Britain has run out of places, and yesterday almost every party spent the day offering a better way of standing in the queue rather than more places to stand in.
Crossbencher · 08 August 2026
Britain has run out of places, and yesterday almost every party spent the day offering a better way of standing in the queue rather than more places to stand in.
Start with the loudest of them. The Conservative leader promised to bar foreign nationals from social housing and to end what her side called cash machine Britain. Labour's border minister called the plan dangerous and attention seeking; the Guardian reported charities calling it divisive; readers quoted by the Independent said it was an attempt to out-Reform Reform. Every one of those arguments was about who should stand at the front. None of them was about the length of the line. A council with no spare homes rehouses nobody by reordering its waiting list, and this country has been short of homes for so long that the shortage now gets treated as a fact of nature rather than the result of decades of not building.
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