YOUR FIRST HOME, LABOUR'S LAST LAUGH

The latest political wheeze to emerge from the northern marches arrives wrapped in the familiar packaging of benevolent concern for the young. Andy Burnham, that tireless salesman of regional virtue, is preparing to unveil something called “Your First Home.” The name alone is a small masterpiece of advertising copy: possessive, intimate, and entirely free of any awkward suggestion that the thing being offered might not, in the end, be yours at all. Under this scheme the aspiring householder may, with a deposit of a mere 2.5 per cent, acquire a new-build property. The remaining 97.5 per cent will be supplied by a mortgage, presumably at the sort of interest rate that currently makes a banker’s pulse race with quiet professional satisfaction. Six per cent has been mentioned. One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from the housebuilding industry as the numbers are announced.

What could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot, as it happens, and most of it has gone wrong before, under different names and with only slightly less optimistic branding. The first-time buyer is invited to step onto the property ladder with almost no equity and a mountain of debt, the better to purchase a dwelling whose chief distinguishing features are a thin coat of paint, a kitchen island designed by committee, and the lingering scent of the developer’s profit margin. The house, one suspects, will already be overpriced relative to the surrounding market. The scheme will ensure that it remains so.

A simple question presents itself, and it is the sort of question that schemes of this kind prefer not to answer. Why is the same generous deposit not available for existing homes? The silence that greets the question is eloquent. Existing homes are already there; they do not require the coordinated efforts of planning officers, marketing departments and political announcements. New builds, by contrast, keep the wheels of a particular industry turning. They also provide politicians with the pleasing sensation of having Done Something. In a flat market, where prices show little inclination to rise of their own accord, a carefully calibrated injection of demand can perform the useful service of propping them up. The government looks active. The builders look prosperous. The young buyer looks, for a moment, as if he has been given a leg up.

The leg, unfortunately, is attached to a body that will spend the next twenty-five or thirty years discovering the true cost of ownership. Mortgage payments are only the beginning. There are service charges, ground rents that somehow never quite wither away, the unexpected need to replace a boiler that was installed with all the care of a temporary fixture, and the peculiar British tradition of discovering that the “affordable” new estate sits adjacent to a dual carriageway or a flooded field that the brochure somehow omitted to mention. The buyer who entered with 2.5 per cent equity may find that equity remains stubbornly theoretical for years. Negative equity is not a theoretical concept; it is a condition in which the house owns more of you than you own of it.

One is invited to believe that this arrangement addresses the deep structural problems of the British housing market: the punitive weight of stamp duty, the chronic failure of supply to meet demand, the long-term collapse of genuine affordability. It does nothing of the kind. It merely rearranges the furniture so that demand is stimulated in the one sector that benefits most from political intervention. The real difficulties remain where they were, carefully unexamined. A government that preferred to confront them would have to risk the displeasure of those who profit from the status quo. It is so much easier to announce a scheme with a warm, possessive title and a photogenic deposit percentage.

Of course, a still simpler remedy presents itself, though one that successive administrations have treated with the delicate aversion usually reserved for a relative’s embarrassing illness. Were the government merely to attend to the persistently expressed wishes of the electorate, put an end to the illegal small-boat traffic across the Channel, and arrange the repatriation of the migrant population already present, the chronic mismatch between people and roofs might ease of its own accord. In that event the elaborate machinery of “Your First Home,” with its wafer-thin deposits and its quiet enrichment of the developers, would be revealed as the unnecessary contrivance it is. Demand, after all, is not a mysterious atmospheric condition; it is the arithmetic consequence of numbers. Yet to act on that arithmetic would demand a political will that, for the time being, remains as scarce as genuinely affordable housing.

The prudent course, therefore, remains the unfashionable one. Save a proper deposit—ten per cent, twenty if possible. Buy when the numbers make sense for your own circumstances rather than for the electoral calendar. Ownership of a house brings obligations that extend far beyond the monthly standing order. To enter that arrangement under the temporary spell of a government incentive is to mistake a sales technique for a solution. The property market will not be fixed by encouraging young people to borrow almost the entire value of an overpriced new-build. It will merely ensure that the next generation learns, at considerable personal expense, what previous generations already knew: that the ladder is real enough, but the rungs have a tendency to give way just when one is counting on them.

QUINOA MUNCHERS, LEAVE OUR ROAST ALONE!

There is a peculiar species of modern journalism that exists solely to inform the British public that everything they have always enjoyed is, in fact, a moral and dietary catastrophe. The latest specimen arrives courtesy of a newspaper that once knew better, solemnly declaring the traditional Sunday roast 'terrible' and in urgent need of an overhaul. Expensive, time-consuming, unhealthy: the usual charges are laid out with the air of a coroner examining a corpse that has had the impertinence to go on living. One is left with the distinct impression that the only proper British meal would be a carefully portioned kale smoothie consumed in silence while contemplating one’s carbon footprint.

Permit me a right of reply, there is nothing greater, nothing more civilising, nothing more profoundly English than a traditional Sunday family roast. It begins, as all true rituals must, with the potatoes. Not one variety, mind you, but two: mash for the soft-hearted, roast for those who understand that a potato’s highest destiny is to be transformed into something golden, crisp, and faintly indecent. Alongside them march the roast carrots and parsnips, their natural sweetness coaxed out by heat and fat until they become the sort of vegetables that even children will tolerate. Cauliflower cheese may put in an appearance if the household is feeling particularly luxurious, or particularly determined to ensure that every last member of the family will spend the afternoon in a state of gentle torpor. The meat itself—beef, lamb, chicken, or whatever the butcher has managed to persuade you is still affordable—is secondary only in the sense that gravy is the true sovereign. Lashings of it. Homemade Yorkshire puddings, risen to the height of small cathedrals, stand ready to receive the gravy like communicants at an altar.

Afterwards comes the pudding: a homemade fruit crumble or pie, its pastry or topping bearing the proud scars of domestic improvisation, served with custard for the stout-hearted and ice cream for the lightweights who still believe dessert should be cold. All of this is washed down with white or red wine according to the season and the cook’s remaining patience, possibly a glass of brandy for those who have earned it, and absolutely—without apology or modern self-consciousness—a cigar or two. The children will by this point have produced at least one tantrum and one storming-off. These are not interruptions to the proceedings; they are part of the liturgy.

Translated into the language of ordinary human feeling, it means “I love you.” It is one of the last remaining institutions in which love is expressed not through declarations or carefully curated experiences, but through the sheer, unapologetic abundance of food, noise, and residual irritation. The critics who now propose its overhaul appear to believe that affection is best demonstrated by calorie counts, timed cooking sessions, and the substitution of avocado for peas. They have mistaken the point entirely.

Modern “vegan” cuisine is a bland, joyless procession of beige textures and apologetic flavours, endlessly recycled into the same uninspired plates of mush, cardboard, and self-congratulation. It is not food so much as ideology on a plate: deliberately stripped of richness, depth, and pleasure, then forced upon the rest of us by humourless zealots whose primary talent is moral preening rather than cooking. These people, steeped in a far-left agenda that treats traditional eating as a political crime, insist we celebrate their sterile inventions while sneering at anyone who still prefers actual taste, culture, and satisfaction.

The Sunday roast does not require an overhaul. What requires an overhaul is the attitude that finds the whole business faintly embarrassing—too messy, too caloric, too redolent of a time when families still gathered without first checking whether the occasion had been sufficiently optimised. The roast has survived wars, rationing, and the invention of the microwave. It will survive the current bout of journalistic hand-wringing as well. All it asks in return is that we continue to sit down, eat too much, argue about the washing-up, and understand, without needing to say so, that this is how certain civilisations have always said they care.

DUTY CALLS, BUT NO-ONE'S HOME

One suspects the modern European state has finally achieved what generations of utopians only dreamed of: a polity so thoroughly denationalised that it can no longer risk asking its own citizens to defend it. The proposition is delicious in its absurdity. For decades the official line has been that Britain (and much of the Continent) is no longer a nation in the old, inconvenient sense, but a sort of luxurious international departure lounge where the indigenous population are merely the longer-stay guests, expected to keep the carpets clean and the Wi-Fi working while newcomers settle in for the better life. Then, when a foreign power begins rattling its sabre a little too loudly, the same authorities suddenly remember the language of blood and soil and start murmuring about “doing one’s duty.”

It will not happen. The state will never dare try conscription, and one rather hopes any half-hearted attempt would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions before the first reluctant recruit had finished lacing his boots. The moment the call-up papers fluttered through letterboxes, the carefully constructed post-national fiction would evaporate overnight. Those who arrived more recently would, with admirable practicality, recall urgent family obligations in the lands of their origin. Flights would be booked, WhatsApp groups would hum with sudden nostalgia, and the “New Brits” would discover that home, after all, still held certain charms. Meanwhile the longer-resident population – those awkward, unfashionable natives who had been told for thirty years that they no longer owned the place – would find themselves, by pure bureaucratic accident, revealed as the only people left who might actually have to stay and fight. The propaganda of the preceding generation would be undone more efficiently than any opposition pamphlet could manage. One almost feels a twinge of pity for the speechwriters.

A serious war, of course, would impose still greater inconveniences. Borders would have to be controlled with something approaching competence. The open-door hospitality that has been the moral centrepiece of recent policy would become a strategic liability. Welfare systems designed for perpetual expansion would face the unromantic necessity of prioritising those who might be required to risk their necks. None of this appeals to the governing class, whose principal talent lies in the management of appearances rather than the management of reality. The cost, in both political capital and ideological consistency, would far outweigh the fleeting satisfaction of another round of virtue-signalling speeches about solidarity with distant causes.

Ukraine will therefore be quietly demoted in the hierarchy of official concerns. The language will soften, the photo opportunities will grow scarcer, and the whole business will be allowed to drift into the category of problems that are important but not urgent – until the next financial upheaval arrives to sweep the present arrangement aside. This is not cynicism so much as pattern recognition. States that have spent decades dissolving the emotional bonds that once made conscription thinkable are unlikely to rediscover those bonds the moment the artillery grows louder.

There is, however, a certain dry optimism to be extracted from the mess. Across Europe the electorate appears increasingly primed to reject those who keep insisting that distant conflicts require the indefinite sacrifice of domestic cohesion. Voters have noticed that the same voices loudest for escalation are often the ones most reluctant to acknowledge the social and fiscal consequences of their preferred demographic experiment. An attempt at conscription – even a tentative one – would accelerate that realisation. It would force a clarity that polite discourse has long avoided. The resulting backlash would not be elegant, but it might prove decisive. Politicians who have treated national identity as an embarrassing relic may yet discover that electorates retain a residual attachment to the idea of a country worth neither invading nor abandoning.

One does not need to romanticise the past to observe that a polity which cannot, without contradiction, ask its people to defend it has already answered a rather fundamental question about its own future. The hope, modest but persistent, is that any further attempts to square this particular circle will simply make the circle more visible – and that the voters, when next given the chance, will politely but firmly show the circle-drawers the door.