The Labour Party Conference was in full swing in Brighton. Should the policies it was discussing be enough to sway the British public to vote the Party into power at the next general election, expected later this year, then a year or two from now it is possible that your property portfolio will have been sold (reluctantly) to your tenants for pennies in the pound.

It will be just as well really, as by then the rent controls the Party will have enforced meant that you were running at a loss anyway, especially since the tax breaks on your mortgage interest payments were phased out. You had a couple of really bad tenants that you wanted to evict anyway, but the Labour Party banned the eviction process so you were stuck with them, until suddenly they found enough cash to buy your property from you under Right to Buy.

The withdrawal of any monthly rental income has meant that you have had to re-enter the workforce of course, but the good news is that you get Fridays off because nobody works five days per week in the UK anymore. This also allows you to spend an extra day per week with your children because the last thing you want to do is send them to that local crack-den masquerading as a high-school for any longer than you have to (you were forced to pull them out of private school because Labour made those illegal also). The money you were paying for private school education is being put into your local bank to go towards your children’s future university fees. The trouble is that base rates are now in negative territory across all of Europe so you are paying your local bank 1-2% of the balance each year to look after your cash.

Yes, we live in strange times but they could be about to get a lot stranger if Labour has its way. The radical proposals being debated by Labour in Brighton also include linking rents to local incomes and capping them at no more than one-third of the local wage, while also giving local councils increased power to purchase empty homes that have been left empty for more than six months.