MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a three-hander that broaches big themes, but doesn’t transcend dry academia
The right to live
MARTIN GRAHAM recommends an excellent starting point for unions and the wider movement for discussion of the housing crisis
Protestors take part in a demonstration, United for Education, marching along Piccadilly in London, over access and quality of higher education, November 2016
DAN GLAZEBROOK eavesdrops on the bourgeois intelligentsia and the stories it tells itself at this moment of crisis
JAN WOOLF is bowled over by a major retrospective for the YBA artist
LEO BOIX, ANGUS REID and MARIA DUARTE review Night Stage, Two Women, Kim Novak’s Vertigo, and Fuze
KATHRYN JOHNSON recommends the work of Norman Kaplan that was a tool in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa
GAVIN O’TOOLE welcomes a bold feminist subversion of classic folktales that are ubiquitous in the Irish imagination
Against landlords – how to solve the housing crisis
Nick Bano, Verso, £16.99
HOW can we solve the housing crisis? The government is set on relaxing planning restrictions in the hope that the private sector will step in and build the houses we need. Nick Bano disagrees.
In his book Against Landlords – how to solve the housing crisis he argues that there is no shortage of houses – it’s simply that the prices are too high and this is caused by the high level of rent that landlords can extract with impunity from renters.
He introduces his book with an apposite quote from Marx: “Poverty is a more fruitful source for house-rent than the [silver] mines of Potosi were for Spain... One section of society here demands a tribute from the other for the very rights to live on the earth.”
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