59. The Arsonist and the Water Pistol

You know, it’s easy to forget, after the coughing and the comedian with the P45 and the bit where the sign started disintegrating, that there was a far bigger problem with Theresa May’s speech: it was bad. To be specific, the housing policies the prime minister unveiled yesterday were in no way an adequate response to the housing crisis – which, you’ll recall, is disadvantaging the young, holding back our productivity, and (though I don’t care so much about this part) wrecking the Conservative party’s electoral chances. It is in some ways May’s good luck that nobody will have been paying the slightest attention to the actual content of her speech, or they might have noticed quite how completely bloody useless it was. Anyway: this seemed like a good moment to drag Stephen Bush back into the podcasting basement to discuss all this. We cover the Conservative party’s long-standing failure to tackle this issue; our suggested solutions; and how exactly we can get rid of buy-to-let. All that, and you can learn about “the incident”, too. Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman's cities site, CityMetric. It's hosted by Jonn Elledge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.