James Cleverly (doing his rounds this morning as the new shadow Housing secretary) is right about one thing: the government has lost control. But the control that has gone is not over asylum housing, it is over the story they are telling, the scraps of decency they used to pretend to have, and any grip on what’s actually causing the mess they made. His intervention, framed as righteous indignation on behalf of “people who play by the rules”, is in fact a distraction, a sleight of hand to conceal his party’s (yes his party’s) decade-long dereliction of duty on both housing and asylum.
“Disconnect from Reality”? Projection, Plain and Simple
Cleverly accuses Starmer of a “disconnect from reality” because the Prime Minister dared to acknowledge that there are, in fact, enough houses in Britain. Just not distributed fairly or used well. That is not fantasy. That is structural critique. The real disconnection is Cleverly’s refusal to admit that the housing crisis is manufactured, by successive Tory governments who turned homes into commodities, gutted social housing, and handed the keys of housing policy to private landlords and developers.
There are over 700,000 empty homes in England. Around 250,000 of them have been empty for more than six months. Meanwhile, 150,000 children are in temporary accommodation, and thousands of asylum seekers are crammed into hotels not because they jumped any mythical queue, but because the Home Office has created a bureaucratic backlog so bloated it has all but collapsed under its own weight. This is not an immigration problem. It is a political one. A consequence of deliberate underinvestment, policy mismanagement, and xenophobic scapegoating.
Homes or Assets? The Rotten Core of Britain’s Housing System
Home ownership in Britain has long since ceased to be about shelter, security, or somewhere to live your life. It has become an asset class, a pension plan, a tax-free investment vehicle wrapped in bricks and mortar. Houses are bought not to be lived in, but to be flipped, rented out, or held onto until the price goes up. This is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of decades of policy designed to inflate property values and financialise everyday life. Help to Buy, Right to Buy, planning deregulation, landlord incentives: every measure has pushed us further from housing as a right and deeper into housing as speculation.
So we end up with a grotesque mismatch. On one side, luxury homes sit empty while investors wait for prices to rise. On the other, families are stuck in damp flats with no tenancy security, and asylum seekers are crammed into hotels because the housing stock has been hoarded and hollowed out. The housing crisis is not about scarcity. It is about distribution. About a system that treats property as capital first, and people as an afterthought. What Cleverly and his ilk defend is not the dream of home ownership, but the machinery of extraction built around it.
Taking Back the Homes: Lambeth’s Quiet Rebellion
While national politicians wring their hands about migrants and hotel bills, some councils are quietly trying to reverse the damage. In Lambeth, where over 40,000 people are on the housing waiting list and thousands of homeless families are stuck in hotels or bedsits, the local authority is doing something almost unthinkable in the current climate: reclaiming housing from the private rental sector and returning it to those in most urgent need.
The council last year was in the process of taking back 163 homes, previously rented out on assured shorthold tenancies close to market rate, and repurposing them as emergency council accommodation. This is not some grand utopian plan. It is a practical, material intervention: using what already exists to house the people pushed furthest to the edge. More than 60 homes have already been returned to council control, with several now let to homeless families. At the same time, the council is accelerating repairs on nearly 400 empty council properties that had fallen into disuse, recognising that a “void” property in a housing crisis isn’t just a waste, it is a scandal.
This kind of move will not solve the housing crisis alone. But it exposes the truth Cleverly will not touch: there are homes (plenty of them) but they are locked up in a system designed to serve landlords, not tenants. Lambeth’s initiative is modest in scale but radical in implication. It suggests that the housing system does not have to revolve around profit. That councils, if empowered and resourced, can act in the interests of people, not property portfolios. And that the real scandal isn’t asylum seekers in hotels. It is the grotesque normality of letting homes sit empty while families sleep in cars, in hostels, or on the street.
“Playing by the Rules”? Whose Rules?
Cleverly’s crude distinction between the good citizen and the cheating migrant is a moral schema built on lies. The asylum seeker, fleeing war, persecution, or climate collapse, does not “jump the queue”. There is no legal way to claim asylum in Britain without entering the country first. This is not queue-jumping, it is the only route left standing after Britain pulled up the drawbridge on resettlement schemes, safe routes, and family reunification.
The truth is, the people who supposedly “play by the rules” are being shafted too, not by migrants, but by landlords, letting agents, and housing policy written in the interests of capital. Who fixed the rules so that young people spend half their wages on rent? Who decided that local councils must auction off land to the highest bidder? Who made it easier to evict tenants than to house them? Not the people in dinghies. The people in Downing Street.
The Riots Are Not a Mystery. They are a Warning
Cleverly’s remarks about riots are particularly insidious. He tries to position himself as the voice of reason, condemning violence while gesturing at some mysterious “agitators” from left and right. But this both-sidesism is cowardice masquerading as balance. It is the far right who are organising these protests outside asylum hotels. The far right who are the ones weaponising local grievances. And it is the state that’s letting it happen. Because it finds political utility in the anger, even as it pretends to abhor it.
To suggest that local frustration stems from the presence of asylum seekers is to blame the victims of this government’s failure for the failures themselves.This is the same old trick: deflect attention from the real class antagonisms (between landlords and tenants, workers and bosses, capital and housing need) and aim the rage downwards. Scapegoating with a posh accent.
Cleverly’s Position is Not a Solution
Let’s be clear: Cleverly’s critique of Labour is not born of compassion for working-class families struggling to get by. It is a continuation of the same politics that made life precarious in the first place. A cynical an attempt to reframe a housing crisis caused by capitalism as a crisis caused by migration. It is that move (the ideological sleight of hand) that must be resisted most strongly.
Cleverly does not want justice. He wants order. He wants to put the boot down on the asylum seeker, gesture sympathetically to the “ordinary Brit”, and hope we don’t notice he’s spent his career voting against housing benefits, against council house building, and in favour of deportation flights and detention centres.
We Don’t Need Their Rules
The contradiction is this: the same system that fails to house British workers is the one that criminalises those fleeing war and poverty. These are not competing problems. They are the same problem.
The solution is not more scapegoating. We need socialism. Build good quality public housing, and lots of it. End the hostile environment. Tear down the detention centres. Dismantle the property market that treats homes as investment portfolios rather than a human right.
The only real “disconnect from reality” here is a man like Cleverly pretending to speak for the people, while standing on their backs
