They are revolting (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
Aspiration is a word forgotten by the Conservative Party. It’s certainly not a word that’s forgotten by me. In only one generation, my family went from being born in council housing and needing to muck out the pigs before heading out to school, to providing a comfortable suburban upbringing that paved the way to my own graduate career in financial services. What better example of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” conservatism could there be than this?
I first joined the party around 2011, 18-years-old and full of belief in the values that I think have delivered so much for my family, and the country at large. The right of individuals to choose how to spend their own money. The power of liberalised markets to deliver improvements in living standards. The importance of our national institutions. Empowering individuals to live their life on their terms. My belief in these values has not changed.
What has changed is the Conservative Party. While its leadership candidates would happily agree with these aspirational principles, to be a young Conservative today feels like being a Judas goat, leading its own generation towards destitution. It’s not just me — my circle of young party members didn’t have a positive word to say when we found out the choice was between the two continuity Johnson cabinet candidates.
I want to light a fire under the arse of the party. I want to grab it by the lapels and shout with the moral fury of a cri de cœur: “You cannot continue like this”. A country must build for its future, not relentlessly indulge its present. To continue as we are, offering crumbs to the young while ceaselessly gifting jam to the Baby Boomer generation, simply because it wins elections in the short term, is not just bad for our party’s electoral prospects in the coming decades. It is fundamentally unpatriotic and unconservative.
Acting against conservative principles has consequences. Thank goodness, the leadership debate has finally noticed Britain’s appalling growth record over the past decade and a half — a period that awkwardly coincides with 12 years of Tory rule. The leadership candidates even openly admitted in the BBC leadership debate that the party’s economic management has failed to make Britain any better off. We are no richer than we were before the financial crisis. The march of economic progress — the increases in real earnings and upgrades in living standards that defined postwar Britain — has stalled.
“We have had a consensus of the Treasury, of economists, with the Financial Times, with other outlets, peddling a particular type of economic policy for 20 years. It hasn’t delivered growth,” said Liz Truss. She’s right. If we don’t change course, we could well see the United Kingdom fall behind the per capita GDP of Poland in little more than a decade. The former Soviet satellite state had to play catch up after it was forced to run an uncompetitive and sclerotic command economy for the best part of five decades. What excuse does Britain — the birthplace of free trade, and of the industrial revolution — have for its lacklustre economic performance?
“What people in Britain desperately need now is change,” Truss added. She is, at least, challenging the orthodoxy that has led us to this juncture. But, like a plague doctor from 1769, while her diagnosis might be right, her cure is the equivalent of stripping at midnight during a full moon and standing in a barrel of eels. I lean heavily to the Right on economics — I should be delighted by Truss’s promises of immediate tax cuts to the tune of £30bn per annum. She’s proposed a reversal of the manifesto-breaching National Insurance hike, cancelling the planned 6p rise in corporation tax, and a two-year suspension of the green levy — a particularly eye-catching and juicy policy with energy bills soaring. Sunak, meanwhile, has pledged to cut the basic rate of income tax to 16% by 2029.
In one sense, less taxation is exactly what I want to see from a Conservative government, not least with my own marginal rate reaching beyond an eye-watering 60%. Cutting taxes is the fillet steak of red meat Thatcherism, is it not? While Truss may be claiming the mantle of Margaret Thatcher as her own with her tax cuts proposals, what the proposals forget is that Thatcher was cautious on tax cuts until the hard work — of eliminating the economy’s structural weaknesses — was done. In fact, taxation as a share of GDP continued rising into the early Thatcher years, only consistently falling after 1985, six years into the Conservative government.
In the Seventies, the structural weaknesses were all-powerful unions obstructing industry reform and undead, state-owned businesses kept going only through public subsidy. Modern Britain has its own equivalent of this economic drag anchor: the cost of housing and its root cause — the utterly dysfunctional planning system.
That planning system is designed not around growth, progress or even necessity. Rather, it is almost exclusively geared towards securing the lifestyle and preferences of those who already own — and who overwhelmingly oppose development. The result is laughably predictable: a severe supply shortage of homes and rocketing prices that far outstrip languid growth in earnings. Astonishingly, property listing website Zoopla found last year that one in five homes “earned” more in a year than the average UK salary. So much for the dignity of work.
We cannot expect anything other than a sclerotic economy if we throttle the supply of workers in our most productive regions through high housing costs. One study found that by restricting access to workers through planning regulation, aggregate economic growth in the United States was a third lower than it could have been between 1964 and 2009. The cost may even be higher for the United Kingdom. Choking off all development is not small-c conservative protection of the “local character” of our neighbourhoods. It is nation-wrecking.
London, host to some of the most productive financial and legal services in the world, is now home to house prices 14 times greater than median incomes. Between the war and 2000, this multiple never rose above six. In Oxford and Cambridge, home to countless high-productivity businesses associated with the crown jewels of British higher education, the multiple exceeds 12. There is a clear economic incentive for young people to steer well clear of the country’s most productive jobs. That means lower growth, lower living standards, higher taxes, and worse public services.
And here lies the national practical joke: who supports this incredibly restrictive, nationalised and closed planning market? The party that liberally peppers its speeches with saccharine praise for privatised, lightly-regulated, liberalised markets. And what is the closed, state-regulated planning market that benefits existing players? A huge government subsidy. Again, anathema to Tory orthodoxy.
“The best way to achieve economic growth is cutting taxes and bureaucracy, and boosting private sector investment and innovation,” said Rishi Sunak, also at the BBC television debate. Yes! Reforming the planning bureaucracy fits hand in glove with the rhetoric. Yet neither candidate will touch the planning system with a barge pole, let alone seek a mandate from the membership to reform it, because it is an electoral livewire. Any attempt at change swiftly results in enormous electoral backlash, as proven by the 2021 Chesham and Amersham by-election loss, followed immediately by dilution, if not abandonment of reform.
Without seeking a mandate for change from the party, attempts at change will always fall flat. David Cameron’s leadership campaign back in 2005 featured an open, public insistence that the party had to transform to ever win power again. “When I say change, I’m not talking about some slick rebranding exercise: what I’m talking about is fundamental change, so that when we fight the next election… we have a message that is relevant to people’s lives today, that shows we’re comfortable with modern Britain,” Cameron said at his 2005 conference speech, widely seen as the turning point that put him on the path to victory.
Cameron challenged his party to accept the social liberalism of modern Britain or face electoral oblivion. By making this a core theme of his campaign, and by winning, he was able to move forward and drag the party with him. I see no equivalent pitch coming from either candidate on what should be the most salient issue of the day. Sunak is actually proudly stating he’ll give residents even more power to block housing near them. How is someone in their early thirties, in a rented flat, with no prospect of owning their own home, whose wages haven’t risen in more than a decade, to interpret that, other than as utter contempt for how the country works against them?
It cannot even be claimed that this inequity is in the party’s long-term interests. If multiple generations are locked out of homeownership, they will not vote Conservative. Why should they?
My message to the party leadership is very simple: you are not discharging the duty of society to care for and improve the lives of its young. How am I, as a young Conservative, meant to defend our party’s record? How can I, when it is directly lowering my standard of living in order to subsidise already well-off, retired and home-owning Baby Boomers — whose incomes, for the first time in history, exceed working age incomes?
And while housing is the worst part of a sorry national picture, the intergenerational war on the young doesn’t stop there. Working age benefits fall while pensioners enjoy the comfort of the triple lock policy. Usurious rates of interest are applied to student debt. Taxes are at their highest level since the war, paying for increased NHS spending that primarily benefits the elderly. To be young today is to be relentlessly milked for extractive, gerontocratic tastes.
It has become a common trope: the young, imperious politico announces their resignation on social media with an image of a cut-up party membership card. Why don’t I do the same, given my contemptuous descriptions of the party’s record in government? I’m clinging on by my fingertips, still believing in “our” values. Truss or Sunak need to actually implement these values, instead of just paying lip service to them, to get my vote.
Right now, I’m planning to simply scrawl “build more bloody houses” on my ballot paper in a thick marker pen. The young, renting staffer opening the envelope to record the vote, whose wages haven’t risen in a decade, is unlikely to disagree with the proposition.
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Subscribe“People – rightly – recognise that building more homes while doing nothing to bring immigration down is like running up the down escalator”: Kemi Badenoch, 2022
And that is why the country voted Leave. Net migration in 2021 c.240K
Fewer Eastern Europeans, more 3rd Worlders!
Well one of the East Europeans has just murdered a nine year old girl in Boston, Lincs, a town that was already the murder capital of England on a per capita basis. And an East European killed a six year old English girl in Bolton a couple of years ago.
No, it is not OK and I was not suggesting that, although it does suggest some sort of dispute between two Lithuanian families.
Correct! We – Leave voters – gave the politicians the means to control immigration. Now they need to do it.
They also need to stop illegal immigration otherwise it will cancel out any gains we get from reducing legal immigration. So they need to get Rwanda plan up and running and expanded.
I would suggest, as a first step, we double the minimum salary requirement for work visas to £50k per annum. Also we should not expand the Hong Kong scheme beyond British passport holders, as some are suggesting.
On housing specifically we should also look at overseas investors buying UK property.
If we can get net migration to something like 100k pa and build houses at a rate of 200k per year (as we did in 2018 and 19), we might just get on top of this.
So you are going to pay all those migrants working in nursing homes 50K a year?
From 1997-2016 c. 66% of migrants were non Europeans (Free movement). Plenty of control there.
Last time I “fact checked” these topics, I recall that a newcomer to this country has to earn £42k p/a in order to be a “net contributor” financially.
So ok, maybe £50k is too high, but certainly above £42k might be reasonable.
Of course I fully understand the fact that contributions do our society aren’t purely measured in money- but to allow anyone into this country who is NOT a net contributor costs money. Can we afford it?
The facts (not opinion) are that UK:
1) labor force is aging
2) low productivity workforce
So depending on the study UK needs around 200-300K to deal with its structural issues.
Farage once said that there is more to a nation than GDP growth (and I agree). But the people that take Farage’s position need to accept the consequences of the policy. Lower growth, lower tax take and worst public services. All good but again no “cakeism”!
I gave you the example of nursing homes ( i know the sector very well) because of cakesim. The Tory party promised to not raise taxes but also fix the sector.
Well we all know what happened – and that it is the political and economic reality.
“But the people that take Farage’s position need to accept the consequences of the policy.”
Quite prepared to do so, Jeremy. My home is not a get rich scheme
Yes, but your fellow citizens are not. Think of TM’s “dementia tax”.
“Yes, but your fellow citizens are not.”
How do you know that?
Voting record.
Again, think of “dementia tax”.
I’m not really sure about your facts to be honest. I’m always sceptical of productivity figures. Low productivity could well be due to an oversupply of cheap, low skill labour deterring investment in process efficiencies. Also our population structure is not so unhealthy – our largest cohort is 30-35 years old (largely due to immigration). But no doubt people are living long lives and so we have a large retired cohort (about 9% of the population is over 65).
If we were to increase the minimum salary limit, it would need to be done over a period of years to allow for automation to reduce manpower requirements and for recruitment and training of British kids into the jobs left vacant by reduced immigration.
What we really need is a plan that takes into account things like GP availability, housing starts and school places when deciding overall immigration allowances.
Also it is worth pointing out that the 240k work visas issued in 2021 is up from 190k in 2019 and so probably includes pent up demand built up during 2020 when entry to the UK was restricted. Getting from 190k to 100k over say ten years while we continue to build 200k houses a year (as per 2018 and 2019) is tough but not impossible.
Many moons ago an economist acquaintance told me that low GDP is almost always due to lack of investment in capital equipment, and that UK’s notoriously low GDP is because employers can get low skilled, low paid workers, removing the need to invest and thus keeping dividends up – until it all crashes around them.
He was right. We knew all of this decades ago. After Keynes died he left the post-Keynesian group – Joan Robinson in particular – whose genius should have been awarded a Nobel.
What keeps entrepreneurs on their toes (and insures investment) is a tight labour force.
Government stimulating capital expenditure (investment in productive equipment) is actually self defeating since it results in higher unemployment.
Business investment should come as a result of the natural cost pressures of the market – mostly labour.
Oh dear god, the wisdom we have lost…..
Based on what?
You are going to replace nurses, baristas, cleaners with robotics?
It is the structural economy of UK. You can not replace jobs in retail, hospitality, food services with robots.
Ways to replace humans, off the top of my head:
retail
Online shopping replacing shop staff
Amazon Fresh stores without tills
Ocado’s fully automated warehouses
hospitality and food services
ordering from a menu via app or console rather than from a human
collecting your own food and drinks Nando’s style
“dark kitchens” supplying different restaurants at the same time to achieve economies of scale with fewer staff
Using Uber cab drivers to deliver food as well as taking passengers
baristas
Self service coffee machines as seen in every petrol station in the land. I’ve seen videos of very upmarket ones in the US.
………………………………………………………
I’m sure there are labour-saving, productivity-improving options for nursing and cleaning which need upfront investment.
No one will make that investment if they know cheap labour will always be available. The best example is the automated carwash – they used to be the only alternative to washing your own car but the upfront cost for the entrepreneur was high. Then along can the EU expansion and hiring a dozen men to wash cars by hand become the most lucrative option. Now very low paid labour is cut off, expect to see a return to the carwash.
Start a steady and predictable yearly increase in the minimum salary requirement on work visas and business people will make the switch. Especially if we retain the high tax write-off on capital equipment.
Retail/food services – self-service tills are?
Hospitality – self check in at hotels/holiday rentals has become more common.
There are jobs that are harder to do with robots but having been to the Tottenham Hotspur stadium it is easy to see how in the future that could all be done without staff – cashless tills, automatic beer pouring, ordering over the phone at restaurants.
A rather unpopular view of the collapse in productivity is adding another 50% to the labour force since 1970!
This is not a misogynistic comment, merely an observation that productivity has fallen in what appears to be a rather correlated way.
It makes logical sense too: large increases to the labour force would have this impact.
I’ve never really understood this. Surely, the less one takes from a society in income, the less one has to contribute to it in order to be a “net” positive contributor? So a CEO earning £2mn per year with share options better well work very hard to demonstrate that they are clearly making a massive gross contribution, whereas the bar for someone working long hours in a high pressured, under-rewarded job in a care home that few other people want or are properly qualified to do is much, much lower.
Like a lot of other things, it’s inverted.
The bosses have their money and as ever want more of yours.
“ 3rd Worlders!” Where did you learn such an offensive term? USA?
Yes,
It was a widely used term. Now people use the “global south”…whatever…
Precisely, WAS not IS.
Ooh, is it not PC to say ‘third world’ any more? Good to know, thanks. It’s difficult to keep up sometimes!
Apparently not! Although I am old enough to use a far earlier and arguably ruder term that I obviously cannot repeat here, on pain of death.
I believe ‘developing countries’ is what you say now. Until, of course, that starts getting used as a flippant pejorative and we have to learn the new way not to ‘exclude’ people with our language.
It’s Majority World now as most of the world lives on $10 a day or less. I was told ‘developing’ countries is impolite as it suggests that countries are not fully developed unless they adopt Western standards of living.
Oh dear, I’m behind the curve again. I’m off to cancel myself. Tatty-bye and sorry for any trauma!
🙂
But we don’t have enough native manual workers (hospitality, airline industries etc) or skilled workers (health service etc), so what do you propose to do about it?
Immigrants are for the most part motivated, aspirational people – just getting here demonstrates that. Just the sort of people you Tories should like!
Immigration is a complex issue and there are no straightforward solutions. However, keeping Johnny Foreigner out is sadly not an option. The (mostly Tory) government and liberal market forces have demonstrably failed to provide increased facilities and infrastructure for those that have arrived over the last few decades. Meanwhile, the Progressives have pandered to the ‘cultural needs’ of incomers, rather than insisting they integrate into the country they were so desperate to be part of.
good
Unfortunately no one seem to notice that we didn’t have high levels of unemployment pre-Brexit so its not as if all those ‘free-movement’ Europeans were doing nothing. They were actually in employment, so as soon as FM stopped we had to increase non-EU immigration which is what has happened. The only way to decrease immigration is to change the structure of the economy so we can run things more efficiently with fewer people, but of course that means government interference which goes against the whole ideology of the ‘free market’. So we go round in circles.
Six days ago James McSweeny wrote and interesting article about urban planning in the UK and how it might be improved. There is no doubt that the planning system strangles development here and does nothing to provide local amenities for new developments.
However, the comment that gained the most votes by far was a brief post stating: “Just stop importing people: Learn to do without the cheap servants.”
Until people feel that immigration has been brought under control they will not support planning reform to create more housing and the necessary infrastructure of local services. They will not feel that new housing will be erected to improve their locality and their community rather than provide for an endless influx of immigrants.
Immigrants or no immigrants, older homeowners will never support anything that might lower the price of their house.
You are generalising and making assumptions. I am an older homeowner and since I only own one house as do most of our friends, it makes no difference to me whatsoever how much it’s worth, its my home. If the price is halved it makes no difference since the only people that will benefit from the sale are my children when I’m dead,I would happily see the value come down to benefit all the young struggling to own a home just as my husband and I did. Not all young people are in the same boat either, both of my children are already way better off than us lucky boomers, both earning better wages than the minimum we earned and both owning bigger houses.
The time it may make a difference is if you have to go into a care home, and don’t want to be in one of the storage units mascarading as care-homes. Anything decent is extortionate and, for most people, the proceeds of their houses will be needed.
First of all we need to know the mix of immigrants
– ‘servants”
– students
– high skilled workers
– wealthy people probably stealing from their home country and settling here
– unskilled, often illegal
I seem to feel the most outrage is about the last category, but would agree bringing in low skill employees to wash cars, drive Ubers or deliver food (category 1) is a stupid idea.
In my experience those pushing for immigration to replace labor shortages never have their own jobs in mind.
As a 31 year old and often staunch Conservative Party backer, I don’t see a reason to vote for them other than Labour probably being worse for the country. I’m fortunate in that my wife and I actually do own our home (very recently too) but that was down to a mixture of bank of mum and dad, wife having no life while living with her parents and me inheriting from a late family member. Most young couples are probably not in that position and are condemned to spend their lives paying someone else’s mortgage. What a life eh…
The Conservatives are losing in every demographic aged 55 downwards. Fewer people in those younger brackets have access to capital, and therefore any reason to conserve the system they are living in. This is an extremely dangerous place to be putting the country in and I doubt it will end well.
“I don’t see a reason to vote for them other than Labour probably being worse for the country”
Welcome to the rest of your life. For all the fury of the young Tory’s article (well he calls himself a Tory even if he seems to want to put his faith in politicians) it’s this simple choice he will have to make each time he gets to the ballot box, as will you & I. The Tories are the worst, except for all the other parties.
Luckily there is so much more (beyond voting) that we can do to resist this rot: we can stand up to bullying landlords by joining tenants unions, help clean up politics by supporting investigative journalism, fight eroding work conditions and increasing child poverty by standing with the trade unions etc (and who knows, maybe the Tories will thank us – a lot of them did say they wanted us to ‘take back control’)
If Labour ever got their act together the Tories could be out of power for a generation. A manifesto of protecting workers rights, building more houses (both council and private), coming out in support of single sex spaces and improving public services would be a vote winner, alas I can’t ever see it happening
As in paying higher wages…or does modern Britain still sends children up the chimney!
Sadly ‘real’ coal fires have been banned, so there is no necessity for ‘pygmy’ chimney sweeps, even in such salubrious areas as Clapton Pond.
My parents still have a coal fire. As a child I was regularly sent up the chimney to the sound of Mary Poppins. It didn’t do me any harm.
‘Character building’ as we used to say.
I really was sent up chimneys as a child…. cleaning big Lancashire boilers.
I am not sure that it didn’t do me any harm.
Clapham not Clapton
‘ You’ used to live on the 38 Bus Route close to its terminus at Clapton Pond didn’t you?
Angel (19/38 to Green Park)
Thus Clapton is far closer to you than Clapham. Incidentally how was Luxembourg?
Real wages- including the minimum wage and working wage- are at an all time high at the lower end, are they not?
if we want those benefits to remain and continue improving, inflation is the real threat, so one could argue that this has been largely due to the Tories rattling Corbyn,s “magic money tree”.
So- we are currently pretty close to “peak tax-take” (Laffer curve and all that) and cannot “print our way out of trouble” any further, so if you are genuinely concerned about people on low wages, what’s your plan?
You are not, Northern Europe has a higher tax take.
Yet median wages still can’t afford a house in many cases, so I don’t believe wages at the lower end are higher than they have ever been.
Inequality is at record levels, and wages as a proportion of company expenditure is much lower than it was 40 years ago. You’re correct we can’t print our way out of trouble, but the current setup is also untenable in the long term
Higher wages would be ideal yes
How are “higher wages” going to fix the issue re. property affordability? The average UK house price is close to 10 times the average wage – are you going to double wages to deal with that, or do you just not have a clue?
If wages doubled then house prices would only be 5x the average wage wouldn’t they and we wouldn’t be talking of a housing crisis.
Whilst I’m not proposing a doubling of wages (the house prices are a seperate issue) it would be fair to expect some of the money from our increased productivity to “trickle down” as we were promised rather than simply pooling at the top increasing inequality.
More money in workers pockets is ultimately good for society, as they have more money to spend on productive businesses that create jobs and growth, the states income tax increase allowing for better public services and less people are in need of benefits to survive
Without “controlling immigration” the rest is puff
Immigration is an important part of that, and I believe it has been abused to keep wages down yes
Actually Corbyn offered three out of four of those (plus suggesting women only train carriages) and was shot down in flames, so……
The problems for Mr Corbin were: the accusations of anti-semitism, the Labour Party’s stand on BREXIT, and some of the more vocal far-left Labour MPs and activists. Many of Labour’s actual policies were quite popular within the country.
It’s been well documented that some of Corbyns policies were reasonably popular amongst the electorate. Unfortunately Corbyn himself was completely unelectable so it was all rather academic. Likewise Boris manifesto of levelling up and Brexit was popular, but he appears to have had no intention of ever actually getting round to enacting it
Great piece, I totally empathise with your generation.
You’ve been effed up the arse by quack economists bought by the rich, or those in Treasury hoping to be bought by the rich. Together with the imbeciles at the BoE, they conspire, mostly out of outrageous self interest to keep the economy massively suboptimal.
Returns on Capital are ludicrously high – all gouged out of worker incomes, or via som shit Truss trade deal that only expand deficits: every quid we run up in public debt, at least 30% is shit out to Stuttgart or Shanghai! And that’s not even including the investment that goes there instead of the UK.
We don’t produce anything anyone wants apart from dog shit media – like Reality TV.
In the meantime the Boomers whine about interest rates and come begging when they fck it all up in the credit crisis!
We should never have bailed the banks – we should have nationalised the lot. House prices should have been left to implode and find their own level, together with the still massively overvalued sterling.
The Boomer generation are thieves par excellence – we privatised everything and they got all that too.
Now they squeeze the working generation for more and more just so we can pay their disgusting bloated pensions, and the shit states of health they’re in costs us a fortune on the NHS.
Sadly the Tory prescription of low tax is never going to work this time around: we’ve privatised everything, what is left to be cut?!
I could go on forever but I’ll part with a final thought: the system is more corrupt and more inefficient, than ever it was in more Keynesian times.
The only thing I see changing the system is another full blown asset/house price collapse: this time the working classes won’t be fooled by bailouts or QE.
What should have been carried out in 2008 will finally be forced upon society: capital will take the punishment not labour….
Making foreign ownership of U.K. housing prohibitively expensive would be a great lever in reducing the cost. Taking a similar approach to 2nd homes would do likewise. Without these, we will still hopefully see a gradual reduction of 10-15% over the next few years – with higher interest rates to keep them lower.
No it will not.
You come across as rather abrupt this morning.
Please expand on your responses as I’m sure many would find your points of view interesting.
Of course it would. Anything that can help reduce demand would have an effect on house prices
Charge CGT on primary residences too
I agree with most of what you say. As for this from the article:
‘London, host to some of the most productive financial and legal services in the world,’
Surely the correct word here is ‘extractive’, not ‘productive’.
An salient point. I remember about 5/6 years ago I read an article in Prospect Magazine which precisely made this point, that London actually is “parasitic” on the rest of the nation, drawing in educated young people thus impoverishing the smaller cities and towns. I believe the article concluded that an overhaul of the present capitalist system was needed; I don’t remember the details, I would have to read it again. However, I found it interesting that someone was challenging the idea that London and it’s systems is an unalloyed good for the rest of the nation.
Well you could look at it this way Linda: the financial collapse cost us around 3.5x GDP. That’s decades of bank industry profits. We had to bail that out as a nation largely through austerity. So figure out now whether London is a net positive or negative?!
The same argument has been made about immigration – that developing countries remain undeveloped because their skilled people leave for greener pastures.
This is an argument I seem to be having frequently with friends. We should be training our own doctors (for example) not “stealing” those whose education was paid for by tax payers in poorer countries. Morally it seems very dubious to me.
It’s a very good article. Your grasp of the economics and the anti-conservative politics is ALMOST spot on.
But it’s worse than you think, on two counts. First, there’s this trite observation that “an Englishman’s home is his castle.” We should be the party of property rights (on your own property). Instead we’re the party of those-with-property being able to dictate to others what can happen on their property. As though everyone’s house wasn’t a “development” once.
“Protect the countryside from houses at all costs” is the cry. But only as regards NEW houses. My semi-serious proposition is that anyone who opposes development should be required to enter a sort of reverse lottery, the “winner” of which would see their house bulldozed and their garden returned to meadows and hardwood forests. The countryside is more important than housing, right?
But the second bit is even worse. It’s not just that the young are propping up the old via pensions and NHS (as you say) while being denied home ownership (as you say). It’s that such a massive slab of the AFTER-TAX income of the young goes towards…those massive house prices that make home-owners so colossally wealthy.
What Conservatives should stand for? The freedom to use your hard-earned money to make your life better, as you choose…and if you choose to aspire to own a home, or a better home, or a home with a garden, that should be your freedom. Join the demand side of the housing market, and pay those on the supply side to provide what you want. Instead, what do we get? A vertical supply curve for housing…where every penny that workers are willing-to-pay for housing goes NOT into new housing, but into the swollen pockets of existing homeowners. Quantitative easing and demand side boosts, likewise, all a a boon for homeowners.
You grew up owning pigs? A privilege many could only dream of.
Post Brexit, the Conservatives are no longer conservative. They’re a radical nationalist party, addicted to wild upheavals and grand experiments. And if you like that sort of thing, vote for them. But don’t kid yourself that they are conservative any more.
I’d love to see a strict rule that all mortgages have to be tied only to one household income, and further confined to a max 2.5 times that one income. That’d soon put a stop to the property market gallop.
The Tories haven’t been conservative since the 60’s. Thatcher was a turbo charged economic liberal
Nice rant. Almost completely wrong of course, but … nice rant.
Yes, the price of property is ludicrous. But it was Labour under Blair who opened the floodgates to uncontrolled immigration – not that the Tories have fixed anything – without any coherent plan of how to manage the resulting infrastructure demands as a whole, not just housing.
The Tories *have* betrayed the country, especially the young, with their zealous adoption of the climate nonsense, the Covid cult, identity politics and all the other neo-Marxist garbage – but not a mention of any of that from you.
You claim to “lean heavily to the Right on economics”. Perhaps, but on the rest, my guess is that you are just one more indoctrinated product of the Long March. Delusional.
The Tories have been in power for 12 years. The fact they’ve done nothing to stop immigration means they own the problem just as much as Blair, maybe even more so as the bulk of Blair’s immigration was from the EU which we couldn’t stop while being a member, whereas the Tories is from non EU countries over which we have total control of numbers
You’re right, but in my mind Tories and Republicans seem to be nothing more than controlled opposition. I no longer put my faith (not that I ever really did) in politicians to improve my living standards. As far as I’m concerned they are ugly celebrities playing a role in a scripted reality show. They have as much credence as the contestants in Love Island.
You omitted Immigration. Exactly why is the Tory Party importing half a million new people every year. It may put up GDP but it reduces GDP per capita and destroys public services .
The country is being run by the civil service. None of the Tory leaders over the past twenty years have had the competence to stand up to them and overrule their leftist advice.
Precisely, well said!
But how do we overthrow this Civil Service behemoth?
British people voted for them.
Seriously: going from mucking out pigs to working in financial services, that’s progress?
Ha! A different take on The Rake’s Progress, perhaps?
So this guy’s family benefitted from council housing (Labour initiative), was enabled to rise out of poverty by free university education (Labour initiative) and he decided his natural home was the Tory party… ♂️
I identify as conservative, however currently I will be voting Labour in the next election to punish the Conservative party for the very reasons stated above.
“ I identify as conservative”, but now consider myself “political fluid” and want to self harm to show the Conservative party my pain.
The Conservatives are only winning among voters aged 55+. If you’re of working age, why would you vote for them?
Masochism or a determination to see your country slide even further into irrelevance?
From the Spectator (why Liz is ahead):
Sorry chum. Building more houses will not make them cheaper. You need interest rates put back to their long term average of 7-10%. That will reduce house prices and make them more affordable for young families.
(The way it works is the monthly payments stay the same but at higher interest rates house prices fall to fit the affordable monthly payments )
The author seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that the ‘free market’ is a straightforward idea. All markets are regulated. The minimum wage is a regulation, building regulations are regulations, statutory maternity leave is a regulation, so the planning system is just another set of regulations. Whether you regard a particular set of regulations as an unnecessary impediment to the operation of the ‘free market’ is simply a matter of what goes against your interests. If you are a well-off baby boomer living in an unspoiled village, planning regulations are an important bulwark against the destruction of rural England. If you are a millennial renter desperate to buy at an affordable house, planning regulations are just NIMBYism. If you are an expectant mother statuary maternity leave is an important protection for family life. If you are an employer losing a key member of your staff its government interference in the market place. There is no such thing as the free market so lets stop pretending there is, and certainly, as Liz Truss will discover, deregulation does not lead to Nirvana.
My three daughters, who are all left wingers, would have laughed their socks off at the photo of those two young men at the top.
Perhaps Unherd could arrange a meeting between your daughters and the two young men, or the writer of this piece. I’m sure it would make for a good video, with Freddie to guide the conversation.
The nice but dim meet the daft but left…
Forget Freddie, I’d get Harry Hill to do it. FIGHT!!!
Glad that the centrality of the housing crisis to our current productivity problems is being increasingly recognised, but it takes more than just de-rigging the market and removing barriers to planning (which they’ve already massively streamlined – 9/10 planning applications are granted these days). Instead the government needs to be more active in making sure new builds are affordable, and if possible build council houses (this has virtually stopped). Lots of houses are being built by developers, but as with products in any insufficiently regulated market, they’re being produced to meet demand rather than need (hence why there are more houses than households in the UK).
The myth that planning is the main barrier to building has too long been peddled by publications and think tanks too afraid to stand up to the interests of landowners who have the Conservative party in a death grip.
You are absolutely right. It isn’t planning that is the problem, it’s developers controlling supply and ensuring that the 20% profit margin that is built into every application is strictly adhered to. If that margin is under threat then they pressurise planning officers, who have to meet government housing targets, to accept less affordable housing on new developments and reduce their Section 106 commitments. That results in less money for all local amenties such as the NHS, schools, play areas, sports facilities etc. Why would you build more houses if you can make a shedload of money by controlling the supply? Housebuilders are a gold mine for their executives and their shareholders not to mention landowners. I should know as I sold my empty knitwear factory to one in 2006!
Of course they also make significant contributions to Tory Party coffers.
Thank you Philip. This is also the conclusion I came to when writing a masters thesis on the causes of the housing crisis and potential solutions. And to nail the point, here’s a handy visual:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EEAPadRXsAERWIi?format=png&name=small
‘The problem is the planning system.’ Discuss
Spot on! The local councils should be allowed to build council houses but the Tories have taken their funding away and given it to Persimmon et al…..
Oh please, not another “betrayed” or “destroyed” tagline.
The supposed Tory values that the author describes represent neoliberalism, not conservatism.
I never cease to be amazed by the middle class arrogance that assumes that others should start and build businesses that will employ their sons and daughters as lawyers and accountants? Have a look at Britain’s zenith when those middle classes in the 19th century were socially and financially by passed by entrepreneurs, often from Jewish and Quaker backgrounds, excluded from education, who built financial, industrial, food, brewing, confectionary, glass making, manufacturing and other businesses from scratch, and were enobled with Peerages and Baronetcies…. and neatly went off and bought large estates, post agricultural decline, and married into old aristocratic families… leaving the middle classes to work for them and still say ” leounge, toylitte, settee” and worry about the neighbours?!!!!
Precisely the same phenomena occurred in 19th century Germany France & Italy but unlike this ‘sceptered isle’ will its all it leounges & settees, it didn’t, to their eternal shame, end well did it?
At least, they have the required suspenders!
What if the immigrants dress conservatively like the two natty blokes in the pic. Love those suspenders !!
The single most important issue facing young enterprising youngsters hoping for a real stake in society.
If whoever wins and ignores this fact will over see the decimation of the Conservative Party for a generation.
Please, please! address this sclerotic planning system or accept the consequences.
Bang on about the importance of the housing crisis – but it’s not the planning system that’s the problem! 9/10 planning permission requests are approved these days. As Philip B says above, the problem is that landowners are not incentivised to sell land and developers are not incentised to build on it until they can get the best possible price for it (and guess what, they aren’t donating the proceeds to affordable housing schemes for struggling families)
If you don’t believe me:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EEAPadRXsAERWIi?format=png&name=small
Spot on … Housing has to be a priority and for that to happen the planning laws need radical reform.
But its difficult for any change when the State is so big … we must cut the size of the State which means reducing the size of the Civil Service and abolishing quango’s which have no place in our democracy
Yes I remember Cameron’s Bonfire of the Quangos but went on to increase them while he was in charge
Hard but true, there is no hope until the old die and no longer are an influence in politics.Maybe Covid was aimed at culling the elderly vote and unfreezing wealth for the young.
There are a number of important fact here which politicians in general and the Treasury in particular choose to ignore.
1) To keep up with the housing needs the country needs to build upwards of 300,000 houses per year. This equates to a city the size of Birmingham every ten years. This is a known fact. When was a building programme of this magnitude last (or ever) included in any Parties manifesto?
2) Immigration, legal and illegal, is running at circa 300,000 persons per annum. Therefore building a city the size of Birmingham every decade will get you precisely nowhere; you would simply be playing catch up.
There is an answer to this which includes a long term strategy for growth, not simply the four year politics cycle, Strict limitations on all immigration based on business needs and most importantly of all getting control of the Treasury which has become the enemy within.
Not me.
Can somebody please tell me what “jam” it is that boomers are being “handed” now? FFS! What hate-mongering cobblers! With wages and prices rising and pensions stagnant, yeah we’ve never had it so good have we? Get a grip and stop picking on the elderly James, you disgraceful little creep.
I’d be inclined to put it down to the callowness of relative youth, except that someone whose family “pulled itself up by it’s bootstraps” should have the sense to realise that whingeing is so extremely unedifying.
So cut your Tory party membership card up, James, you’ll be begging for a replacement when you finally learn that whatever your current gripes are with the party, the alternatives are all far, far worse and would have you hiding under your kitchen table within a year or so of being elected, if you’re foolish enough to go down that route.
Far better, if you actually believe in what you say, to stay and fight for those principles. Very hard work, for sure, but you’re not afraid of that, are you?
I don’t think ‘handed’ is quite true, nor that you’ve never had it so good, but there are features of the current system that make older generations (those more likely to vote) better off – the Triple Lock, higher homeownership rates and also the fact that stagnant wages for the last 40 years mean each generation is generally poorer than the last..
https://www.if.org.uk/research-posts/age-bias-government-spending-by-age/
It’s all stated in the article. The triple lock pension, the fact their incomes grew faster than working age peoples wages, high ownership rates, and expensive end of life healthcare costs that they expect the young to fund, the same working youngsters who are paying record rents, are much less likely to be able to afford a house and who are facing the largest tax burden since the war.
With all that in mind I’m amazed the young aren’t more bitter than they are
A few points:
Steady on Pam you are getting stressed…. I think he means the tripple lock? By the way state pensions may not exist in 15 years time at this rate!
The Job of the Tory Party for over a century has been to Govern the people on behalf of the country’s owners and they are usually in power because the Crown Machine and its Corporate allies, which combination works for the owners, sees to it.
We are told what to think at school not taught how to question and verify instruction before adopting it.
The result is that we are generally indoctrinated to the effect that the UK is a superior and heroic State and that to question this is cause for shame.
Those who question and are critical are therefore seen as disloyal and of dubious moral character. It is shameful not to admire the Crown, particularly militarily according to conventional belief.
This cocktail produces young Tories and they experience preferment.
We have to escape the realms of faith, in which we abide, into those of reason or remain in the state of psychological subjection that this ingrained arrangement creates.
Looks like the Tory plebs didn’t like that… ouch 🙂
A bit abstract in places Pete, but I think I’m pretty much with you here – what’s so unpatriotic about wanting to rid your country of injustice and wanting everyone in it to feel they have a stake in its future?