Last week, while MP Apsana Begum was defending herself against fraud charges relating to her socially rented studio flat, a quarter of Conservative MPs were supplementing their salaries by renting out homes. An openDemocracy analysis has found that ninety Tory MPs, including 27 percent of the party’s ministers or whips, had declared earnings of over £10,000 per year from rent. The law was treating one of the victims of the housing crisis with suspicion and contempt while at the same time rewarding its beneficiaries with unearned profits.

On one level, it’s immediately obvious why the existence of landlord MPs is a problem. It offends against notions of independence. There is a whiff of the self-serving and the corrupt. It’s exactly why we have a register of members’ interests, why Jeremy Corbyn has rightly raised the scandal of Sajid Javid remaining on the payroll of private companies with an interest in the NHS, and why we’re aghast at the revolving door between local council seats and property development jobs.

But it’s too simplistic just to argue that some MPs are landlords, and that Parliament is going to look after its own. After all, as Tribune has repeatedly pointed out, housing makes up a massive part of the UK’s economy, and the government would have an interest in protecting that market regardless of any landlords in its ranks. This does not mean that openDemocracy’s findings are irrelevant, though. As a recent London Review of Books piece said about the housing crisis, “In the absence of global meltdown or a collective Maoist turn by . . . renters, politics remains the only remedy,” and it is therefore worth understanding exactly how and why this intersection between landlords and lawmakers is politically relevant.