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Gifts from The Morning Star
Britain’s housing crisis: profit over people in high relief
It is painful to observe that neither party intends to end the hellscape of astronomical house prices, rip-off rents and homelessness when the post-war housing programme has all the answers we need, writes NICK WRIGHT
HOUSING STRUGGLE: Activists from Acorn the community union march in Manchester

IN the Westminster world of cross-play politics, Keir Starmer’s embrace of the corporate land bankers and construction firms is garlanded with a pledge to “back the builders, not the blockers.”

On the other side of the gangway Rishi Sunak — no less a corporate crony of big business and the banks — is a new-born partisan of the pastoral.

Responding to the wave of nimbyism that has sprung up wherever the construction monopolies take advantage of his government’s planning and housebuilding regime, the Prime Minister aims to shore up the Tory vote with a pledge to protect the green belt and slacken the housebuilding targets his government has imposed on local councils.

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Monica Crowley, White House chief of protocol (obstructed at left) greets European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, right, upon arriving to meet with President Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, August 18, 2025
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