Gentrification. Are you pro or anti? Perhaps, if you’re reading this article in a small town with a dilapidated high street, this question may be far from your mind. But if you’re inside the M25, it will loom larger, and …
What if King Charles were your landlord?
Nansledan is a partially built village on a hill at Newquay: the wind blows through, almost knocking me off my feet. The Cornish housing crisis is a paradigm of the national one: towns filled with holiday lets and Airbnbs while …
What was the point of Jacinda Ardern?
No one saw Jacinda Ardern’s resignation coming, though many of her critics have been willing it for years. She has, she says, no more gas left in the tank after her five and a half years as New Zealand’s Prime …
Poundbury and the English apocalypse
To reach the King’s vision for modern Britain, first you must travel through his kingdom. Take a delayed train from London down to the south coast. Turn right at the docks outside Southampton, past a wasteland of Chinese shipping containers, …
Britain’s squalid housing crisis
The Conservatives are doomed. But it won’t be Brexit that destroys the party in its current form. That’s ultimately a symptom of a far larger problem: a slow but inexorable collision between voters’ desire for ongoing growth, and voters’ desire …
When will the Grenfell betrayal end?
At 12.54am on the 14 June 2017, a small fire started in a fridge on the fourth floor of a west London tower block. It quickly spread from the window of the kitchen in which it started, and ignited the …
The Tories are the anti-growth coalition
It would appear that Maria Miller, Conservative MP for Basingstoke, did not get the Prime Minister’s memo. “Still time to sign my ‘Slow It Down’ petition calling on the Borough Council to drastically reduce housing targets,” she tweeted on Friday, …
The boomers destroyed the Tories
Boris Johnson stands over your hospital bed, mask and medical gown on, forceps at hand, shining a lamp brightly down on your face. There had better be a good reason you’re undergoing this surgery. Pain must have a purpose.
Think …
The scapegoating of the Grenfell firefighters
Five years ago, in the early hours of the morning, I was suddenly awoken by a ringing mobile phone. Sky News were hoping to speak to a Fire Brigades Union (FBU) official. A fire was ripping through a high-rise residential …
How Grenfell exposed Britain
The Grenfell Inquiry began hearing live evidence four years ago, a year after the fire. This mammoth legal process is now coming to a close. Evidence will conclude in July, in an echo of how the process began, with an …
How Blair broke Britain
Tony Blair is hated up and down the land but not in Islington, and not in Labour HQ. Speaking to the FT last summer, Keir Starmer embraced Blair’s legacy. “We have to be proud of that record in government,” he …
