Since 5 October, in the dead of night, masked gangs have been roaming the streets targeting so-called HMOs (houses in multiple occupation), thought to be housing migrants.
The attacks seem to be escalating across Greater Manchester with almost 50 reported incidents, mostly in Salford, including a severed pig’s head being left outside a family home in Kersal.
The attacks are meant for migrants, but are actually indiscriminate. Family homes and student terraces are painted with “no HMOs”, and have their windows smashed in amid calls on local right wing Facebook groups for “British houses for the British people.”
Weaponising crimes of landlords
What the far right is weaponising here is people’s well-founded anxieties around housing.
In the last decade rents in Salford, according to the ONS, have risen by a staggering 72 percent. Whereas wage growth in Greater Manchester and Salford has averaged year-on-year to a pitiful 2.6 percent over the last decade.
It is no wonder therefore that Salford City Council estimates that the number of HMOs have risen by a shocking 167 percent since 2010. This is the real background to the violence on Salford’s streets this month. But this has not been created by refugees and asylum seekers. It is a creation of British capitalism’s predatory housing businesses and landlords.
The scarcity of housing has become a greater avenue for speculation. Predatory private landlords (as rents rise sky high) are using their parasitic position to buy up even bigger shares of the housing market.
In particular, the greatest enemy and main culprits are the major housing conglomerates like The Heaton Group and Verta Property Group. They have grown massively in the last period through buy to let and build to let schemes.
The number of companies who exclusively engage in buy to let (purchasing residential properties to manage them as rental properties), has grown by over 332 percent since 2016. Now across the UK these bloated parasites account for around a quarter of all buy-to-let properties.
Manchester has by far the highest proportion of rental properties at 62 percent. That’s leaving out ‘build to rent’, which is having a huge boom in Manchester.
Expropriate the real criminals
These parasites are making an absolute killing here, driving up rents through their monopoly on housing pushing up prices to the point where an average of 55 percent of a workers’ wage in Manchester is spent on rent.
It’s no surprise that there is legitimate anger over the question of housing. But the blame is not of migrants, Muslims or asylum seekers but the handful of conglomerates who are booming off of our misery.
We appeal to Manchester’s workers and young people to mobilise in defence of our communities against these attacks by the far right. Moreover, we must openly demand the expropriation of the British vulture funds, without compensation, because they are at the root of Manchester’s housing crisis.
A political campaign against the real enemy driving up rents and creating insecure housing will cut the ground of the far right grifters who are currently finding an audience.
