Free Leaseholders@FreeLeasehlders
MAKE HOMEOWNERSHIP GREAT AGAIN 💥
Watch our video on the new politics of housing.
It’s clear the world is changing and the politicians and parties who do not get with the programme will be destroyed.
The rupture in the global strategic environment will have cascading effects on domestic policy.
Respected historian and grand strategist Professor John Bew has said we are at the “foothills of the fourth great structural strategic challenge since the French Revolution”.
Professor Bew says we are going to need a whole new political economy and social contract to deal with the major problems confronting us.
“It may mean we have to take periods of very difficult financial pain,” he warns.
This has vast implications for policymaking here in Britain. Everything from energy to welfare and housing are on the table now.
A new social contract will be needed because too many people believe that the system is rigged against them.
Previous generations understood that housing is a prime social need.
Lloyd George pledged “Homes for Heroes” post-WWI.
Beveridge and the Atlee government cracked down on “squalor” - substandard, overcrowded, and unhygienic housing.
You cannot rebuild and unify a society without secure and affordable housing.
Under the last government, @michaelgove raised eyebrows for correctly warning in @thetimes that failing to deal with the housing crisis would not just backfire on the @Conservatives, but British democracy itself.
This belief that the system is rigged is delegitimising the nation-state and governments’ ability to deliver public goods and withstand external pressures and hostile state actors.
Yesterday, Professor Bew told @unherd that we are at a “break-glass moment” for domestic policy.
He says our political class needs to “restore national power”.
That reframes measures once thought impossible or laughable as not only within reach, but necessary.
This echoes what @Dominic2306 has said. He has called the present “a pre-revolutionary moment” and believes that the two old parties are collapsing before our very eyes.
These disruptive forces are why Mark Carney, for example, has rushed to distance himself from Davos man and globalisation.
The political economy of housing is rapidly changing against this backdrop.
@ZackPolanski clearly gets it, coming out against Labour backsliding on leasehold abolition, saying they are for the lobbyists, not the people.
“How quickly did ‘abolish leasehold’ become work with managing agents and insurance companies to ‘reform’? Labour constantly showing where their loyalties lies,” he posted.
@BarryGardiner and @AngelaRayner get it.
And even @realDonaldTrump gets it, saying “homes are for people, not corporations” as he launched a crackdown on the financialisation of housing in the US just the other week.
On the British right, @TiceRichard and @RobertJenrick also seem willing to channel the zeitgeist, having decried rent-seeking freeholders.
They see leasehold as “a symbol of ‘rip-off Britain’” and recognise that weird ECHR legalism is being weaponised to protect the leasehold scam that is destroying our homes, money, and lives.
As @AaronBastani has rightly observed, the dividing line in Western politics is now family capital versus global capital.
Telling the people to “own nothing and be happy” will end very badly for incumbents, including this @UKLabour government.
Yes, we need to “build, baby, build”, but it will harm our people and the economy if we do not prize open the property-owning democracy once and for all, turning leaseholding serfs into freeholders under commonhold.
Tenure matters.
A mass shift to commonhold is not some crackpot theory.
In the US, Canada, Scotland and across the continent, people live with dignity, autonomy and control in their own flats. No extractive freeholders in sight.
@Keir_Starmer, @RachelReevesMP and @mtpennycook must stand up to Davos man and the offshore property mafia, euphemistically referred to as pension funds, to deliver for the British people.
Disrupt or be disrupted!
