How to get on the housing ladder

It is always interesting to watch the debates that roil a nation. So far as I can see, the current debate in parliament mainly consists of trying to work out whether the NHS is competent enough to kill people or not. This week one of our greatest Home Office ministers – Jess Phillips MP – was asked about the question of ‘assisted dying’. She said that, naturally, she is in favour of this ‘progressive’ policy. But one qualm held back her support. In Phillips’s estimation the NHS is ‘not in a fit enough state’ at present to kill patients on demand.

Many people whose family members have gone through the NHS might beg to differ with Phillips on this point. In my own observation, as well as the evidence of neglect on care wards, cancer waiting times and much more, the NHS strikes me as being exceptionally well-placed to kill its patients. Many of them may not want to be killed, but it is an interesting argument to make: that the NHS is too busy killing people who don’t want to die in order to be able to perform the same service for people who do.

In any case, there must be things that the nation could fix its eyes on other than just killing us all off. One issue that springs to mind is why consecutive governments seem to have decided the end-ambition of Britain as a country is that immigration must remain at such historic highs that everything in the land must be covered with ugly new housing developments.