Rae Cox, Oxford Socialist Party
Young workers face enormous challenges accessing the basics in life, and nowhere is this more obvious than with housing. In Oxford, where I live, median house prices are over 12 times higher than median annual incomes, that’s nearly 50% higher than the average for England and Wales.
So for young workers, renting is our only option, if we can even get this. In an ongoing cost-of-living crisis, many are unable to meet the strenuous reference checks.
Nearly 1 in 2 men, and just under 1 in 3 women aged 25 still live with their parents. Even those renters lucky enough to have a guarantor, spend on average 42% of their income on rent, jumping to 72% in London.
But what do young workers get for jumping through these hurdles and hoops? In many cases, black mould, rats, structural damage, and battles for our deposits.
In 2023, the chair of the Association of Chief Environmental Health Officers said: “There are some living conditions today that are as poor as we would have found in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. It’s shameful to feel that there are still people living in terrible conditions in 2023.”
So how do we escape the crisis? Some will be hoping that the incoming Labour party will offer solutions.
But Keir Starmer has keenly shown, by scrapping many of the Jeremy Corbyn-era’s rental and housing reforms, that Labour is firmly a capitalist party. We need a new voice, for the working class and the trade unions, to fight for rent controls and widescale council house building, we need a new mass workers’ party.
But even this will only get us so far. In a capitalist society, where housing is seen as a source of profit first, and somewhere to live second, workers will always eventually be squeezed for higher rents and lower maintenance.
The fight for a socialist society, where the giant construction house building companies are nationalised, under the democratic control of the working class, is the alternative to this fundamental flaw – where housing is not a source of profit, but a place to live.
We demand:
- Rent control now – take on dodgy landlords and slum HMOs
- A mass council house building programme to end homelessness, and provide genuinely affordable homes for all
