Thatcher's policy of allowing Council Houses to be sold off cheap at a discount because of how many years they had been tenants turned everyone into property owners who made instant profits. Her theory being that would turn those owners into Tory voters. But what she also did which has caused today's homelessness is snatch that money, ring fence it, and forbid the councils to use it to rebuild their housing stock.

After Thatcher came the Blair government and they needed that money along with Private Finance to carry out much needed public building requirements such as hospitals and roads. So, in effect Blair & Brown allowed the ringfencing to continue, which in turn has caused further problems. After Blair & Brown came the Cameron Government and his Chancellor Osborne.

That government encouraged people to get to the lump sums in various pension funds and many used that to get cheap interest-only mortgages to buy housing to rent to those in need. That caused another bubble and increased housing values.

Tory ideology stifled the attempt at Social Democracy and here we are until a government is brave enough to re-build homes for the poorer end of society, which hopefully Starmer/Rayner might achieve with their plans of mass housebuilding. If they also go back to subsidising craft apprenticeships instead of making those pay for their training there may be a final correction and fightback.

The problem is that there are still many in business that think of Thatcher & Reagan as their idols and reminisce to their super profitable years. If some were encouraged to have a social conscience along with those profits we might succeed.

When Blair came to power, I was a member of a section business supporters of New Labour and that government did, at least, try to get to that mixture of Socialist and Capitalist and it worked for a while until greedy bankers buggered it up in their leveraging of the sub-prime lending, the result of another Reagan policy.