Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

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I Miss the Lies of the 1990s but I Don’t Want to Go Back

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On February 17, 2026

18 Comments

Watching this Richard J. Murphy podcast with John Christensen I was struck by an anecdote that Christensen shared about corruption on the Isle of Jersey in the late 1990s (note that I didn’t have time to confirm spelling of the proper names mentioned or fact check, so I’m redacting those):

John Christensen:I for quite a long time I had been very disillusioned with the government in Jersey. It’s become clear to me that by and large the the regulatory pro processes the laws in play and regulations in place were window dressing exercises and there was very very weak enforcement or compliance.

So the whole thing as far as I was concerned was a charade.

Late one January evening (and this is 1996) the phone went at my home and it was a Wall Street Journal investigating investigating journalist calling an and he started questioning me about a currency trader who was operating in Jersey and a subsidiary of the Swiss bank UBS.

The subsidiary was called [redacted] and and and a major churn client churning exercise which had cost a bunch of American investors tens of millions of (dollars).

And what he said was that the government of Jersey was thwarting any attempt at investigating this and allowing these investors who had lost tens of millions to have access to justice.

I said, “I know nothing about this whatsoever.”

He clearly thought I was bullshitting. He said, “But it’s your department that issued the license to the currency trader to trade in Jersey. (The trader) was not a Jerseyman, and it’s your department that gave him the housing or or supported his application for a housing license to rent property in Jersey.

And I said, “Well, to be honest, mate, I know everything that goes on in my department. I’ve never heard of this.”

He clearly thought I was a liar. And I did a deal. I said I will go in first thing tomorrow morning and check the files and if what you’ve said is correct then I will help you. I will cooperate.

Now I was in this extraordinary situation because I was a very senior civil servant. In fact I headed the government economic service. Part of my job was to work with international media.

I went in, checked everything he said, stood up and I realized that in order to circumvent me and my department, my boss, [redacted], the chief adviser…had gone round my back um and issued a license which should never have been issued and had given support for a housing consent which by policy should not have been supported.

And he’d done that because it turns out that at that at the time when this felony started, the most important politician in Jersey happened to be a member of the board of [redacted].

So here’s corruption in a very British form.
…
Another part of the corruption lay with the media in Jersey. BBC Radio Jersey never asked the the correct questions. The Jersey Evening Post never asked the correct questions; which were how the hell did this guy get a license to operate in Jersey and how the hell did he get a housing permit?

Because both were against government policy. And the reason they did that was because the Jersey Eden Post at that time belonged to a very senior politician which itself is corrupt.

This is all very British. This is the way things operate in Britain.

Journalists go to great lengths to not ask the right questions because they are themselves corrupted. …It was a staterun organ in effect at that period and it probably still is to some extent.

This anecdote raised conflicting points in my mind.

On the one hand, I admire the seriousness, technical expertise, and ethics of Murphy and Christensen. They represent the best of their generation and have multiple qualities I don’t see from younger reformers.

I also am nostalgic for an era in which a whistleblower like Christensen could actually make an impact by talking to the press. People were tried and convicted, etc.

That kind of thing is much missed in the Trump/Starmer era.

On the other hand, my lived experience of the 1990s contrasts so strongly with how the period is damned to be remembered historically that it inspires awe at the power of the dominant narrative in the West in that era.

The 1990s was the age of Sir Jimmy Saville after all.

In America we had Bill Cosby and Woody Allen, who may not have been knighted but had a comparable status as secular sages, beloved and admired.

Of course, we didn’t know then what we know now about Saville being a prolific sex predator, or Cosby being a serial rapist or in Allen’s case, people were trying to tell us, but many people were convinced his marriage to his ex-wife’s daughter was a love match.

We certainly didn’t know Woody was having dinner with Noam Chomsky….and a man we hadn’t heard of yet named Jeffrey Epstein.

It was comforting to watch the official propaganda of Ken Burns’ Civil War series on PBS and be reassured about the noble nature of both sides in that war and then follow it up with Eyes on the Prize which taught us that things had been bad in the racist past but the miraculous 1960s had solved everything.

Perhaps I was just young and naive, but in the 1990s it somehow seemed plausible to accept the mythologies of the capitalist west.

Things like the Iran-Contra Scandal or Watergate showed that there was corruption, but it was limited and could be dealt with.

After all, wasn’t that bright young Rudy Guliani bringing down the Mafia itself?

Hadn’t the evil empire of the USSR fallen without a war?

Hadn’t an American president united the whole world against Saddam Hussein’s aggression and fought and won a war to liberate Kuwait?

Even better hadn’t the Color Revolution in Serbia shown that Gene Sharp had distilled the non-violent revolutionary techniques of Gandhi and MLK into a formidable instrument for freedom?

From the vantage point of 2026, post-Enron, post-9/11, post-2008, post-Maidan, post-Trump/Brexit, post-COVID, it’s just as impossible to look back fondly at Gene Sharp and company as it is to enjoy the comedy of Bill Cosby with your kids.

Yes, it is upsetting and alarming to watch David Ellison’s CBS blatantly censoring a late night show or US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declaring a new era of colonialism, but perhaps it’s good that the lies of this era are so flagrant.

The Amount Of Contempt Elites Have For Public Intelligence Is Breathtaking

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On February 4, 2026

33 Comments

The latest episode is an attempt to suggest Epstein was working for Russia:

This is ridiculous. Epstein was close friends with the Israeli Prime Ministers. Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell might have been Israel’s most important spy. Israel’s fingerprints are all over the Epstein files, and there are almost no significant ties to Russia. There’s one email where Epstein tries to coach Trump on how to deal with Putin, and some trafficking ties, though more to Ukraine than to Russia, but they are dwarfed by Israeli ties.

Source

Elites think we’re morons. But hey, why not? I mean the “Trump is a Russian asset” lie worked (he massively increased sanctions on Russia). They lied over 80% of the time about Corbyn, including ridiculous anti-semitism smears, and it worked. They lied about WMD in Iraq, and Iraq ties to 9/11 and it worked. They lied about mass baby murders by Hamas and it worked. They lied about Gazan hospitals being Hamas bases and it worked.

They’re completely used to a plurality to a majority of the population believing their lies, so why not this time?

Are they right? Can they tell us the moon is made of blue cheese and get us to believe it? Perhaps so.

This is one of the reasons why, when I talk about war crimes tribunals I always include the media, who lied and lied and lied to enable genocide, child killing, rape and war. The media is almost entirely captured, certainly every corporate media outlet is little more than a source of propaganda. Truth only peaks out when one part of the elite disagrees with another part of the elite, but if the elites are united, as they were against Corbyn and are for mass murder of mostly children in Gaza, well, the media salutes and falls in line.

As I have said many times, the only way to fix the West and especially America is wholesale replacements of the elites and all their courtiers. No one with a conscience works at the top levels, because if someone has a conscience they can’t do the job.

They all have to go, and to ensure there’s no repeat, most of them need to be tried for their crimes, have everything they have beyond basic subsistence taken from them (they’re why so many people are homeless) and be thrown into prison.

This is is also a matter of simple self-respect from the rest of us. Enough pretending these people aren’t psychopaths who would kill or impoverish anyone if it would earn them a single bent nickel or, in many cases, even if it wouldn’t, because it’s how they get their rocks off.

It’s them or us, and so far it’s mostly been us.

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Britain To Restrict Jury Trials, Ending Jury Nullification For Political Crimes

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On December 2, 2025

16 Comments

Without jury trials, there is no justice:

David Lammy, the justice secretary, told The Times that the scale of the backlog – which has reached nearly 80,000 cases – is failing victims as he warned that “justice delayed is justice denied”

Lammy is expected to announce that he will scrap the right to trial by jury in “either way” cases, where defendants have the choice to have their cases heard in the magistrates’ or crown court.

Last year there were an estimated 13,000 either way cases – including theft and handling stolen goods, burglary, assault causing actual bodily harm, fraud, dangerous driving and possession of drugs with intent to supply – went before juries. 

Or you could spend more money and hire more judges and judicial staff? As usual, the real reason for the backlog is that governments after government have made cuts to the justice system.

But I suggest connecting the dots. All those people being arrested for protesting Palestine, they won’t have the right to a jury trial either. Which means that juries can’t nullify the law by refusing to convict.


Oh yes, she’s a terrorist.

The war on terror, as an aside, has reached the point many of us predicted at its start: anything the government wants to say is terrorism, is terrorism. As a rule I oppose most strengtheners. A crime is not more of a crime if it is motivated by hate. We already have motivation based modifiers in law (the difference between manslaughter and murder is intent) and those are enough.

But terrorism is particularly egregious because the way we define it is completely arbitrary at this point: it’s just “whatever a government says is terrorism, is terrorism.” Even in the past it was bullshit, because “killing civilians to effect political change” is something governments do all the time, but don’t call terrorism. The biggest terrorist organization in the world right now isn’t Palestinian Action, it’s Israel. At least by any sane definition. But even there, who cares? The actual crime isn’t “terrorism”, it’s genocide and the penalty for that is either execution or life imprisonment.

The UK government is becoming one of the most authoritarian and repressive in the world. To end jury trials for a huge class of people because they can’t be bothered to tax rich people like themselves is the very definition of tyranny, especially in Britain, the very mother of the right to be tried by ones peers, not some appointed judge who will often rule exactly as those who appointed them want.

Pathetic.

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The US-UK Special Relationship is Officially Dead

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On July 11, 2025

14 Comments

I doubt any of you will recall, but in 2003 I wrote a long post over at a different place, that NATO was dead. It was useless, much like the Concert of Europe that emerged after the 1848 Revolutions in Europe recast and sought to revise the settlement of 1815, set up by Castlereagh-Metternich and Talleyrand.

So, today it’s official: the US-UK Special Relationship is dead. It’s been moribund for a long time, since after the Iraqi invasion there was a huge groundswell of UK citizens that resented their country being the American poodle. Lip service was paid, but now, no longer. That the Brits have to turned to the French says a lot.

With the Northwood Declaration the Brits have indicated their nuclear arsenal will no longer be under the unified command of SACEUR. The Brits will instead “Decouple” from the Americans and integrate with their continental ally, France. For decades the UK’s nuclear arsenal was inoperable without the USA, as it is so much based on American technology, command and control dependency, even the Brits boomers (SSBN) are dependent on US technology, namely the UGM-133 Trident II, a submarine launched ballistic missile made for the US and Royal Navies in America.

The UK has four Vanguard-class boomers in service, which each carry a potential total of 16 SLBMs. Each SLBM Is MIRVed, deploying a potential total of 192 nuclear warheads with yields of 100kt each per submarine. In 2021 the government of Boris Johnson implemented a policy of ‘deliberate ambiguity’ so the exact size and scope of the UK’s nuclear arsenal is unknown.

France, like the UK, maintains a small fleet of four Triomphant-class boomers. Each French boomer can carry up to 16 French-made M45 or M51 SLBMs, that are MIRVed, and French warhead yields fall between 150kt-300kt. Both British and French boomers have four torpedo tubes, the French can also launch the Exocte anti-ship missile while underwater. French boomers got some teeth.

France also maintains a small aircraft deliverable stockpile of nuclear weapons. The UK decommissioned their nuclear aircraft years ago. By French and UK law each country must have at least one boomer at sea at all times.

In the video I linked above the Deutsche Welle interviewer asks Phillips O’Brien the main question, “how historically significant this is this shift in nuclear posture from France and the UK?”

Phillips answers with typical British understatement, “well particularly from the UK but also from France because both of their nuclear deterrence particularly the UK has basically been inoperable without the USA that it’s been based on American technology a lot of it and very close cooperation uh and the idea that sort of the British would would go in a way to try and establish a nuclear deterrent that could be operated, developed and operated without the USA would be something quite extraordinary because they’ve not done anything like that before. I think it’s a sign that the United States is no longer seen as quite a reliable defense partner.”

This is decline observable in real time. This is the world that Trump has created. The nation that I once called the USS Unsinkable, no longer finds the US a reliable security partner. Imagine what our allies in Asia are thinking?

The Northwood Declaration is a concrete manifestation of how the rest of the world now sees the United States: the primary rogue nation. I knew the world would change a great deal in my lifetime, but I honestly did not think that I would see this. Thirty one years ago this summer I got my first passport and headed to Europe. I remember thinking about my passport as almost like one would think of an American Express card. It was my key to the world and I could go anywhere. That was true until about 10 years ago. What a world we Americans pissed away.

 

As Churchill once said, “friends are not permanent, interests are.”

Britain Is Toast, Period

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On May 1, 2025

20 Comments

Long term readers will know that I’ve been negative on Britain for a long time. Corbyn was their last chance to turn things around, but Corbyn lacked the necessary ruthlessness to win, and was destroyed by absolutely bullshit allegations of anti-semitism. Starmer became Labour leader after him, on promises of left wing policies which even a child should have disbelieved, and ruthlessly purged Labour of all left wingers.

Conservatives ran stupid governments with horrid policies which led to inflation and continued de-industrialization, and Starmer backed into power.  His policies are worse than the Conservatives, with draconian cuts to social welfare policies like child support, heat for old people, and wheelchairs for cripples. The last British steel plant is shutting down, and the next party to rule Britain (as I also predicted) seems likely to be Reform:

It showed that if a General Election were held tomorrow, 25% of UK voters would choose Reform, 24% chose Labour and 21% would vote for the Tories.

The party topped a Find Out Now Westminster poll last week, with Farage’s party on 26% of the vote – outstripping the Tories (on 23%) and pushing Labour into third place (on 22%).

While this is even or only a slight lead, Labour’s policies, which include selling a big chunk of the UK to Blackrock, will continue to be extremely damaging and unpopular, so I expect Reform to continue its rise.

Reform’s policies, should it come into government, will be absolutely disastrous, Trump/DOGE style shoot yourself in the foot, then realized there’s still plenty left to blow away.

Meanwhile Wales. Wales, which has been under English rule for over 700 years now pols in the 30s for support for independence. Scottish support is in the high 40s, sometimes spiking over 50, with support for going concentrated among the youngest Scots. Northern Ireland is around 40% for joining Ireland.

Again, as things become worse, I expect these numbers to increase. In twenty years, I don’t expect there to be a United Kingdom (the union of Scotland and England.)

There’s no easy recovery from what has happened to the UK as there’s no prospect of a government which will seriously try to re-industrialize. As China continues its rise, and as the US dollar loses its hegemonic status, the City of London financial center will continue to weaken and, well, the UK will have less and less the world wants, which is bad since the UK can’t even feed itself, and has limited natural resources, especially if Scotland leaves.

It’s over. The English had a good run from 1500 to 2000 or so, but all nations face periods of decline and poverty. Britain’s will soon be upon them, and given how authoritarian England is becoming, it won’t even have a lot of freedom to offer. If you’re British, and can, get out. Now.

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Why Assisted Suicide Bills Will Proliferate & Deaths Will Increase

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On November 25, 2024

15 Comments

Nothing saves money on people who are old, disabled and unable to work like just killing them.

Covid killed mostly old people. That saved the government money in the long run, although in the short run it was expensive, except for Sweden where they just euthanized their old people with Covid instead of treating them. (Gave them opiods even when they had enough oxygen and drugs.)

Since Covid, however, there’s been an unfortunate increase in people who can’t work because they’re chronically ill.

This isn’t hard to understand. Britain is massively importing young people who can work, or older people who have lots of money, but at the same time the number of people who are liabilities, financially speaking, is exploding. If you have a liability the easiest way to get rid of it is to… get rid of it.

Canada’s in the same boat, and these bills will spread.

Assisted suicide isn’t automatically a bad thing, mind you. If people were properly supported and cared for I’d support it. People who are in a ton of pain and won’t get better ought to have the option.

But when the government is whining about benefits and cutting them, as in Britain, one doesn’t expect this is being done from a humanitarian impulse. And the medical and social workers, in hospitals and palliative care centers that are overstretched and don’t have enough nurses or doctors or beds, well, convincing someone who’s taking up time or a bed to just die already will have to be pretty tempting, sometimes even with somewhat good motives: to free up resources for people who can be cared for.

But, of course, what will often happen is that chronically ill people or homeless types who could live for quite a long time and with proper care could be fairly happy will wind up dead because in Britain and Canada we don’t help them enough: to get enough housing, food, help and pain meds (given the way we’re so scared of opiates.)

Wikipedia lists some known cases of abuse of the law:

  • In 2017, a mother of a young woman with cerebral palsy was told by a doctor that not applying for MAID was “selfish”. Her daughter was in the room when the conversation took place and described the experience as traumatic.[71]
  • In 2018, Roger Foley was being treated for cerebellar ataxia at an Ontario hospital. Foley alleged that his only options were to be forcibly discharged from the hospital and then treated by an organization that had previously failed to provide him adequate care or apply for MAID. Foley hired a lawyer for a charter challenge.[72]
  • In 2019, Alan Nichols successfully applied for MAID while being hospitalized for suicide ideation. The reason given on his application was hearing loss.[1]
  • In September 2021, Rosina Kamis, a 41-year-old Malaysian woman, applied for MAID citing fibromyalgia as the reason. However, in conversations and recordings shared with friends, she mentioned financial hardship and social isolation as additional factors influencing her decision.[73]
  • In February 2022, an anonymous Torontonian suffering from extreme chemical sensitivity syndrome with the pseudonym Sophia had a medically assisted death after failing to find affordable housing that was free from tobacco smoke and other chemicals.[74] This case was addressed by her health care provider in testimony provided to the Special Joint Committee on MAID, and was referenced in their final report.[75]

One can safely assume there are many, many more. The fact is that even doctors and social workers think some lives are worth more than others. No one who’s spent time in the medical system believes otherwise.

The West is in decline. Our elites are wedded to austerity as a “solution”. They often, probably usually, feel that people who are non-productive are useless eaters and a burden on the state.

That combination is going to lead to a truly vast expansion of measures intended to get people off benefit rolls.

In a way assisted suicide, or euthanasia, is the most honest of those policies and maybe even the most merciful. There’s nothing honest about deliberate policies which make people homeless, leading to most of their deaths, after all. Politicians know that winding up on the street long term is essentially a death sentence, they know that policies like mass immigration without increasing the housing supply to match will cause homelessness, so they know their policies cause homelessness and death but they can pretend it’s an unintended side effect.

Just killing people is at least not hypocritical.

***

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Consequences of the British Election

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On July 5, 2024

27 Comments

Labor won with a massive majority. In seats:

 

Of course Britain has a first past the post system, so these aren’t nearly the same as the percentage results.

  • Labour Party: 35 percent vote share, 412 seats
  • Conservative Party: 24 percent vote share, 121 seats
  • Liberal Democrats: 12 percent vote share, 71 seats
  • Reform UK: 14 percent vote share, 4 seats
  • Green Party: 7 percent vote share, 4 seats
  • Scottish National Party (SNP): 2 percent vote share, 9 seats
  • Sinn Fein: 0.7 percent vote share, 7 seats
  • Plaid Cymru: 0.7 percent vote share, 4 seats

Labour has a huge MP majority, but received less of the vote than they did in 2017 under Corbyn.

The Reform surge, which at one point looked like it might overtake and pass the conservatives died out, alas. But note that Reform received more votes than the Liberal Democrats but received four seats to their seventy-one and Sinn Fein received 7 seats for .7% of the vote. In first past the post, you want your votes clumped, not spread out. In vote total terms, Reform is now the third party.

It’s also worth noting that almost no one is voting Labour because they like Labour or Keir Starmer:

As with LaPen’s National Rally, Reform may well improve with each election and Labour is vulnerable to a real challenge from the left.

But let’s move to more immediate consequences.

The Conservative austerity policies severely gutted Britain:

  • The grant to local governments dropped 60% from 2010 to 2020. They’re the ones who run most of the government: libraries, fire departments, council housing, roads, public transit and so on.
  • 20% of libraries closed
  • Spending on old people down 35% with one estimate saying this killed 45K people.
  • Inflation adjusted wages are lower than in 2007, and the inflation numbers are certainly lower than reality.
  • Rent and housing costs are way up.
  • Twenty percent less people get cancer treatment on time.
  • The UK now has the highest homelessness rates in the Western world.
  • Gutted universities, one of the few world class industries left in Britain (and one which brings in a lot of foreign currency.)

And so on. Tory rule has been a catastrophe.

But there’s little reason to expect Labour rule to be much better. They voted for many of the bills that caused this catastrophe, and didn’t oppose most of the rest. They still believe in austerity and neoliberalism. It’s likely they’ll increase some taxes, but they’re not likely to use the money to spend much more and fix problems: Britain is serious fiscal condition, and the level of tax raises necessary to deal with that and to allow spending is off the table, especially as to really get money they’d have to tax the city and massively raise taxes on the rich.

They will continue to clamp down on public dissent, and likely use the banking system against protestors, along with locking them up. I’m unsure how they’ll handle strikes, but odds are that Starmer will be unsympathetic to mass strikes and use legislation and the police against them (which is why the big unions should leave Labour and support a new left party.)

In other words, Britain’s decline is not going to halt under Labour and neither is the decline in standards of living for most Britons.

This means that there will be room for Reform and a new left party to surge. While I’m not a fan of right wing social policies, Brits tend to be more left wing economically than Labour but socially conservative, which means Galloway’s “Worker’s Party” is positioned to take advantage, being economically left and socially right on some key issues, such as trans rights.

However Galloway’s party’s social conservatism is a barrier to some left wingers, like Corbyn (who won his seat as an independent) joining.

Whatever the specifics, there is a constituency for an economically left wing party, and Labour’s likely terrible economic performance now that it’s in power leaves an opening.

Generally speaking, as neoliberalism dies, there will be changeovers in dominant parties: either the parties themselves will change, or they will be replaced: this is true in almost every country. If we want a good world, and government which genuinely tries to help ordinary people, we have to work for and hope for the real left to take power.

One good piece of news in this regards is the continued weakening of the Zionist movement, since accusations of anti-semitism have been one of the main weapons used against the left, as they were against Corbyn and as they have been used against the left in France. Making charges of anti-semitism for supporting Palestine identically to excusing genocide (which they are) is necessary, and underway, especially among younger voters.

To summarize, however: nothing much will change immediately or in the next four years because Labour won. They’re still austerity loving neoliberal scum who can’t imagine, let alone institute any of the policies required to turn around Britain’s decline. The medium term trends, however, and the consequences of their failure to govern effectively offer some promise for the future, though by the time someone with sense gets in power it’s going to be nearly impossible to turn Britain around, assuming it’s even the United Kingdom any more. (Scotland should leave, and so should Northern Ireland, and both stand a good chance of doing so.)

Plus ca change, etc…

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The UK’s Housing And Immigration Crisis In Charts

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On July 2, 2024

20 Comments

Here’s the TLDR: the UK has a housing crisis because it is bringing in way more immigrants than usual and not building way more housing.

(Most of the charts from Simulcrax.)

For a long time Britain was building more housing than it had population increase. This was good, because as anyone who visited England in the 50s or 60s will tell you, it didn’t start with an excess.But starting around 2000AD it increased immigration and didn’t increase how much housing it was building, and after a while that caught up.

The chart only goes till 2019, though. Let’s see what happened afterwards.

 

Wow. That’s pretty ugly, and hey, it happened under the anti-immigrant Conservative party, and after Brexit, which was supposed to reduce immigration. Anyone wonder why Reform is challenging the Conservatives for second party status?

Now let’s be clear: immigration can be good, bad or mixed. If your economy is doing really well, you have low inequality and high wages and not enough workers and an economy which makes most of what you need domestically, then immigration is going to be good: the immigrants will get good jobs, increase demand and the economy will expand. But if you’ve gotten rid of your industry, have high inequality and an economy which is sucking wind then immigration is going to take jobs from natives and keep wages lower. And if you aren’t building enough housing and don’t do something about that, it’s going to raise housing prices, especially at the bottom and middle, which is going to hurt people.

The people it will hurt most, of course, are:

The chart pretty much speaks for itself. Let’s look at one more chart:
Ouch. I mean, it’s not like the situation is good in the US, is it?

Let’s be clear about what’s happening: it’s not that the UK can’t reduce immigration, it can, especially post-Brexit. Like Canada, however, it wants to increase GDP and keep wages low, so it’s bringing in as many people as it can, as deliberate government policy and doing so, without a booming economy, is hurting people who already live in Britain.

You don’t have to be racist or xenophobic to believe, accurately, that too much immigration is bad if there isn’t enough housing and jobs to absorb the immigrants. Problem is, given how people are, they will blame the immigrants and become racist and xenophobic, when the correct response is to hate the government and ruling class.

Britain, having deliberately de-industrialized, especially since Thatcher, can’t absorb this many people without causing extreme harm to people already living in Britain, especially if the government doesn’t move, massively, to social housing. People who want less immigration are correct, the only way to absorb this sort of influx without harm would be an entirely different set of government policies, even then, the immigration surge wouldn’t make sense until the policies take effect.

Unfortunately the only chance of pursuing anything like those policies was to elect Corbyn, and that chance has passed.

The sun always sets, and now it sets on Britain.

Addendum: Stumbled on this after writing the article.

He continues: “According to the Government’s own methodology, we needed to expand the housing stock by around 3.4 million homes over the last decade: 2.2 million to meet existing housing pressures, and 1.2 million to cope with net migration. We increased the number of homes by only 2.1 million.”

So, without immigration, they’d only be down 100,000 over the last twent years, rather than 1.3 million.

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