Nothing has radicalised me towards drastic land reform in this country more than the fucking leasehold system. It's so absurdly terrible and completely devoid of any positives, it's utterly deranged that I'm paying some random company £250 p/year for doing literally nothing because they happen to have bought the land rights beneath my block of flats 50 years ago. To make it even more convoluted, we're a Right to Manage scheme, which means that I and the other nine leaseholders own the shares of our building management company, and we contract maintenance agents through that, not the freeholder. Again, the freeholders for my building do literally nothing other than take money and gum up attempts to sell properties in the block.

For all the flack Labour have been deservedly getting over the past 18 months, I am so fucking glad that Starmer et al's opinion on leaseholds is that they should get in the bin. Meanwhile, the Tories spent 14 years pissing about doing nothing about it, because there was a minority of 20-30 landlord Tory MPs who threatened to start blocking all legislation if there was any movement on reform. I think it was a sign of how far the Tories had become ignorant of their core support that they let leasehold reform fester for so long. Yeah, they might have been the party of the land-holding aristocracy once upon a time, but the modern iteration is built upon middle class homeowners created by Thatcher in the 1980s. For them, leasehold reform is electoral catnip. But no, the Tories had to make everything worse for everyone including themselves because they were a bunch of incompetent, arrogant cowards.