IT is hard to find adequate words to express just how outrageous the scandal about Labour’s now former homelessness minister Rushanara Ali is. But I’m going to give it a go.
Ali is the landlord of what sounds like rather a swank gaff in east London, near the Olympic Park. She kicked the tenants out of the four-bedroom townhouse before re-listing the property with a tidy rent increase of £700 a month, taking it to a cool £48,000 per annum.
The Labour MP for Bethnal Green said that she had tried to sell the property but was unable to find a buyer so put it back on the rental market around three months later. She must have rotten luck.
Fortunately, all this happened before Labour’s Renters’ Rights Bill has become law, so it was allowed. Under the legislation, it will be illegal to evict tenants to sell the property only to relist it before six months have passed.
That’s jaw-dropping enough but the story doesn’t end there.
The firm that Ali (above) hires to manage the property attempted to charge the tenants £2000 for the house to be repainted and £395 for professional cleaning.
That is not allowed and under English laws, hasn’t been since 2019. If a Labour MP is to be a landlord – and it tells you a lot about a party of supposed socialists who see no contradiction there – then surely they must be the most unimpeachably squeaky-clean landlords that ever extracted rent on God’s green Earth.
It was only after the tenants told the agency they knew Ali was a Labour MP that the fees were dropped.
Good on the tenant who exposed this tale of literally staggering hypocrisy by speaking with the i newspaper.
This wasn’t Ali’s first spell of misfortune during her brief, disastrous spell in government. Late last year, she was forced to give up her ministerial responsibilities for building safety after she had attended a conference sponsored by a firm implicated in the Grenfell Tower disaster.
Ali has basically quit twice. But neither time has she apologised.
When she tendered her resignation to the Prime Minister on Thursday evening, she went down insisting she had followed all the rules – more than could be said for her agent – but that she felt the stench of scandal following her around had become a “distraction”.
The time before, she said through gritted teeth that “perception matters” when she relinquished her building safety responsibilities.
Speaking with a source on Friday about an unrelated story about dodgy Labour antics, they told me that, despite popular perception, Labour were actually worse than the Tories for sleaze scandals.
Tot it up and you start to get his point: corruption minister felled by corruption allegations, homelessness minister bagged for evicting tenants, a transport secretary who committed fraud while the head honchos are showered in enough freebies to keep you in Christmas presents for the rest of your life.
Are we still waiting on that “Change”?
