I’m never going to be able to own my home, that’s why I’ll vote Labour; also the Tories are horrible to immigrants and they don’t think animals are alive or something, my friend Molly shared it on Facebook.
That’s basically the crux of the argument I’m hearing, obviously a reductio one, and I sense the frustration. I’ve argued before that house-building is an existential issue for the Tories and that we need to allow people to build the sort of beautiful homes neighbours will not object to. (Even if you don’t like it, traditional architecture neutralises NIMBYism).
And yet last year 150,000 homes were built in Britain, which on paper, for the third most densely populated non-microstate in Europe (and England is first), and for a country well below sub-replacement fertility, should be enough. But it’s not, it’s barely even sufficient to house the extra 246,000 people who officially arrived here from March 2016.
As the crisis has got worse, and homes have become ever more unaffordable, the animus has been directed against the Tories, and old people, and countryside-dwellers; strangely the intersection between people bitter about housing costs and hostile to any immigration restrictions as being a priori racist is pretty large, even though an increase in demand will lead to an increase in price.
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