weeks, they have gleefully issued 400,000 tenants with eviction notices.

With a government impervious to the most milquetoast calls for renter protection, some have looked to the Labour Party. They have been disappointed. On May 14, 2020, with the first deadline for the government’s eviction ban looming, Labour’s former shadow housing secretary Thangam Debbonaire called a “cancel the rent” policy for people whose income had been slashed by the pandemic “un-Labour” and “really regressive.”

“Whether it’s moral or not,” she said, “There is a legal structure underneath this. A tenant has signed a contract with a landlord. Even if it’s a rubbish contract, it’s still legally binding. There is no such thing as canceling it.”