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From cityscapes to deportations

How colonial feminism shapes Germany’s migration politics and fuels the AfD’s rise


12/11/2025

A photograph of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz

Back in November 2018, Friedrich Merz declared that he intended to steal “half of the AfD’s voters”. At the time, Merz was campaigning for the CDU-chairmanship, and the AfD was the third-largest party in the Bundestag.

When asked about his now almost seven-year-old promise at a press conference in Brandenburg—where the AfD has recently polled above 30%—Merz responded with his now-infamous “cityscape” (Stadtbild) remark: 

“We have come a long way in terms of migration. In this federal government, we have reduced the numbers by 60% between August 2024 and August 2025, but of course we still have this problem in the cityscape, which is why the interior minister is now in the process of enabling and carrying out repatriations on a very large scale.”

In his cityscape-remark, Merz blamed migration for the AfD’s rise and presented large-scale deportations as a means to contain the far-right party. His comment immediately caused outrage across Germany, though public criticism focused mainly on his visual description of the country’s supposed “cityscapes”, while his deportation plan received far less attention. 

It was only a few days later, after facing heavy backlash over his remarks, that Merz turned to the issue of women, declaring: “Ask your daughters. I have absolutely nothing to retract”.

“Ask your daughters” is as vague as it is clear. Even though the chancellor did not explain what he meant, everyone knew exactly what he intended. Merz himself underlined this by saying “many people say the same thing… everyone will confirm this is a problem, especially after nightfall.”

Merz relied on a narrative he did not invent, but that has been deeply embedded in collective consciousness over decades—regardless of whether one agrees with it or not. This narrative frames otherized men as a danger to women. Indeed, the accusations echoed by the chancellor closely resemble nineteenth-century narratives—those of so-called colonial feminism. 

Inventing colonial feminism

In her book Women and Gender in Islam, Harvard scholar Leila Ahmed demonstrates that Western feminism played a crucial role in the colonial assault on Muslim societies. Using the British occupation of Egypt as her case study, she argues that while the “woman question” had long appeared in Western discourse on Islam, it only became the centerpiece of the Western narrative as Europeans consolidated their colonial rule in Muslim countries. 

The British occupation of Egypt began in 1882. The colonizers introduced agricultural projects and administrative reforms aimed at making the country a more efficient producer of raw materials. This so-called modernization of Egypt, along with the country’s increased integration into European capitalism, economically benefited the Egyptian upper class and a new middle class, who therefore embraced the presence of the West. The lower-middle class and lower classes, by contrast, were negatively affected or saw no benefits from British domination. They reacted with resistance to Western culture, anxious to preserve their Islamic heritage against colonial domination. These differing attitudes toward the colonizer’s influence created a contest between Western and Islamic culture. Within this contest, the issue of women in Islam emerged as a focal point. A closer look at British society at the time helps explain why the “woman question” became central to the colonizer’s battle over culture (Ahmed p. 145).  

According to British colonial theories, middle-class Victorian England represented the peak of civilization. Women in this peak civilization, though, were believed to be biologically inferior and by nature destined for domesticity. Evidently, the ideal Victorian women was a devote housewife.

When a vocal feminist movement challenged Victorian ideas of femininity, the state responded with oppression. While the British male establishment denied that men oppressed women within their own society, it appropriated the feminist claims and applied them—in service of colonialism—to Egyptian society. Essentially, feminism directed against white British men was suppressed, but, when turned against otherized men and their cultures, it helped sustain the colonial project of the white male establishment. 

As Leila Ahmed observes, “it was here and in the combining of the languages of colonialism and feminism that the fusion between the issues of women and culture was created. More exactly, what was created was the fusion between the issues of women, their oppression, and the cultures of Other men” (Ahmed p. 151). Within this colonial narrative, the veil became a symbol of women’s oppression in Islam. 

Western feminism thus became an instrument for morally justifying the attack on native societies. Leila Ahmed termed this colonial feminism—“a feminism as used against other cultures in the service of colonialism” (Ahmed p. 151). 

The actions of Lord Cromer, consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, exemplify how colonial feminism operated in practice. While Cromer was a founding member and sometime president of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage in England, he simultaneously organised public unveilings of Egyptian women. Yet, his policies—such as reduced access to education—harmed Egyptian women (Ahmed p. 153). 

In the narrative of colonial feminism, otherized men and their cultures were portrayed as the source of women’s oppression in order to morally justify attacks on colonized people. This pattern underlying colonial feminism continues to shape Western discourses and collective knowledge to this day.

Colonial feminism in Germany’s cityscape

When Friedrich Merz told Germans to “ask your daughters”, he deliberately tapped into a modern trope of colonial feminism. Having come under fire for his cityscape-comment, Merz invoked the issue of women to morally justify his racist rhetoric and, by extension, his deportation policies—which he framed as both a strategy against the AfD and a form of women’s protection. 

The thing is, deportations won’t stop the AfD’s rise. Merz’s goal is not to extinguish the fire the party emerged from, but to make it work in his favor. As he stated seven years ago, he aims to win over half of the AfD’s voters. Yet, his approach is likely to backfire: it fuels the racism the far-right thrives on—and the AfD will continue to benefit from it. 

Neither will deportations protect women. But was that ever Merz’s goal? During his political career, the chancellor has barely distinguished himself as an advocate for women. In 1997, he voted against the criminalization of marital rape—a stance he retracted only last year. He also opposed a proposal to weaken Section 218 of the German Criminal Code, which still defines abortions as illegal, though not punishable. Despite earlier promises, his administration remains overwhelmingly male.

Narratives like Merz’s “cityscape” have a dual effect: they create and fuel racism, while simultaneously distracting from the actual causes of what they seemingly address. The Merz administration is cutting back the public sector to funnel resources into militarization. A weakened welfare state will deepen precarity, poverty, and homelessness in Germany. The political aim behind this is to sustain the dominance of the Merz administration at the expense of the wider population—with marginalized groups suffering the most severe consequences.

Merz’s cityscape-comment substantiated with the daughters-question—a modern echo of colonial feminism—blames migration for the AfD’s rise. In doing so, Merz aims to morally justify his racist rhetoric and deportation policies. These, however, represent a breeding ground for the far right. Friedrich Merz is dancing in a self-reinforcing circle as old as colonialism, literally invented by the predecessors of the white male ruling class in order to sustain itself. Then and now, it operates on the back of the racialized Others.

Red Flag: first Manhattan, then Berlin?

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin looks at why Germany’s Die Linke is not like Mamdani.


Zohran Mamdani

Last week, Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayoral elections, and reformists around the world cheered. In Germany, Die Linke came up with the admittedly great slogan: “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.” (Yes, I know it’s a song—check out this amazing cover by Enrique Moreno.)

The shoe doesn’t fit, though. Mamdani is known for his solidarity with Palestine—he at one point refused to distance himself from the slogan “Globalize the Intifada” (before caving in to the Democratic Party establishment). According to exit polls, this opposition to the genocide in Gaza was a major factor for 38 percent of Mamdani’s voters. While he did focus on a simple message of affordability, he could not help but be the pro-Palestinian candidate.

Die Linke, in contrast, would prefer to not talk about the war. Former co-chair Martin Schirdewan posted a Mamdani hype video. Yet Schwirdewan spoke at the German government’s pro-Israel rallies and boycotted his own party’s limited Palestine solidarity work. Schwirdewan successfully had the Palestinian-German Trotskyist Ramsis Kilani expelled from the party.

Caren Lay, former vice-chair of the parliamentary group in the Bundestag, similarly cheered about New York results—just a month after she helped organize a counter-demo (!) against the huge Gaza demonstration in September. 

Die Linke’s Berlin candidate, Elif Elrap, made a video on the anniversary of the November Pogroms, talking about the need to fight antisemitism today. As examples of antisemitism, she could have talked about cops beating up Jewish activists or Nazi billionaire heirs controlling the economy. Instead, the posts only lists two examples of modern antisemitism: 

1. A non-Jewish woman being refused service in the left-wing café K-Fetisch for wearing a Zionist t-shirt in the middle of a genocide. 

2. The non-Jewish, pro-Israel bar Bajszel being criticized for supporting genocide. (Bajszel once held a pro-Israel event where they kicked out all Jewish participants and had one of them beaten up.)

In other words, Die Linke agrees with Springer tabloids, the CDU, and the AfD that antisemitism is when right-wing supporters of Israel are criticized.

Is the Guard Changing?

Die Linke is certainly quite a different party than last year (when I and many others saw it on the verge of disappearing.) Tens of thousands of young people have joined the party, and they are instinctively pro-Palestinian. That is what forced the leadership to participate in some kind of Gaza protest.

Yet even if a couple of the vilest Zionists abandoned the party, such as former Berlin vice-mayor Klaus Lederer, the party apparatus is still unflinchingly pro-Israel. 

This was shown when the party youth, Linksjugend-Solid, passed a resolution criticizing Israel’s “racist and colonial character.” 17 members of the Bundestag ran to the far-right press to denounce them (including Pascal Meiser of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, who represents one of the largest Palestinian communities in Europe).

Some of the most fanatical genocide supporters, like Gesine Lötzsch or Petra Pau, are approaching retirement. But Bodo Ramelow remains the Bundestag’s vice president, and thus Die Linke’s most powerful elected representative. The new leadership is only slightly less Zionist: Co-chair Inés Schwerdtner continues to defend Israel’s right to exist. Jan Van Aken has defended the expulsion of Kilani, and said further expulsions of pro-Palestinian activists could be necessary.

Once Again

This is not some personal moral failing. Die Linke is a party that has, from the day of its founding, been involved in the administration of German imperialism—they have been part of numerous state governments. As recently as 2023, Die Linke had senators in Berlin. In that role, these “leftists” were responsible for evictions, deportations, and the privatization of 200,000 public apartments. They helped sabotage the referendum to expropriate big corporate landlords—and they also carried out the first bans of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, long before Kai Wegner.

I don’t agree with what Pepe T. wrote last week, that “Die Linke once represented a revolutionary alternative to establishment politics” and that it was “once an anti-imperialist force against oppression worldwide.” That is simply not true: the main founder of Die Linke was a former German finance minister who has attacked refugees for decades.

Die Linke’s unbroken Zionism is just a symbol of their fundamental commitment to Germany’s capitalist state—they are willing to throw their supporters under a car whenever the ruling class demands it. They would have expelled a Berlin Mamdani years ago.

But there is hope! Mamdani’s victory shows that leftists can push back against false accusations of antisemitism—Mamdani didn’t just win, but he even won a large majority of young Jewish voters. Die Linke could potentially speak to the large majority of Berlin’s population (70-80 percent in polls) who oppose the genocide. 

But for this to happen, all those new young left-wing members of Die Linke need to get organized. They need to call for the expulsion of Ramelow and all the other supporters of genocide. Most importantly, they need to oppose Die Linke’s orientation to joining capitalist governments—another “left-wing government” will only lead to new betrayals and disappointments. 

As Rosa Luxemburg said, the role of a socialist party “in bourgeois society, is essentially that of an opposition party. It can only enter on scene as a government party on the ruins of bourgeois society.”

The resolution by Linksjugend-Solid—and the furious reactions to it from far-right tabloids and Die Linke’s leadership—show a way forward. This kind of militant opposition to Germany’s capitalist state is how we will get left-wing policies in Berlin.

Red Flag is a weekly opinion column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.

15 November 1884 – start of Berlin conference

This week in working class history


On 15 November 1884, Otto von Bismarck opened the Berlin Conference in his palace on Wilhelmstraße. The conference aimed to resolve the “Scramble for Africa,” in which Global North countries competed to control the continent’s mineral-rich resources. Nineteen delegates from fourteen countries attended, ranging from the United States to Tsarist Russia. Despite it sometimes being called the Congo Conference or the African Conference of Berlin, not a single African country was invited.

The conference redrew the borders of Africa. When it opened, only 20% of the continent was colonised. By the outbreak of the First World War just thirty years later, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained free. Ten thousand distinct communities were forced to live within forty separate occupied territories. Before the conference had even ended, Nigeria’s Lagos Observer reported that “the world had, perhaps, never witnessed a robbery on so large a scale”.

Colonisation was far from peaceful. South Africa saw the world’s first concentration camps, set up by British occupation forces. Germany followed suit in Namibia, where a German-organised genocide killed 80% of the Herero and Nama populations. Various methods were used to normalise colonisation to the German public: street names were dedicated to colonisers, and the supermarket Edeka took its name from an acronym for the Einkaufsgenossenschaft der Kolonialwarenhändler (Cooperative of Colonial Grocers).

The General Act of the Berlin Conference contained two key articles. Article 34 declared the “doctrine of spheres of influence,” allowing European powers to claim parts of Africa provided they informed the other nations beforehand. Article 35, the “principle of effective occupation,” stated that a country could acquire rights over colonial land by setting up a coastal base, as long as it promised to protect existing rights and freedom of trade—meaning the rights and freedoms of other imperial powers.

The attempt by the Great Powers to carve up Africa did not go unopposed. The Nandi waged a ten-year war in what is now Kenya, disrupting the construction of the Uganda Railway. Ethiopian resistance preserved the country’s independence until the Italian invasion of 1936. The Maji Maji rebellion in Tanzania between 1903 and 1907 was one of many local uprisings. Ultimately, however, European firepower overwhelmed local resistance. The divisions sown in Berlin endure to this day.

Threads of Resistance: the women stitching stories and struggles

From Palestine to Greece, mothers are the roots of hope, the strength of solidarity, and the flames that keep tradition and dignity alive.


11/11/2025

The art of Palestinian embroidery, or «Tatreez», is a decorative technique on fabric using needles and threads, passed down through generations of Palestinian women. This art form encompasses a variety of styles and motifs from different regions of Palestine, with each design reflecting the life, experiences, and social fabric of its community. The creation and preservation of these garments played a vital role in the daily life, cohesion, and socialization of women within each local society.

From nature-inspired motifs — such as flowers and trees — to geometric patterns, the embroideries carry unique meanings and histories. The most characteristic garment adorned with such stitching is the traditional thoubah — the wide dress once worn by Palestinian women. Every village in Palestine had its own distinct motifs, serving as visual identifiers for the women of that community. Red is the dominant color in embroidery, though its hue varies from region to region, from one artist to another. Common designs included the “eight-pointed star”: the moon, birds, palm leaves, stairs, and diamonds or triangles used as amulets to ward off the evil eye.

The Greek tradition of embroidery, though unique in its own right, follows a similar path. In Greece, embroidery has long been a form of expression and social connection, deeply rooted in history and tradition. From the famous embroideries of Macedonia to the intricate patterns of Crete and Thrace, the creation of woven and embroidered textiles in materials such as linen, cotton, and silk was intertwined with women’s everyday lives and with the preservation of family and local heritage. The motifs — whether depicting elements of nature or geometric forms — were closely linked to the rhythms of Greek life and society.

Just as in Palestine, embroidery in Greece served as a form of communication and a marker of one’s place of origin. Each region had its own characteristic designs, many of which — such as the cross-stitch — were rich in symbolism. Through embroidery, women cultivated their artistry, preserved traditions, and created garments that held deep significance in both their social and personal lives.

Both the Greek and Palestinian traditions reveal how women, even within societies shaped by different historical and political contexts, use art as a way to express identity, forge communal bonds, and strengthen their position within society. The art of «Tatreez» and Greek embroidery are inextricably linked to resistance, the preservation of cultural heritage, and the ongoing struggle for equality.

On March 8, a day that honors women and mothers around the world, we are reminded that — though they come from different lands and historical realities — the women of Palestine and Greece share common struggles, aspirations, and values. Our worlds may seem distant, separated by thousands of miles, yet the power of art and solidarity brings us closer than ever.

In 2021, UNESCO added traditional Palestinian embroidery to its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

 “The reason the housing crisis continues is because there are people benefitting from it”

Interview with Jacob Stringer, author of “Renters Unite”


10/11/2025

Hi, Jacob, thanks for talking to us. Can you first introduce yourself?

I’m Jacob Stringer. I organised for five years or so with London Renters’ Union and then I did a PhD on tenant unions. I just wrote a book called Renters Unite, which is an overview of the new wave of tenant organising in the Global North.

When you say the Global North, where exactly do you mean?

The book covers Europe and North America. Realistically, I didn’t have the opportunity to go to Australia or other more far-flung places. But it’s a wide variety of countries and experiences.

Tenant unions have been springing up across Europe, across different parts of the UK. There are city-specific unions, so I talk about the Manchester tenant union. Then some countries have a national tenant union. Ireland has one called CATU. It’s also happening in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Poland.

In the US, there’s a huge number of new tenant unions, which tend to be city based. I talk a lot about the Los Angeles and Crown Heights (Brooklyn, New York) tenant unions because they’re particularly interesting examples.

You say there’s a new surge of tenant unions. Why now?

It’s happening now because many places are experiencing what we loosely call a housing crisis. “Housing crisis” is a strange term, because usually you use the word crisis for something that doesn’t last long and then you resolve it. That’s not what’s happening with housing.

In many countries, people are facing ridiculously high rents for very low-quality accommodation. There’s a lot of overcrowding in the UK. A lot of low-income families are pushed into “temporary” (accommodation) in which you can actually be for years.

It’s better to talk about housing injustice because the reality is that it’s a crisis for tenants, but it’s not a crisis for landlords and it’s not a crisis for a lot of the establishment. The reason it continues is because there are people benefitting from it.

The increase in housing costs and degradation of conditions has now been going on for decades. Housing has become a very intensive site of exploitation in the current moment and often the big investment funds see more opportunity to extract money from housing than they do from setting up a factory, say, particularly in de-industrialised countries like the UK.

Around the world, people are starting to say that this can’t continue. We’ve got to do something about this. We’ve got to take the fight to the landlords and to the establishment who are keeping things going this way.

After Occupy, for instance, a lot of people started thinking about more permanent organisations, which could gather people together in communities of solidarity. Tenant unions just became the answer in a lot of different places.

You’re talking about the Global North where the population is stable. Free market theorists say that supply and demand means that housing prices should remain as stable as the population. So, what’s behind this surge in rent costs?

That depends on who you ask. There are some on the UK left who say that we don’t need to build more housing in the UK. I disagree with that. As an example, housing has been quite tight in London, and over the last few years net migration into London has been half a million people. When that’s happening, I do think is necessary to build more housing.

However, at the moment, building more housing doesn’t actually make prices cheaper, and part of the reason for that is because more and more capital is flowing into housing. It is becoming really attractive to big real estate investment trusts, private equity even.

Housing prices are not just about supply and demand. It’s also about who has the capital to put into it. So, what’s happening in the UK, and I suspect in a lot of countries, is that the landlords have more capital than ordinary people. They out-compete everyone.

People also occupy housing less densely than they used to. In a lot of rich countries the boomer generation is coming into retirement. In a more rational housing market, when you retire and your kids have left home, you might sell your three- or four-bedroom house and move into a smaller place. But what’s happening is that for a lot of retired people, their house is their main asset, which gives them a lot of security.

It’s not just retired couples. Single people are also living in large family houses. The boomer generation is called that because it was so large. Now enormous numbers of older, retired people who don’t really need very much space are living in these big houses. That’s a more peripheral effect, but it all comes into the mix.

In the UK, a big factor is the sale of social housing. The purpose of social housing was to undermine the landlord class and provide cheap, quality accommodation. Nobody would dream of paying large amounts of money to a private landlord. A big project of neoliberalism was to sell off a lot of public housing.

People talk about this a lot in the UK. But there are other countries that haven’t sold off their social housing. Spain never had much social housing. France hasn’t really sold off much. Yet they still have housing crises. There are a lot of factors in play. But the really short answer is property becoming attractive to capital.

How are people resisting the rise of rents?

The short answer is that they’re setting up tenant unions.

What does a tenant union do?

A tenant union is a membership organisation that collectivises people’s struggles around housing in a similar way to a union collectivising people’s struggles around the workplace.

A lot of people were involved in smaller struggles before over a particular building or a particular housing estate in London. And people saw that there was a need to build larger organisations, to really build broad-based solidarity. And so, these tenant unions have arisen. Usually, they have a fee-paying membership. So, they have resources. Some of them have paid staff, others don’t.

But all the tenant unions have two main tracks that they’re working on. One is solidarity around particular conflicts with landlords. Sometimes that’s just an individual having a conflict with a landlord, sometimes it’s a whole building. A lot of the base organising of the tenant union is around those conflicts.

Another track is campaigning. Most tenant unions are involved in campaigning for things like rent controls or ending no-fault evictions, which has just been won in the UK. They are also campaigning at local level around regulation of landlords and things like that.

A lot of the tenant unions are also trying to build local communities of solidarity, so that neighbours get to know each other and people do not live in isolation. Most tenant unions see themselves as part of a wider political project of trying to challenge individualism, making sure that people don’t feel that they’re facing the troubles of life alone.

London Renters Union, for example, tries to make its events enjoyable. It’s not just about having meetings. We have food in most of the branch meetings, we put on events people can enjoy coming to. It’s about building relationships and trying to spread networks of solidarity through your community.

You’re talking about moving from smaller, localised struggles to larger ones. It’s obvious how that works in social housing if everyone has the same landlord. How can people with different landlords work together?

This is a particular problem in the UK, where ‘landlordism’ is very dispersed. Most landlords in the UK only own one or two houses. Most blocks are owned by the local authority. This is something that London Renters Union has had to address by developing a narrative of mutual aid: “We’re going to help you. You’re going to help with someone else’s struggle.”

We sometimes put quite a lot of work into just one individual’s case. Sometimes that person then leaves the union and never sees us again. It’s always a little disappointing when that happens. But a lot of people don’t. They stay and want to fight other people’s cases as well.

The collective action element comes in with individual cases, where a tenant union decides that we will bring pressure on either the landlord or the agents in a collective way. We might write a letter to an agent who is failing to do repairs on a house. Then we turn up at the agent’s office with 20 people and say: “here are our demands. We are not going to go away until you sort this out. We are going to make your life miserable until you sort this out.”

That can be very effective. It doesn’t always work. Any workplace union could tell you that you don’t win every fight. But London Renters Union has got pretty good at winning.

Part of your book covers Berlin, where most of our readers live. As an outsider, what’s your perception of the housing movement in Berlin at the moment?

On the one hand, the housing movement is stronger in terms of numbers than in London. Berlin has had strong housing organising for a while. On the other hand, it’s very apparent that a lot of the attempts to stop gentrification have not, in fact, stopped gentrification. Many attempts to save sites which were available for community use have failed. The rents keep going up. There are some really wonderful successes, but it feels like not enough.

I talk a little bit about the expropriation campaign in the book. That’s a wonderful, inspiring campaign in many ways. A lot of people around the world read about it and go: “Wow, we wish we could achieve something like this here”. On the other hand, it also feels painfully slow to many people. It also feels like it will only help a limited number of people.

In Berlin, everyone knows the figure 59.1%, which was the number of people who voted to expropriate the big landlords. But after we won the referendum, the Berlin government just simply ignored the decision and carried on as before. What can we do to ensure that we do not just win votes, but get real change?

Barcelona has suffered some similar disappointments, where the housing movement got their people into the city government for a few years, who managed to make some changes, just not as many changes as people were hoping. And there’s still a housing crisis in Barcelona.

Now that that left wing government is out of power, they’re asking themselves: how is it that we could get so far and still not really make a big impact on housing for ordinary people? I think the difficult but true answer is that it’s hard to see how housing issues will really be resolved without undoing the wider neo-liberal governing conjuncture and taking on the powers of finance at the national and international level.

It is a huge struggle, but we have to face up to the reality that to make changes through legislative methods, these wins at local level are often not enough. You’re going to have to get wins at national level and get your people into government at national level.

But even then, you’re going to find that you’re up against the power of capital and the finance power block. The reality is that we’re not going to solve housing crisis until we are strong enough to take that on. That’s quite a difficult message, because it feels a long and painful job to take on those powers. But I do think it’s going to be necessary.

The strongest interim measure that you can take, without entirely overthrowing the current order, is to get public housing built in very large quantities. But the problem with that is you’ve got to get the finance for it. And as long as governments are pretending that austerity is the only option, it’s very difficult to get the finance for that housing.

Building more public housing is not a full answer, but it’s a good halfway house. And even to get that, we’re going to have to undo the entire austerity narrative that has bedevilled Europe for the last couple of decades. We’re going to have to say: “this scarcity you’ve created is false. We do have the resources to build the public housing we need”. I think it’s achievable, but it’s a big, big project.

What would you say to the people who say higher rents are not because of landlords or austerity. They’re the fault of migrants?

Of course, it is not migrants’ fault that house prices go up. This is about the scarcity narrative that years of austerity has induced. People are convinced that there’s very scarce resources to go around and that there’s not enough to share with new people coming in.

That narrative is entirely false. In the case of London, which has had a lot of migration over the last few years, you do need to build more housing, but that housing needs to be public housing. It needs to be aimed at the working-class, low-income people who need it the most.

In many cities, the population is not increasing. In that case, it’s very easy to show it’s nothing to do with migrants. It’s to do with the grip that landlords and capital in general have over the housing economy.

The main thing we have to do around this migration issue is destroy this idea of scarcity. We live in very rich countries with enormous access to resources. We can share these resources around, as long as the people at the top aren’t hoarding too much of it. And that’s got to be the main message.

Where can people get hold of your book?

Renters Unite is published by Pluto press, and you can order from their website, or you can just go into a bookshop and ask them to order it for you.

Is there anything that you’d like to say that we haven’t covered?

I would say, join a tenant union. And if there isn’t one near you, start a tenant union. Because this is the fight of our lives. We’ve got to win decent housing, or we can never live well.

Illustration: Anna Hijmans