I wish someone somewhere would do an analysis of Corbyn's policies and see what European countries it put us on a par with. Tories are going on like it would be Stalinist Russia but I suspect it would be more like one of those kind of reasonable social market countries like the Netherlands or Belgium.
Private renting is just a massive cash cow for richer people. I remember during and after the financial crisis, buy to let kept growing because even though investors were still pouring in, lack of availability of mortgages for FTB kept rents high relative to mortgages, and lack of house building kept supply low. It was the only investment that was making anyone any money. The big house builders are not going to increase the supply enough to bring down house prices - one of the reasons they do land banking or land hoarding is exactly to ensure that house prices stay high to maximise their profits. With ever increasing numbers of households in the UK, and house building not keeping up with demand, it doesn't matter how well individuals do in their careers, at the aggregate level it's just the same people playing musical chairs with the same inadequate housing stock and if someone works harder or gets a degree and a better job that extra money just goes into the housing bidding war. People who hold wealth already get a good bite of the cherry in the form of dividends and capital growth of companies. Then, they get a second bite of the cherry because any increases in income that workers make end up in their rent. This is why it would be a piece of piss for the government to build council houses and make a profit off them while keeping rents at a level where people could work in an average job and have a decent lifestyle. We could share the dividend that would otherwise go to landlords between renters and the government. With adequate supply, you could make it easier for people to move from a council house in one area to another, which would help to reduce structural unemployment and support young people in their efforts to get their careers off the ground. Why would you not go in for such an obviously excellent idea? Because your rich mates who put you in number 10 wouldn't like it? Because as a voter, you've had to sign yourself up to paying a few hundred grand towards someone else's retirement just so you could live in a house close enough to your work that you get to see your kids before they go to bed?
Compassion starts with self-compassion. We all had to struggle under this system but imagine if we were the last generation that had to struggle. Just because it was hard for us doesn't mean that there's something morally pure about it being hard for everyone. We could just solve this fucking problem and it would go away. Same for health and education. Decide that our legacy is going to be that our children don't have to work the way we worked, that they will be able to go into their lives and careers and take risks and do cool new things, safe in the knowledge that if it doesn't all go according to plan, there's a basic safety net that will hold them up?
There's this idea that people want to be lazy, that a safety net enables layabouts, and it's bullshit. Nobody wants to be that lazy. Nobody wants to do nothing. The vast majority of people want to work, they want meaningful work that they can be proud to do. It makes you a part of society, it makes you proud, it makes you feel like a human being. But when you can't find work that will let you live - when there's no decent jobs where you live, when it's zero hours contracts and short notice and you can't fit it in with looking after your kids, when you don't know from one week to the next how much you'll be living on, when you can't pay an average rent off an average wage - then our society is broken. And it's time we fucking fixed it.