The Breathless Geordie

What is it that the Conservatives and Reform don’t like about a Labour government standing against unearned wealth? What is it they don't like about raising money for our state schools, our hospitals, our police, and to lift children out of poverty?

A young couple in England, the day before they were due to exchange contracts on what was to be their first home, received two phone calls in quick succession. The first was from their estate agent. The second was from their solicitor. The information was the same in both. The local council had outbid them for their house, by £20,000. The seller had accepted. The couple had been bidding for the house since the asking price was £150,000. The bidding had taken the price up to £190,000, already, by their own account, the upper edge of what they could afford. The council had come in at £210,000, a level they could not match. Their offer was abandoned. Their survey, costing £900, was wasted. They still owe legal fees of £2,200 plus VAT regardless. The fixed-rate mortgage offer they had secured, in a market where rates have been rising again, will now expire before they find another property. Their landlord has new tenants moving in to their current rental in the second week of June. They are looking, on the calendar in front of them, at potential homelessness inside two months. The reason the council bought the house was disclosed to them, after some pushing, by a councillor they happened to know personally. The council needed urgent additional accommodation for asylum seekers. The property they had been buying was already previously registered as a House in Multiple Occupation, which made the conversion straightforward. The taxpayer money the council used to outbid them comes from a £500 million national pilot scheme, established under the present government, in which local authorities are funded to buy properties on the open market in order to house asylum seekers and reduce the cost of asylum hotels. In other words, local government is, on the order of central government, using your own money to give housing that you should It's a representative case. 134,760 British households were in temporary accommodation as of September 2025, which is a record. 4,793 people were sleeping rough on a single night in autumn 2025, also a record, and 171% higher than in 2010. 28% of all new social housing lettings in England in 2024/25, approximately 75,000 households, went to people deemed statutorily homeless. The number of new social housing lettings that included a member of the Armed Forces community was, in the same year, approximately 2,600. The number of new lettings that went to non-UK nationals, on the basis of the nationality data published by central government, was substantially in excess of that veteran figure, by, depending on how the data is cut, about 10x. This is the British state, in 2026, using the working tax contributions of two young people in the first weeks of trying to buy a home, to outbid those same two young people for that same home, in order to provide free accommodation for foreign nationals whose claims to be in this country have not yet been assessed and may well be completely worthless. The young people will, on the present trajectory, be made homeless in the same June in which the asylum seekers move into the property they were trying to buy. The young people will be paying, through their council tax for the rest of their working lives, for the accommodation in which the asylum seekers will live. It is likely, given the number of migrants to Britain whose lifetime tax contribution is net negative, that they will be paying tax to offset these new arrivals for the rest of their lives. It goes without saying that we need the most fundamental imaginable reconstruction of our asylum, housing, planning, and immigration laws to prevent such travesties of justice from happening again. We all know what is required by way of change in those areas. Progress has written a more extensively policy testament on this subject than any other political organisation in Britain. Beyond that there is one last thing worth saying. The young couple, on the available account, are not in a position to fight any of this through the courts. They cannot afford to. Their solicitor, on their telling, was pressing them for the legal fees on a debit card before the rest of the conversation was over. They will, in all likelihood, lose the home, the deposit, the survey, the rate deal, and the remainder of their tenancy in a single short summer. They will then watch the property they were trying to buy be filled, at the public's expense, by the people the British state has decided to prioritise over them. If that does not make you furious enough to do something about what is happening in Britain, nothing will.