This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
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Is Boris Johnson the raucous clan chieftain that feudal Britain deserves?

By:   []

Date: 2021-12

The current state of British politics only makes sense once you understand that the country is becoming increasingly feudal.

After a long year of allegations of Covid cronyism, donation scandals and the bizarre story of the Downing Street refurb, Boris Johnson is still strolling out ahead in the polls.

How to explain this solidity of support other than to see Johnson as the booze-swilling, raucously shagging clan chieftain that this moment demands?

As the flickering dream of an ageing landed class that’s shaggy at the edges, but conservative at its core, that grew up after sex was ‘invented’, then got fat off the property boom?

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The simplest way to tell that Britain is an increasingly feudal society is that land and who owns it is becoming more and more important, while labour and capital are rapidly losing significance. Wages have long stagnated, while house prices have grown by an average of 5% a year.

As openDemocracy’s economics editor, Laurie Macfarlane, has pointed out, three-quarters of the increase in the UK’s wealth between 1995 and 2016 came from the rising price of houses.

Conveyor belt of wealth

This trend has been so dramatic that, by 2018, the real estate market was contributing almost as much to UK GDP as all of production. And with house prices rising by almost 11% during the first year of the pandemic, while, for obvious reasons, productivity crashed, buying and selling homes likely now plays a far more significant role in our economy than making things.

The rapid churning of the property market acts as a conveyor belt, carrying wealth from poor to rich. Rising house prices are paid for by those struggling to afford mortgages or rent, while most of the benefits are handed to the well-off: if you owned a million-pound house in an average location a year ago, you’re now notionally £110,000 richer. If you owned a £100,000 house, you’re only £11,000 richer.

Equity release, buy-to-let and downsizing all mean that it’s increasingly easy to convert that notional wealth into hard cash – unearned money skimmed from someone else’s wages.

But while the better-off always come out best, a solid majority feel like they’re gaining: about 65% of British adults are homeowners. And so it’s hardly a surprise that the property boom unleashed by the ‘race for space’ has made people feel richer.

And being a nation of people whose fates are tied to the magic property market machine rather than earned wages has significant psychological effects. That, after all, was the point of Thatcher’s housing revolution. “Economics are the method,” she famously said. “The object is to change the soul.”
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