Affordable Housing: That seven years of government was nearly reduced to a bitter meme reflects disappointment with Conservative broken promises

Conservative flagship housing policies have yet to deliver anything even resembling an affordable housing market where young people can get their foot on the ladder.

When the phrase "No Deposit Required" started trending on social media on Sunday, there was a rumble of excitment. Unfortunately, it was not trending for the reason that people, momentarily, thought it was (it was actually a gambling promotion).

The mistaken belief was that it was a brave new housing policy announcement, with an level of ambition that might make a real dent in the housing crisis. A policy that might really help make home ownership affordable.

The trend quickly became filled with the same joke - "I thought this was a housing policy, but..." - and, for a moment, seven years of government teetered on the brink of being reduced to a single bitter meme.

That disappointment is dangerous for such a weak government and, that it spread so easily in a free form moment, is a big threat to a party that relies so heavily on well practised, old media control over the message and tone of politics.

The Conservatives rely on controlling public discourse and their grip is slipping. That is a sign of Conservative failure, symbolised by Philip Hammond's Autumn Budget in which he promised help to young people toward owning homes.

The breakdown of his signature offer of cutting stamp duty for first time buyers, however, is a narrow policy whose benefit will mostly be helpful to those who are already home owners - a key Conservative audience - and beyond a narrow group, may actually lead to homes being more expensive.

While Hammond put his faith in tinkering around the edges, with some subtle shifts in regulation, it's clear that out there in the public imagination tackling the growing crisis of affordable housing is going to take bigger ideas.

The fact that there was excitment about a policy of no deposits when buying a house - a policy that would come at an extraordinary cost, even for renters - shows just how far the May-Hammond government is from the scale of response the public is expecting.

For Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, that will be music to their ears - perhaps a sign that their message is getting through or has a receptive audience. However, Labour is not free from singeing by the burn of this particular trending topic.

Housing is an issue that no party has adequately dealt with - not even William Beveridge, when he drew his ideas for the welfare system, had an answer for housing.

Homes are too expensive and the growth and security of incomes is low and sliding. Land and property remain archaic, rentier dominated, sectors - cartels like great spiders sat in webs in the midst our economy, catching our resources, extracting and hoarding them.

Conservative failures and broken promises have fed disappointment that risks turning bitter. Progressives must take seriously the need to unravel these webs, and push out the fat lazy spiders, on which so much of our economic potential is snagged.

Budget 2017: Cautious Hammond has salves not solutions, as Budget falls short of action

Chancellor Philip Hammond was in bombastic mood for delivering his second Budget of 2017, making jokes despite the Office of Budget Responsibility's projections that listed productivity as down and growth falling. He brushed past those figures with lots of Brexiter-placating language and an opening salvo of £3bn put aside to get the country Brexit ready.

In the build-up to the Budget, Sarah Ann Harris in The Huffington Post UK posted an article listing those measures that charities said would be needed to address Britain's varied crises. Together, they would have required at least £10bn of new funding.

In the Budget, Hammond acknowledged the pressures and hardships and said that he was prepared to invest. But when the announcements came, they ultimately offered no more than half of the requested amounts to alleivate hardships.

On the disastrous impact of Universal Credit, Hammond went halfway towards the requests, even of MPs on his own benches, of reducing restraints on claimants - taking one week rather than two out of the waiting time to receive funds. With other easing measures, Hammond called this a £1.5bn package of support. Yet this was step didn't even reach the minimum requests for alleviation.

On the NHS, the Chancellor offered up some large numbers. These break down to smaller numbers, though. The figure of £10bn, for capital spending - infrastructure, buildings, etc - is spread across the five years of the Parliament, meaning no more than £2mn-£3mn a year. Another £2.8bn will be spread over three years, with just £350mn front-loaded to avert crisis this winter.

There was an olive branch to nurses in the form of a commitment to fund a pay rise for nurse, but this was conditional on negotiating a new contract settlement with the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

To address the housing crisis, and in particular affordability, the Chancellor announced a £44bn fund. This was, however, then broken down. This fund would be only partly public funding, with the other parts being loans and guarantees, and was intended to run through to the middle of the 2020s.

That could stretch that £44bn over eight years, or even more, meaning the yearly amount would actually be much lower, at around £5bn-£6bn - of which only a part would be a public funding rise.

At most this overall package, to tackle a range of social crises in Britain, will come to £2.4mn/year, plus only a part of the around £6bn/year package being invested in the housing market. That looks like being a long way short of the £10bn minimum requested.

The Chancellor found some money to invest, with £500m for various areas of tech, a few billion more to extend the Nation Productivity Fund, and a new £2.5bn fund to support new innovative, knowledge intensive, companies. Another £1.7bn was found for cities and city regions for various local infrastructure projects. The reality though, is that most of that will be spread over several years.

The Conservative Chancellor framed this as rejecting extra borrowing and instead using some of the headroom within his fiscal rules. However, there are still questions over how the Chancellor is going to fund these and the reality is there will still be lots more borrowing, with the process of eliminating the  debt and deficit extended over a longer period.

The headline offer made by Hammond was to end Stamp Duty for first time home buyers on homes up to £300,000. While this was trailed as a boon to young people, the reality is that it will serve current homeowners best - likely helping and subsidising current people who are, on the face of it, more likely to already be Tory voters.

The cautious Chancellor had hedged his bets with this Budget. He has tried to appeal to all sides, to make everyone feel like they came out of this Budget with a little something. The reality is that no one has gotten what they wanted, although Brexiters may have been midly appeased by £3bn and adopting their rhetoric.

Social pressures in Britain demand a response, but the Chancellor has decided not to act. Hammond has stuck with cheap salves rather than paying for the solutions. To make real progress, we need more from the Exchequer.

Budget 2017: Hammond gets a second attempt at Budget 2017, but will he act?

Photograph: NATO Summit Wales 2014 by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (License) (Cropped)

On Wednesday, Chancellor Philip Hammond will present his second Budget of 2017. It has been trailed with promises of doing more. But the big question is whether any of the measures will be enough.

Between the growth of wages being anaemic, price rises eating away at households and the private sector not stimulating any positive movement by holding back from investment, it's being argued that Hammond has cornered himself against his own fiscal rules.

The government has made big promises - or at least big announcements, with little that is tangible behind them. The governing reality has frequently been the denial of the existence of a crisis, making excuses or tinkering around the edges.

Consider the big pledges Hammond has made on housing. The Chancellor has refused much needed additional funding, so tinkering measures - such as adjusting stamp duty or loosening restrictions on councils borrowing to build homes - are expected to carry the burden of getting the government to 300,000 new homes a year.

That will mean achieving the completion of around 100,000 extra homes, each year, to reach the target. Which makes it relevant to note that this is, of course, the same pledge that hasn't been met over the last seven years - at times struggling to reach 100,000 at all, never mind an extra 100,000.

These kind of promises, made over and again only to be missed, serve to undermine future pledges to do more. So too, do gaffes like Philip Hammond's Mitt Romney -esque announcement on Sunday that there are no unemployed people (there are).

It hurts the government too, that funding is denied where it is asked for by services, but is magically pulled out of thin air to solve the latest Conservative political crisis - a billion to secure a DUP-Con deal, for example.

The denials, excuses and tinkering extend to other areas. The NHS is expected to be denied the £4 billion in extra funding it's chief has demanded and the existence of a healthcare crisis has been refused.

These attitudes, these tinkering measures, point towards Hammond's approach to the last Budget, which responded to big challenges with a 'steady as she goes' attitude, spending in the millions not the billions.

There are questions still ahead, however, and people who remain vulnerable. What tinkering will help those women, particularly young women, suffering from period poverty? How will tinkering, with cautious suggestions of reducing waiting times, deal with welfare debt traps?

Universal Credit, in the midst of a disastrous rollout, is exacerbating problems - like mounting rental arrears and the simple fact of more than a month without a means on which to live - that are entangled with all areas of life for the most vulnerable.

While the government may be more focused on avoiding any further embarrassments, of which it has had a string lately, by avoiding any backtracks and climbdowns - such as the major reversal on self-employed National Insurance changes back in the spring.

But now is not the time for 'little c' conservatism. Change will perhaps undermine the Conservative position, ever talking of the chaos Labour will unleash by deviating from their fiscal restrictions.

But the Tories failure to match their rhetoric with reality is a party affair. The wellbeing of the people has to come before the wellbeing of the party. It is time to act.

Argentina midterms raise the question: What's so funny about compassionate realism?

Mauricio Macri's hold on La Casa Rosada lightly reinforced by small gains at the Argentina legislative midterms. Photograph: La Casa Rosada from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

The midterm elections in Argentina did little to settle the future of Argentina. President Mauricio Macri's movement gained a few seats, just enough to keep his project rolling forward.

That Macri's project is essentially austerity in a more extreme context is important for progressives to consider. It presents the epitome of what the Centre-Right consider the justification for strong dose of 'realism', but raises the question of why that has to be delivered in the form of harsh measures?

The Midterms elections covered a third of the Senate and half of the lower House. It would have been hoped by Cambiemos to be an opportunity to reinforce Macri's presidency with a stronger legislative contingent - just 16 of 72 in the Senate, with just 86 Deputies out of 257 in the Chamber, to around 46 and 105 for various Justicialist groups combined, respectively.

The four biggest parties each had about half of seats their Chamber seats up for reelection, while most of the Senate seats were being defended by Justicialists (Peronists).

As it happened Cambiemos made gains, though they were few. The coalition took 19 seats, not enough reach a majority, while those were offset by the 25 seats gained by former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, rallying voters from various populist parties to her particular faction.

Even if this result is more than Macri and Cambiemos might have feared, it is still less than they will have hoped. Part of the reason why may be that, after two years in office, Macri has yet to deliver a deep sea shift in the country's economic condition.

That shouldn't really be a massive surprise, because two years is nothing. But the public are restless and what Macri has asked for is a huge change in approach from the Kirchnerist-Peronist years.

Not least are the cuts to subsidies that help with the cost of living for low income families. This is the austerity programme familiar to many progressives around the world.

In Argentina this has particular significance. In reason years, at the least, the Kirchnerist-Peronist populists - especially under the presidency of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner - have tended to offer up big promises, comfortable lies to package harder truths and deeper crises.

Of relevance to all of those resisting austerity is the response of Centre-Right, Argentina as elsewhere: to serve up cold reality and a cold shoulder.

The Cambiemos coalition, that Macri has serving up a meagre helping, includes most of Argentina's Centre and Soft Left - social democrats and social liberals - and you have to wonder have these partners feel about their direction.

Macri has bet the house on austerity, in the meantime putting the poorest in some jeopardy, gambling that foreign private investors will step in and take a chance on Argentina. But it's yet to pan out that way.

The midterms buy Macri some space. Over that past year he has poured the blame for the present situation on the Kirchner "K" movement - calling it the "K Inheritance", probably fairly. But that approach will only work for so long.

Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is already building for a comeback, taking seats at the midterms while Macri's approval ratings hover dangerously low at 41%/46% (approve/disapprove).

Macri has offered some consolation to his Cambiemos partners. Last year he announced what he called a 'Marshall Plan' - a reference to the huge public investment made by the US government in it's allies after World War II.

In reality, it was a public-private investment initiative foucsed on lowering the cost of business - in that conservative vein of reduced costs hopefully leading to reduced prices and reduced cost of living.

But these pledges are coming alongside efforts to force Trade Unions and dockworkers to accept pro-competition measures - and while cornered, they are far from convinced.

All of this leads back to the central question. Populists offer an unrealistic view smothered in giveaways and the Right demand a reaction steeped in a cold austere reality. The question is, why can't we address reality with warmth?

Why is it so difficult to imagine a compassionate realism? To pursue a course that does not abandon the most vulnerable to the mercy of corporate interests and charity, when righting a sinking ship.

Politics in Argentina is raising this question. Progressives and their allies the world over need to find a way to respond.