If you can’t afford a home, why vote Tory?

Back in the 90s and even early noughties, it was a cliché that middle-class English people used to talk about house prices at dinner parties. That hasn’t been the case for a good decade, if my social circles are any indicators; it would be like bringing up interesting anecdotes of people we know discovering they have cancer.

For years, a handful of miserablists, such as our own Nick Cohen, have been warning that housing inflation is not the great boom it was once believed to be, but is in fact an unmitigated social disaster. For years we’ve done nothing about it. And finally, in 2017, rising house prices have proven to be the crack in the dam for the right. It has lead to a flood of devastating support from the under-45s for a left-wing Labour leader. So when Owen Jones gloats or Alex Massie laments that the Tories have lost the next generation of voters it’s hard to disagree with them, and although there are cultural factors involved, a huge, huge problem is the cost of homes.