IF you want an example of the shocking sense of unfairness that now defines Keir Starmer’s Britain, look no further than the housing market.
Ordinarily, you might expect a civilised country like ours to have a housing market that treats its own people fairly, that treats those who have paid into the collective pot for generations with the respect and decency they deserve.
But that is not what is happening today. Far from it.
Only last month it was revealed that the British state and the ruling class are using the British people’s own money — taxpayers’ money — to outbid British people in the housing market to favour the rising numbers of illegal migrants who are breaking our laws.
Yes, you read that right. You could not make it up.
The British state, financed by the taxpayer, is enabling private companies such as Serco to offer more favourable contracts to private landlords who rent their homes to illegal migrants and asylum seekers instead of renting out these properties to the many British families, workers and young people who need them and whose relatives have been paying into the system for decades.
Under these shocking contracts, landlords are being offered far more favourable five-year deals that remove the risk of tenants not paying their rent, funding for property repairs, and even money to cover spiralling council tax bills.
Simply outrageous
In other words, they are being given big incentives to house people who are breaking our laws which, in turn, will almost certainly encourage hundreds of thousands more migrants to cross the Channel in search of homes and welfare.
You might as well put a big flashing neon sign on the White Cliffs of Dover that reads: “Free Homes for Illegal Migrants”.
Let me ask some questions that nobody in Westminster seems to be asking.
How is this right? How is this fair? And how is this just?
It’s not. It’s simply outrageous and, once again, it makes a total mockery of the long-standing sense of fair play in this country.
I ask these questions not just because of the underlying political decision to prioritise foreigners over Brits, which truly stinks, but also because of the staggering cost of all this to British taxpayers.
It is, put simply, absolutely enormous. Only this week, we learn from a new government report about the truly mind-boggling numbers.
In the past year alone, because of the total failure of our leaders to do whatever necessary to fix our borders, the British people were forced to pay an eye-watering £1.67BILLION housing illegal migrants and asylum seekers, which is equivalent to £4.6million every day or £3,177 every minute.
How many winter fuel payments could that provide? How many nurses?
And how many police officers to stop the shoplifting and violent crime that is now going mainstream in this country?
Would Brits rather have 15 new hospitals or keep going with Keir Starmer’s insane, failing and extreme policy, which is making the chaos at our borders even worse
Unless something changes soon — such as fixing our broken borders and sending all those illegal migrants to processing centres offshore — then these already enormous costs will only spiral to new, dizzying heights.
In fact, that same report estimates that over the decade to come, amid an ongoing cost-of-living crisis, the British people will have to pay somewhere in the region of £10BILLION for these housing costs, which is equivalent to about 15 brand new hospitals for the British people.
I wonder: would Brits rather have 15 new hospitals or keep going with Keir Starmer’s insane, failing and extreme policy, which is just making the chaos at our borders even worse?
And when it comes to the palpable sense of unfairness that is now running through our housing market, it is not just about the spiralling number of illegal migrants.
Completely misleading
It’s also about how mass uncontrolled immigration more widely is driving up the cost of rent and house prices across Britain, pushing the prospect of having a place to call home — one of the most basic things in life — further and further away from the hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding who deserve this right.
In the past couple of years alone, record levels of net migration added more than 1.2million people to the UK population, which is equivalent to another city the size of Birmingham.
And so, while Keir Starmer and Labour MPs claim they are solving the housing crisis by easing planning reforms and building more homes, this is completely misleading.
As the reputable think-tank the Centre For Policy Studies has recently shown, over the past decade — and because of mass immigration — the ruling class in this country built 1.3million fewer homes than are needed to keep up with the current record rates of population growth.
In recent years, we have only been building around 178,000 homes in England when, in reality, because of record immigration, we need to build around 515,000 new homes every year.
What this means is that even Keir Starmer’s and Labour’s target of building some 370,000 homes every year is simply nowhere enough to deal with the enormous pressure that is now being imposed on the housing market and the country by mass uncontrolled immigration.
Woefully short
In fact, according to those policy wonks, migrants now account for more than half — 56 per cent — of the total housebuilding need in this country and, shockingly, nearly 90 per cent of that historic deficit of 1.3million homes.
The fact we are falling woefully short of what we need also helps to explain why house prices and rents are soaring, especially in London and the South East, where migrants tend to live — and the pressure for housing is now unbearable.
In the two years to June 2023, for example, which is the most recent data available, rents climbed 11 per cent higher than they would otherwise have done because of immigration.
The increased pressure because of the mass influx, highlighted by Capital Economics, created an additional 430,000 households, which helps to explain why, for example, rents in London recently surged by nearly 12 per cent, which is the fastest annual pace since records began in 2006.
Driving up rents
Such is the competition now that in London, on average 15 people are looking to rent the same flat or house, a figure that has more than doubled since before the pandemic.
As even the typically pro-immigration academics at the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory admit, there is now considerable evidence to support the claim that mass immigration is pushing up UK house prices — a fact that most people in the fanatically pro-immigration Labour Party still refuse to accept.
The key point in all this — even if it’s routinely ignored by our hapless politicians in Westminster — is that you can have available and affordable housing for British people in this country or you can have the ongoing policy of mass, uncontrolled immigration, which is driving up rents and house prices.
You simply cannot have both.
The British people and their children deserve to live in a society where those who have paid tax, who have paid into the collective pot for generations, who play by the rules, and who respect our laws are prioritised above everybody else.
This common-sense suggestion, to embed a principle of “national preference” into our housing market, whereby Brits are prioritised over everybody else, will inevitably lead to the woke politicians who are reading this spitting out their morning croissant.
But it is, ultimately, what the hardworking and tax-paying majority in this country deserve.
And I make no apologies for saying it.
