THERE is something intensely depressing about the case of Rushanara Ali. She was elected as a Labour MP for one of the poorest parts of London with a housing problem of immense proportions.

Tower Hamlets is experiencing housing stress with overcrowding the main problem intensified by a deteriorating public housing sector and a fluid and growing population, extreme disparities of income and wealth, gentrification driven by rising housing costs with every feature of life in this most working class of boroughs affected by across-the-board cuts in local government funding.

Like many of her constituents she is of Bangladeshi origin, born in 1975 in Sylhet just a generation after Britain relinquished control of the then united Indian colony.

Appointed by Starmer as his undersecretary of state for homelessness and democracy she could have been a trailblazer for reform in the housing sector. She could have championed the return of sold-off council houses to the public sector. She might have persuaded the Cabinet to introduce rent controls to drive private-sector rents down to affordable levels.

In government she would be ideally placed to push through measures to begin the mass construction of council houses, financed maybe by the kind of money Gordon Brown threw at the banks.

She could have argued for council direct labour departments with a brief to both construct new council houses and maintain them to decent standards.

She could have argued for measures to compel the finance sector to offer better terms to young people in housing need.

Indeed, with her brief to protect and enhance democracy, she could have made the case for housing as a human right, as the vital underpinning of a democratic system and as a building block on the road to socialism.

In an ideal world, of course, a Labour minister would argue for the full institution of a socialist economy in which land was held in common and the ultra rich relieved of the responsibility of managing their huge inherited (or purchased) estates.

But instead we find her as the entitled owner of a property so desirable that she could charge £3,300 a month in rent whilst representing in Parliament a borough where 48 per cent of children live in poverty

Not content with leveraging her privileges to generate revenues in excess of the average national income, she racked up the rent to £4,000.

To hypocrisy is added deception of the kind that so tainted by the Boris Johnson regime — with that PM revealed to have taken a secret loan to deck out his Downing Street quarters — since she claimed evicting the tenants was because the house was to be sold, not re-let at a more extortionate price.

She had to go, under the traditional notion that her continued presence in government would be a distraction, but it is striking that Starmer, notable for taking gifts of spectacles, clothes and football tickets himself, has refused to condemn her behaviour.

Jess Barnard, a former chair of Young Labour and a member of Labour’s national executive, was spot on when she said: “Seems an appropriate time to reiterate MPs should not be landlords, and landlords should not be Labour MPs.”

It is maybe too late to expect a reset from this Labour government, although common sense and electoral logic would suggest that tackling the housing crisis would be a vote winner.

It is upon the system of private property that there arises a whole ideology — one that has captured this discreditable ex-minister — that justifies almost any behaviour.

Socialism makes a distinction between personal property — for example socialist Germany had higher levels of home ownership than did its capitalist neighbour — but when ownership of private property allows for the exploitation inherent in the system of market rents under capitalism, it becomes a compelling argument for the land to be owned in common.