I'm really interested in the emergent form of anti-landlord politics within Labour because anti-landlord stuff is absolutely a good thing but it can also be articulated to a very limited politics (particularly if it's within Labour).

Anti-landlordism can very easily be articulated to a politics of meritocracy, of capitalist rationalisation (landlords are fractions of capital very much harming the dynamism of British capitalism) and modernisation, of anti-parasitism.

An aside here, whilst there are potentially antisemitic articulations of this, specific histories of modernisation politics in Britain make it much more likely to a sort of sub-Wilsonism.

Related to this, there can easily be a slightly malign shift of class analysis, renter/tenant becoming a pseudo-class identity, particularly in London and major cities, ends up centring youngish professional people and allowing a claim on a oppressed identity.

Thinking about my own experiences of housing organising it was always a struggle to shift focus away from the interests of people who without the specific London housing crisis would have been able to buy to a wider, set of needs.

As the boy said, "this housing shortage gets talked of so much only because it does not limit itself to the working class but has affected the petty bourgeoisie also."

There can be a unity of social basis, big sweep historical analysis and bad politics in the notion then of landlordism as a residual feudalism, so bring about the bourgeois revolution*, sweep away the feudal vestiges, modernise (etc).

None of this is to say this emergent politics isn't good, indeed it has considerable hegemonic potential as only left politics can resolve even the quite contingent aspect so with work could be a broad alliance led from the left - but that also allows the slide into conformism.

* Britain was, of course, the only country to have a genuine bourgeois revolution. This is a hill I will die on.

I was just trying to remember the exact Engels quote so ended up looking this up, which apart from relying on (gasps) Ellen Wood rather than relative autonomy, which would have made the argument better, holds up well I think. http://review31.co.uk/article/view/407/what-is-the-rent-trap