The Tories have trampled on renters for too long, and Liz Truss is about to feel their pain

theguardian.com:

When Liz Truss met her MPs on Wednesday, the mood, by all accounts, was as if there had been a death in the family.

One MP reportedly described “a terrible feeling of sorrow in the room” as backbenchers listened despondently to a leader who has barely been in office a month yet already seems broken beyond repair.

It’s the markets that call the shots now, not the prime minister. Truss will surely have to junk much of her ill-judged mini-budget to placate her new masters, but will even that be enough? A chaotic U-turn could merely strengthen investors’ view that Britain has become a basket case. It’s still hard to envisage the precise mechanism for triggering a general election, but it’s even harder to imagine staggering on like this for another two years. The funereal Westminster mood reflects the fact that many Tory MPs now expect to lose their jobs sooner rather than later, and are beginning to wonder how they’ll pay the bills. To which the nation could be forgiven for responding: well, now you know how it feels.

Rocketing interest rates make this a scary winter for anyone with a mortgage, but arguably even scarier for renters. Rents were already on the rise before this crisis, driven by a shortage of properties as tenants streamed back into big cities post-pandemic. When the pressure group Generation Rent surveyed its supporters, it found 45% of those who had been in their current place for more than a year had been asked to pay more, with cut-throat competition for flats sparking bidding wars and even outbreaks of gazumping. But the big difference between now and Black Wednesday, the last time mortgage rates suddenly rocketed, is that this time renters are more directly exposed.

The private rented sector has almost