The Green Party’s parliamentary candidate for Islington South and Finsbury has attacked the borough’s private landlords and highlighted its “appalling” housing inequality.
Charlie Kiss, 49, called for lower rental rates across Islington on Wednesday and said he would “make as much noise about it as possible” if he became an MP next year.
“There is no doubt about it,” he said, “the people who are suffering the worst at the moment are in the private rental sector.
“They have no rights. My sister, who was seven months pregnant at the time, was told to move after her landlord decided to sell the house.”
Mr Kiss, a long-term Green Party campaigner, singled out the current Government as one of the main reasons for the country’s “extreme levels” of housing inequality.
He said: “The problem is that the present government is so devoid from the reality that everyone else is living in. The current cabinet is full of millionaires.
“It’s so blatantly unfair. The Government makes out that we’re all in this together, but we definitely aren’t.”
Mr Kiss says campaigning has already begun for next year’s election, when he will look to unseat Labour MP Emily Thornberry.
To combat Islington’s inequality further, Mr Kiss said he would campaign to introduce a wealth tax on Islington’s richest.
“But it doesn’t capture those people who bought their houses 20 years ago,” he added, distancing himself from Labour’s unpopular proposed mansion tax.
On his chances of victory in the election, he said: “It’s definitely a possibility.”
If this idiot thinks tenants “have no rights” one assumes he is neither a qualified lawyer nor has bothered to research the laws of assured shorthold tenancy before starting to pontificate. Had he done so he’d have discovered that they have a shedload of rights on matters such as deposit protection, electrical and gas safety, privacy and notice, and quite properly so.
It’s true that they don’t also have the right, like he seems to imply that his sister should have had, to continue living in someone else’s property indefinitely. But that’s neither a surprise to anyone else nor inherently unreasonable. That’s what being a tenant rather than an owner means and has always meant.
Typical Green, really. Completely out of touch with the real world. We need more ignoramuses like that trying to make laws for the rest of us like we need a hole in the head.