Building back better
One of the most frightening things about the leadership campaign is that both tory candidates have pandered to the membership to a disgusting degree. Take just one example, housing.
Each has tried to outdo the other in stopping house building, encouraging and entrenching Nimbyism and ignoring the best interests of the country.
Allied with their attack on environmental policies, the results will be disastrous. Not only is home ownership a distant dream for whole generations but even renting is becoming ruinously expensive, as buy to let landlords screw the poor and young.
Better policies, specifically designed to make home owners ever richer and the young ever poorer, it would be difficult to devise.
The answer, that dare not speak its name, is to encourage council house building on a huge scale and house building with new, much tougher, regulations. This would massively improve insulation, use rain water for flushing the loo, install heat pumps and solar panels. Energy use and costs would plummet.
Councils could build some for rent, some for shared ownership and some for sale. But the money raised would have to be used to build more homes. Councils with large land banks and a monopoly on planning permission are ideally suit to this role.
Otherwise the young, who have been saints during lockdown, will finally decide this economy and especially its housing market are impossible to prosper in and will leave.
An economy rigged in favour of the rich elderly minority is a disaster waiting to happen.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.