The new Labour government’s day one commitment to a vast national housebuilding effort has been almost uniformly welcomed, yet there are some glaring exceptions. Naturally, the rump Corbynite Left is grouching on social media that plans to work with private …
What Young Fogeys get wrong about housing
The Renaissance in Italy came from its cities, and not by accident. What we now call “agglomeration effects” were at work here. Within their curtain walls, all classes and factions were crammed together in lunatic proximity. Unable to grow out, …
New Towns will never be classless utopias
When will Britain’s New Towns stop feeling so new? “Old Labour ideas are right for new times,” insisted Keir Starmer at party conference last year. Yesterday’s manifesto launch embodied this spirit: “A Labour government will build a new generation of …
The rise of California’s vanlords
For outsiders experiencing it on YouTube, homelessness in San Francisco has a sort of up-close profile — overdoses and open drug deals, vacant and filthy faces, bodies sprawled on dirty concrete or, sometimes, just standing, bent incredibly in half, forehead …
The battle for Thamesmead
Maybe the best-known fact about Thamesmead is that, in 1971, it provided the setting for one of the most memorable scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s film, A Clockwork Orange. Alex DeLarge (played by Malcolm McDowell) is shown walking along Binsey Walk …
Is this the end of Angela Rayner?
Why shouldn’t the Tories make the most of Angela Rayner’s personal housing crisis? When you’re short of electoral options, there’s nothing better than punching your opponent’s bruise. If the police investigation launched yesterday reveals anything, it will land Starmer with …
Welcome to Britain’s prefab nightmare
“Lovely, isn’t it?” I’m standing in the kitchen with a resident of Lockleaze, Bristol, as we survey the construction site just a few yards from the end of her garden. She is, of course, being sarcastic. “I’m just so depressed,” …
Britain is facing a second 2008
In selecting the date of the next election, Conservative Party strategists have a choice between catastrophe and oblivion. Following the Labour Party’s micro-landslides in Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire, and with Rishi Sunak’s conference reset leaving opinion polls unmoved, it seems increasingly …
Starmer’s hollow vision for Britain
There is a vast, petrifying hollowness to the British economy. As you race around dealing with everyday life, the reassuring facade of the state is still there: the police and roads, the schools and hospitals. And yet, if you ever …
Rishi Sunak’s war on the young
What does a fair distribution of economic resources look like? It is a question that will dog the Conservative Party Conference this week as questions over inheritance tax, VAT on school fees and the triple-lock on state pensions return to …
Has Xi Jinping bankrupted China?
It is hard to tell when a crisis in a dictatorial regime, such as the sudden breakdown of China’s economic model, is not about this or that, but about the regime itself. My own experience in this regard is very …
Will Britain ever build beautiful?
On the eve of the 2008 financial crisis, in the last days of a monied Britain, Gordon Brown had a rare vision for the country. Amid the burgeoning housing crisis, 10 new eco-towns, a model of future sustainable living, would …
Westminster has failed Selby
It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon in North Yorkshire, and Rishi Sunak is trying to reassure the North Yorkshire Conservative Association gathered on his front lawn that all is not lost. Sheltered under a marquee, he’s like a cruise-ship crooner entertaining …
How landlords became monsters
Everyone under the age of 40 has their landlord horror story. We trade them, like old war wounds. My own, in retrospect, is rather pleasingly metaphorical, something of a capsule (or cubicle) scatological comedy. At one point, as part of …
British renters are losers
My renting life is now on the verge of eclipsing my non-renting life: I have been paying monthly rent for 17 years. As a millennial, I am of the first major generation to get to this age and not be …