Too Few Houses, Too Many People

In the latest wave of strikes to hit Britain, nurses, train drivers, rail workers, university lecturers, border officials, civil servants and other workers have taken to the picket lines in protest against the government’s plans to require striking workers to reduce disruption to the public by providing a minimum service. The industrial action co-ordinated by the Trades Union Congress, once so mighty a body that it was said no government could afford to provoke its ire, has been deprived of some of its bite thanks to the changing nature of work. Since the pandemic, most companies are now fully equipped for their employees to work from home. As for striking border officials, many newspapers reported passengers flying into Heathrow saying they’d never seen such quick, friendly and efficient passage through customs as when it was manned by cheerful squaddies from the British Army.

All the romance and performative importance of the strike remains—who can resist a little toot of the horn when driving past a picket line?—but dated chants and be-sloganed placards cannot disguise the reality that the effect of most strikes has been greatly reduced from the heyday of the 1970s. And ridiculous though some striking unions’ demands are—a 19 per cent wage increase for nurses, for example—there is an underlying truth to the complaints raised by Britain’s unions.

“Broken Britain” feels like an everyday reality to many, as inflation has eaten away the value of incomes and savings, making the dream of property ownership even more distant. Remainers and ardent Europhiles are keen to blame Brexit for all of Britain’s woes, but every negative trend began long before the UK left the European Union.

This report appeared in March’s Quadrant.
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The referendum result itself was fundamentally an expression of British optimism. In the face of an entire establishment that asserted the impossibility of leaving the EU and the certain disaster that would follow, British voters still had enough confidence in themselves to decide it was best to manage their own affairs than to hand Brussels a permanent blank cheque. That confidence, especially when compared to their European neighbours, is at least in part thanks to a long history of legitimacy that dates back to 1066. (The British have always found it easy to ignore the Cromwellian period as an unfortunate experiment that somehow doesn’t count.) Many Continental states have some record of either collaboration with totalitarian evil, or outright practice of it. Parts of Europe’s largest nation, Germany, were under totalitarian regimes from 1933 until 1990.

Despite the efforts of leftist historians, Britons refuse to feel guilty about the British Empire, accepting its faults and occasional crimes as obvious but not integral. The British mentality is thus endowed with a certain kind of little-c conservatism that is completely detached from one’s place on the political spectrum which found expression in polling booths across the country when the Brexit question was put on June 23, 2016.

While the overwhelming majority of Brexit doom-mongers’ predictions have failed to come true, there is an increasingly pervasive sense that the UK is no longer a society of opportunities. Comparing today to the Thatcher era is instructive: then you had a government sure of itself—though not without infighting—focused on unleashing creative and entrepreneurial energy. Refusal to accept permanent decline was embodied in the commitment to liberate the Falklands from its Argentine occupiers and the government’s pursuit of a straight course through unemployment, riots and strife that it knew would produce fruitful long-term results.

One of the most popular policies of the Thatcher era was the Right to Buy scheme, allowing those in state-owned council housing to purchase the properties they lived in. An Englishman’s home is his castle, and the expansion of home ownership arguably reflected desires and priorities buried deep in the English psyche. The Right to Buy scheme was a one-off that brought 1.7 million people into property ownership. If you happened to have a bit of savings and capital, purchased your council house in the 1980s, and held on to it until the 2000s or beyond, the vast inflation in property prices could turn you into an asset millionaire. But central government and local authorities failed to keep building more council or other social housing to make up for the houses that had been transferred to private ownership, depriving the country of flexibility and diversity in forms of housing.

The housing shortage is at its most severe in London, where the average first-time buyer spends double the average price around the rest of the UK. Londoners’ wages, adjusted for inflation, are now 8 per cent lower than they were when the financial crisis struck in 2008, so even a recent decline in property prices (after several decades of increases) has failed to give local residents any joy. Tighter regulation of financial services has made the banking sector safer but also more risk-averse in its lending. After several pre-crash years of easy money, mortgages are more difficult to obtain for those who don’t have large deposits or high incomes.

Confidence in London property as a reliable investment is so strong and has such a proven record that a global downturn will provide no relief to locals in bringing property prices back down to less inflated levels because international money moves in seamlessly in a crisis. A side-effect of this is empty homes. A fellow soup kitchen volunteer gave me a lift home once and described how only a little over half the houses in his small street in well-to-do Chelsea were actually lived in full-time—the rest had been purchased by international buyers as a good way of storing capital and were used just a few weeks or weekends of the year.

This foreign-owned unused housing pushes those who do work in London to live further out and further down the housing ladder. Rows of terraced houses that were built to house Victorian workers were taken over by young graduates in the 1980s and 1990s but today are lived in not by entry-level financial employees but by successful people in their mid or late career.

The imbalance is not just international money in London, but the overwhelming predominance of the financial sector’s cash within the metropolis. Financial workers in England often earn vast amounts. The surfeit of money has further skewed the housing market. Thatcher’s empowering era of distributing ownership of property more broadly is now reversing, as the barriers to stepping on the housing ladder are higher and higher and property ownership is becoming the preserve either of the financial and legal sectors or of those who’ve inherited.

Make no mistake: wealth and prosperity are good things. Those who fetishise poorer, less-well-off societies should try living in them as ordinary working people. There are also innumerable benefits from the money that has been brought in to London through a flourishing financial sector, and the tax receipts—whether from personal income or corporate earnings—have helped subsidise the many services Britons expect from their state.

The problem is the gross imbalances created which no hand—visible or invisible—is intervening to remedy. The government could intervene effectively by facilitating the large-scale building of new housing. Conservative post-war statesmen like Thomas Playford in South Australia and Giorgio La Pira in Florence understood the importance of housing and utilised the state to facilitate it. When Churchill and the Conservatives returned to government in 1951, they ambitiously increased Labour’s pledge to build 200,000 houses a year up to 300,000 per year. The role of housing minister—one of the least glamorous in the 1950s—was handed to Harold Macmillan.

At a time when the Treasury was trying to conserve resources for export, Macmillan battled to obtain scarce timber, cement and steel. Churchill warned him it was a huge risk to the younger man’s political career, “But,” the old bulldog added, “every humble home will bless your name if you succeed”. Macmillan not only managed to reach the house-building target, he did it a year ahead of schedule—earning a promotion to Defence Minister and setting him on the road to Number 10.

Since David Cameron brought the Conservatives back into power in 2010, this important pedigree of house-building, which should be shouted from the rooftops, has been ignored. While the problem was an obvious lack of supply, Cameron’s chancellor and sidekick George Osborne decided to create a Help to Buy scheme which ignored supply issues and instead subsidised further demand. More demand would, Cameron and Osborne argued, create more supply. But in Britain’s case house-building is drastically limited by a sclerotic planning system that stymies new construction. It is easy to lodge objections to any planning application, no matter how sensible the proposal, and the tiniest interference with nature often prevents approval.

Many parts of London have been too lightly developed since the 1980s. Huge swathes of post-industrial landscapes were transformed into single-family homes or the equivalent of bungalows. Areas like Rotherhithe and Surrey Docks—ideally situated between central London and Canary Wharf—could have fit high-density mixed-use districts housing tens of thousands but instead were transformed into quiet neighbourhoods of little houses. This might be reflective of the inherent desires of the English, but it still represents a missed opportunity.

Add the poor quality of design and building in the new developments that manage to get planning approval. Even luxury developments like the ones going up in Nine Elms, Vauxhall and elsewhere are quite shoddily built and are rarely a pleasure for the eyes. Forty years from now these towers will be falling apart, with the leaseholders or share-of-freehold owners left to foot the bill.

There was no worse example of this than the disastrous fire in Grenfell Tower in June 2017. This 1970s tower—council-owned and managed—had recently been reclad in materials which had been approved as safe by the regulators but which turned out to be flammable to a deadly extent. Residents were repeatedly given official advice that in the event of fire they must remain in their flats rather than attempt to evacuate. A number of the flats were illegally divided, sublet and over-housed. The result was seventy-two dead and seventy-four injured on top of property damage estimated between £200 million and £1 billion.

Housing that isn’t deadly shouldn’t be a tall order, but eternally liberalising Britain has spent decades hollowing out almost every institution: schooling, universities, trade unions, professional bodies, the courts, railways, the health service, and of course local government and housing. The leaders thrown up by this system are extremely uneven. Some are frighteningly incompetent, with most of their non-political experience gained in these same hollowed-out institutions of our declining society.

It has become commonplace to cite any example of decline and point out: “Twelve years of Conservative government!” The scandal these declarations attempt to expose is twofold.

First, few political parties in democratic systems are given such a long spell in power. True: Tories have been consumed first by Brexit battles and then by the coronavirus. But voters who’ve consistently installed Conservative governments must feel short-changed by how little there is to show for it.

Second, the shouts of “Twelve years!” are also an admission that the Conservatives are the only political force in the country which could even possibly have the capability of changing what needs to be changed, or preserving what needs to be preserved.Labour has become slave to faddish ideas and is dependent upon the bien-pensant metropolitan liberal elite and its co-aligned professional classes. While the party still views itself as on the side of the worker and the vulnerable it simultaneously looks upon these people with condescension. Labour remains for the most part wedded to the combination of liberal economics and liberal social policy that has devastated working-class communities across Britain. While Conservatives can move a little left on economics, tipping the scales in favour of workers, Labour finds it impossible to move a little rightwards socially in any way that might win them back working-class voters.

Keir Starmer, however, is an astute observer of the political scene as well as a cunning operator. He has ruthlessly purged internal opposition—often in welcome ways, expelling or deselecting MPs with if not outright racist attitudes to Jews then at least comfortably adjacent to far-left anti-Semites. Starmer also knows that the tiniest move rightwards or even centre-wards on social issues would alienate parts of Labour’s internal coalition. Labour is the default opposition, with no chance of the Liberal Democrats stealing this role. All Starmer needs to do, then, is wait for voters to tire of the Conservatives and the Conservatives to tire of serious governing.

For the government’s part, there is neither an appreciable vision nor practical policies being put to voters to give them a reason to keep backing the Conservatives. Repeated Home Secretaries have proved ineffective at stopping the tide of illegal economic migrants across the English Channel. And despite no democratic mandate ever existing for mass immigration, the level of legal immigration is still far too high for most voters, left or right.

There is a series of challenges. Workers need to be paid more, but without consequent inflation. We need many more trained staff in certain sectors like health and social care, but can’t address existing waiting lists in the NHS without importing foreign staff, adding to immigration woes. Illegal Channel crossings need to be stopped completely and asylum reserved for actual refugees in fear of their lives rather than economic migrants. The current level of house-building probably needs to be doubled, but the houses need to be built in areas where older Tory voters are prepared to vote Liberal to stop development they don’t want.

The latest possible date of the next general election is January 2025. Unless the Conservatives can pull a rabbit out of a hat, it doesn’t bode well for another term in office. But I doubt there’s even a rabbit. And if there is, we probably privatised the hat years ago.