This sums it up nicely. The entire UK economy is a stack of cards with home ownership at the very bottom. If property prices plummet, the whole thing goes down.
Not to mention that a large portion of MPs are also landlords so doing anything about it would not only harm the economy as a whole but would directly hurt their own income streams.
I would say that the internet has actually played a pivotal role in bringing about the situation we’re in now. Before, the rich could keep the information to themselves and rule the game. Now, the information is out there on the net for everyone to find. Now more and more people are trying to join the landlord game which leaves a smaller and smaller group of workers to actually keep the country running.
All of this was made even worse by the fact that Brexit ended up stopping the flow of people at the bottom of the pyramid keeping the whole thing up. The only way out of this situation is for companies to reduce the amount of money they pay out at the top and increase the amount they pay to the bottom, it’s the only way to avoid a housing crash. But companies will never do this voluntarily, they’ll have to be forced by a drastic legal minimum wage hike.
This likely won’t happen until Labour get in power. The problem is that this minimum wage hike, may bide some time, but will also lead to bankrupting many small to medium size businesses.
There really is no solution other than to let the house market crash as it should have done a long time ago, and to rebuild the economy based on actual productive work rather than the essentially fake money being generated through rising property prices which are outpacing wages. The problem is that if this were to happen, we are talking Great Depression scale levels of homelessness. I would say the effects may even be worse because a lot of people have become accustomed to a comfortable, modern existence and aren’t going to know how to survive if it’s taken away in the same way that people in the 1920s might have done. The one thing that might help is that technology has come such a long way with things like insulation and clothing that may lessen the worst of it.
No political party wants to be remembered as the one who caused the Depression because they will be so unpopular they may actually cease to exist. Some Tory MPs have been quoted as saying this is “an extinction level event” for the party. Some polls are showing that if an election were held tomorrow the tories would go from having 350 odd seats today, to somewhere between 3 and 70. And that’s just at the threat of mortgage rates going up to 6%, it hasn’t even happened yet.
If the conservatives went below fifty seats, the SNP would become the official opposition. For the last 100 years, the two main parties have been Labour and The Conservatives. The Tory party have been around in some form since 1834, if this were to happen (and it’s looking increasingly likely) it would be truly monumental in British politics.