David Renton

Government support for tenants has been partial and grudging. No minister has suggested that tenants should be granted rent holidays, or that any delay in paying rent during the lockdown should be ignored when payments are due after it ends: tenants may be expected to pay all arrears at once. Still less has there been any proposal to take regulatory action against landlords who use Covid-19 as an excuse to make tenants homeless. Instead the government has published non-statutory guidance inviting landlords to offer ‘support and understanding’ to struggling tenants. One chambers, which principally represents landlords, wrote to its clients last month to say that the government’s proposals at that point did ‘not of themselves prevent evictions . . . Notices served pre-the Act coming into force can be used to start possession proceedings.’ Eventually, after criticism in the press and Parliament, the government grudgingly conceded a three-month stay on possession proceedings from 27 March.

In May​ 1976, two families of Asian immigrants from Malawi – UK passport-holders – were put up in a hotel while social workers decided what to do with their children. The Sun ran it as a front page story: ‘Scandal of £600 a week Asians’. The Mirror followed up by condemning a ‘New Flood of Asians into Britain’. The Express warned that 145,000 further...

‘As a campaign meeting, it must have been one of the biggest yet, a hundred National Front supporters, three and a half thousand police and thousands of Asian demonstrators.’ This was the way News at Ten began its report of the clashes in Southall on 23 April 1979, midway through the general election campaign that would end with the victory of Margaret Thatcher. The report contained footage of police officers arresting middle-aged men in turbans, women sitting down in the road and demonstrators with their heads swaddled in bandages.