Interesting letter sent by a Cambridge property agent to its (landlord) clients. Excerpt:

“As a letting agent, we are not interested in promoting any particular political party, but do feel that it is important to alert you, as a valued client, to the potentially damaging outcomes of Labour’s proposed policies. These are policies that will be extremely detrimental to you.”

The message goes on to outline possible outcomes of Labour’s plan to abolish fees for tenants.

“Whilst at first glance this might sound as if it is a good thing for tenants, I can assure you that it will have the opposite effect. Should tenant fees be abolished these costs will be passed to the landlord and if this happens there is a very strong possibility that many landlords will either increase rents to recoup their costs or they will withdraw from the market and sell their properties.”

And:

“There is a very strong possibility that you, and thousands of other tenants, could lose your homes and find it almost impossible to source another rental property because the supply of good quality accommodation will dry up”.

Note the opening assurance about not promoting any particular political party.

Interesting also that the ‘advice’ didn’t work. The Labour candidate was elected!

Memo to self: Avoid Belvoir.

From this morning’s New York Times:

PARIS — At a moment when American lawmakers are reconsidering the broad surveillance powers assumed by the government after Sept. 11, the lower house of the French Parliament took a long stride in the opposite direction Tuesday, overwhelmingly approving a bill that could give the authorities their most intrusive domestic spying abilities ever, with almost no judicial oversight.

The bill, in the works since last year, now goes to the Senate, where it seems likely to pass, having been given new impetus in reaction to the terrorist attacks in and around Paris in January. Those attacks, which included the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery, left 17 people dead.

As the authorities struggle to keep up with the hundreds of French citizens who travel to and from battlefields in Iraq and Syria to wage jihad, often lured over the Internet, the new steps would give the intelligence services the right to gather potentially unlimited electronic data.

The powers being sought would

allow the intelligence services to tap cellphones, read emails and force Internet companies to comply with requests to allow the government to sift through virtually all of their subscribers’ communications. Among the types of surveillance that the intelligence services would be able to carry out is bulk collection and analysis of metadata similar to that done by the United States’ National Security Agency.

The intelligence services could also request the right to put hidden microphones in a room or on objects such as cars or in computers, or to place antennas to capture telephone conversations or mechanisms that capture text messages. Both French citizens and foreigners could be tapped.

This is interesting in all kinds of ways, but mainly because it shows that surveillance isn;t just an American or a British problem. It’s a ubiquitous problem, and it’s always justified by the same rationale — states of exception

Nice post by Paul Mason:

The polls have not moved, so we’re about to get the second hung parliament in succession, in a system that never used to produce them. Only this time we don’t just get a coalition government. We get an existential crisis of the constitution, and of the UK as a political entity, that no political party is currently geared up to deal with.

To understand why, you have to recognise the demographic tribalism that an economic system in crisis has produced. I’ve written about this before: the division of England into an asset-rich south, a post-industrial north and the emergence of a positive national consciousness in Scotland linked to the rejection of neo-liberal economics.

Worth reading in full.

Martin Wolf is one of my favourite columnists. This is his verdict on the two contenders for power in the forthcoming election.

Hmmm… Only in so far as they surveill Americans at home. Today’s New York Times reports that

On Thursday, a bill that would overhaul the Patriot Act and curtail the so-called metadata surveillance exposed by Edward J. Snowden was overwhelmingly passed by the House Judiciary Committee and was heading to almost certain passage in that chamber this month.

An identical bill in the Senate — introduced with the support of five Republicans — is gaining support over the objection of Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, who is facing the prospect of his first policy defeat since ascending this year to majority leader.

Under the bills, the Patriot Act would be changed to prohibit bulk collection, and sweeps that had operated under the guise of so-called National Security Letters issued by the F.B.I. would end. The data would instead be stored by the phone companies themselves, and could be accessed by intelligence agencies only after approval of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

The legislation would also create a panel of experts to advise the FISA court on privacy, civil liberties, and technology matters, while requiring the declassification of all significant FISA court opinions.

Neither bill will, however, do anything to end the unrestricted surveillance of non-Americans, i.e the rest of the world, whose privacy, and therefore their civil liberties, will continue to be infringed by the US, without let or hindrance.