Back in 2023, I helped to bring the issue of social housing to national prominence. At the time, social housing was one of those national institutions, like the BBC or NHS, that enjoyed uncontested support across the political spectrum. Back then, if social housing was thought of at all, people spoke of it as a nice way for hardworking British key workers to live in areas that were otherwise far too expensive for them to afford.

The 2021 national census gave us all kinds of interesting data on the true nature of social housing in Britain, not that any mainstream journalist dared to look into it. What it showed was that Britain’s social housing system is one of the most unfair and inefficient parts of British society, directly harming the prospects of millions of hardworking Brits and rewarding people who should never have been in this country in the first place.

Alongside the valuable and essential work of Pimlico Journal, I revealed how social housing entrenches a two-tier system: one tier for those of us who have to work hard and pay for ourselves, and another tier for the select few who are given enormous subsidies we pay for. In 2024 I shared how in places like London’s South Bank, where the average one-bedroom flat cost £2745 a month to rent, those in social housing paid a fifth of that, an average of £487 per month.

But the most staggering part of what I revealed was not how enormous the subsidy given to those in social housing is, but the type of person benefiting from this subsidy. Rather than going to hardworking Brits, vast amounts of prime social housing was being given to people not even born in the country, let alone that local area. Altogether, the social houses headed by a foreign-born national receive an implied subsidy of over £6 billion every single year. This is an eye-wateringly large amount of money that would be better and more fairly spent in hundreds of other ways, and that the British public would never accept had they been consulted on creating this kind of system.

In our capital city, half of all social housing households are headed by someone born abroad. It is a fact that has now become well known, often repeated by politicians and commentators, but it is worth underlining just how insane it is. Britain gives away half of social housing in some of the most expensive and desirable areas in the world to migrants. Why?

It all comes down to how social housing is allocated. Rather than priority given to the most productive or necessary members of the community, those people responsible for keeping society going and keeping us alive, social housing is allocated according to need. That is to say, the more needy one is, the less they are able to provide for themselves, the more dependent they are on others, the greater priority they are given. These are the people who then get given social housing: the least self-sufficient and least productive.

Coupled with our insane immigration policies of the last few decades, that is how we have reached a point where Britain is importing people from around the world who then occupy taxpayer-funded housing, at enormous expense. We import people who are dysfunctional and unable to pay their own way, and then the British state rewards them with social housing and a secure tenure, meaning they then get that subsidised housing for life.

Even more crazily, these people are then allowed to legally sublet out bedrooms and keep all the profit. We are allowing foreigners too dysfunctional to pay for their own accommodation to make huge personal financial gains at our expense, and that is without going into the enormous illegal subletting that plagues social housing, which no government dares crack down on.

None of this is fair. How can it be that the British state spares no expense on the dysfunctional, giving them housing often of better quality than those who pay can get? Why are we importing people to Britain who are unable to even pay for their own accommodation, let alone make any kind of fiscal benefit to the country? Why should we put up with this?

And all of this is as of the 2021 census, before the Boriswave immigration explosion and the ramping up of the small boats crisis. The foreign population has increased enormously since then, and the number of foreigners occupying social housing almost certainly has too. That’s yet another reason we urgently need an emergency census, to understand just how drastically the situation has changed and learn of the real extent of demographic change taking place in every corner of British society.

The situation is especially enraging for those of us who the British state treats purely extractively, taking our money to pay for social housing and then leaving us to fend for ourselves in the unaffordable private sector. For young people like myself, who do everything right, study hard to get good grades, survive a punishing job market, and are willing to leave the areas we call home to advance our careers, the best we can hope for are often shoebox flats shared with multiple other people in the less appealing parts of our towns or cities.

Meanwhile, our literal neighbours will be those who never bothered to do things right, who never bothered to work hard or pay for themselves, and for this they are rewarded with larger, nicer houses that we pay for whilst putting up with worse living conditions for ourselves. This is simply not fair, nor is it conducive to a successful society. We have created two tiers of society: the dysfunctional and unproductive who get all sorts of money and resources thrown at them, and the productive whose resources are taken to pay for it all.

This kind of unfairness cannot continue to stand. It must be fixed, and luckily, it can easily be fixed. We can stop rewarding the dysfunctional and punishing the productive. We can allow areas closest to the country’s most important labour markets to be lived in by people who actually work, not the idle.

We can instil hope in our young by offering a future brighter than dingy flatshares and cramped commutes. We can reduce housing costs for most people and regenerate areas that have been needlessly held back. We can do all of this if we free up social housing, returning to letting the market decide who it is allocated to rather than having the state’s favoured groups housed in them.

Our politicians are finally recognising the problem, but they do not go far enough. The Tories, who are responsible for importing millions into Britain and giving more social housing away to foreigners than ever before, are now timidly suggesting taking social housing back from only some foreign nationals. This is laughably inadequate, and in typically Tory style comes nowhere near to meeting the moment we’re in.

Social housing must be sold off. Those migrants who came here and, instead of contributing to society, started to live in social housing and make the most of all the welfare benefits they could find must be deported. We do not want a Britain that rewards dysfunction and imports the world’s most dysfunctional. We do not have to accept such a Britain. We will change it.

In most countries, the way Andy Burnham came to hold the most powerful job in the country would be described as a coup. A man with no personal mandate, who did not even stand at the last General Election, is now in charge of the government and talking of implementing ten-year plans. He has declared his intentions of upending the political consensus of the last forty years in what could be the most consequential change of Britain’s direction in generations.

But it won’t be. Just like Starmer before him, and Sunak before him, and the many other sorry characters that have squatted in Number Ten over the last decade, Burnham’s promises of big change will never materialise. He has executed an almighty coup only to realise a long-standing career ambition and to become even more well known, and, as he hopes in vain, even more well liked. He has been given an enormous amount of power to transform the country, but will never use it.

It is one of the few causes of optimism that as dire as Britain’s current predicament is, we have a political system that makes it exceedingly easy to radically turn the country around. Few democracies boast a level of executive power that is available to British prime ministers. Our prime ministers are not constrained by any written constitution, nor subservient to a political president, or (usually) forced to rely on a coalition of parties for continued support.

Despite the enormous political power they hold, successive prime ministers have utterly failed to use their position to bring about the changes their position would allow them to. Perhaps they fail to realise just how much power is available to them, but more likely, they are too deeply wedded to the current consensus to dare to change anything, and lack the political backbone to go beyond it.

What makes a great, truly historic, world-changing leader is how they wield power. A historic leader uses the power he holds to mould the country into his image through force, strength and sheer willpower.

This is why the British public is so rightly angry with our political class: they can plainly see that the problems the country faces are not technical, but political. We could put an immediate end to the flood of small boats illegally entering Britain by having the Royal Navy push them back. We could rapidly boost our economy by using our North Sea oil and gas reserves to their full potential. We could bypass the usual planning system to hugely expand prison capacity in a matter of months so that dangerous criminals are no longer released early to terrify communities. And so on, and so on. None of these problems are beyond our technical abilities. All of them could be solved.

So why don’t we? Because Britain is stuck with the same set of politicians with the same set of turgid ideas and the same fear of using the power they have. As much as each new prime minister talks of their desire to change things, once they actually have the power to do so, they are too scared to lead, too scared to upset the system they’ve inherited, and too scared to take on the vested interests that are dragging this country down a path of decline.

And so it will be with our latest prime minister, Andy Burnham, who has gone even further than most in embracing powerlessness. Instead of getting to work on transforming the country, he used his first speech as prime minister to declare that he will “carry power into every postcode in the land”, whatever that means. Like his predecessors, he enters Number Ten not with a plan on how to use the power he now has, but offering purely platitudes. Apparently politics will now be “more collaborative”, Britain will now “reindustrialise”, and he will usher in “a new political model, and a new economic model”. Haven’t we heard all this before?

This is especially unforgivable from a man who has been eyeing up the role of prime minister since at least 2010, and has known for months the enormous role he was about to snatch from Keir Starmer. He has had ample time to prepare for power, so why is the best he can offer still just a series of platitudes? Because, like those that came before him, he has no real intention of using the power he now has to change anything of consequence.

Instead, Burnham insists that we just wait. Wait until later next year for the big reveal of what his plan for government is. Wait ten years whilst this plan is supposedly going to be enacted. Just wait and hope that a man who was laughed out of Westminster a decade ago for being such a mediocrity that he made Jeremy Corbyn appear a political genius will somehow transform into the great statesman this country needs.

But why should we wait ten years? Why should young people waste more years of their lives being unable to find a job? Why should countless communities be subjected to masses of unvetted foreign men being plonked into their neighbourhoods against their wishes for years to come? Why should drivers let their cars take a battering from potholes because local government can’t even do the basics? Why should we wait for a man who stated that his first goal as prime minister is to end rough sleeping, something he pledged to do almost a decade ago as Mayor of Greater Manchester and completely failed to deliver?

Britain cannot afford to wait, nor should it.

A real leader, one fit for the moment, would wield the power available to them as prime minister from day one. Obstacles that predecessors have hidden behind – the ECHR, international treaties, judicial rulings, and so on – could be swept aside or scrapped by any prime minister who wanted to.

The country demands it, and until we get it, approval ratings will continue to crash, and Britain’s political class will continue to be hated. Rightfully so.

A political revolution will sweep Britain; it’s only a matter of time.

I believe Britain can be the greatest country on earth. After six months touring universities and meeting hundreds of young people, that belief has only grown.

Our country is full of ambitious, impressive young people, committed to excellence, to their country, and to building a greater future not just for themselves but for the generations to come.

But one thing became clear in my conversations: they feel exactly how I feel. Angry.

Angry at a political class presiding over decline. Angry that immigration has changed the country at a pace no one asked for. Angry at a housing crisis that has priced them out of ever owning a home. Angry at an economy that doesn’t work for them, and the near-certainty that they’ll end up poorer than their parents. Angry that the education system made promises it never kept. Angry that crime feels increasingly out of control.

I’m 25. I grew up watching the news show photographs of soldiers coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq in coffins, and asking myself why we were sending Britons to die in wars that served no clear British interest. I was seven during the 2008 financial crash, and almost twenty years on, most people I speak to feel Britain never really climbed out of the haze that settled in those years. Wages have stagnated. House prices and rents are at record highs. Secure, well-paid work is hard to find. Walk through most British towns, and the decline is visible.

Decades of mass immigration helped drive the 2016 vote to leave the European Union, and the years that followed exposed how far the political class would go to override a result they didn’t like. Then came the pandemic: lockdowns that confined people to their homes, and government spending now estimated at well over £350 billion, the bill for which we are still paying.

It is no wonder we are angry.

But beneath the anger, I found a drive to act. Britain’s youth don’t want to manage a declining country, and we shouldn’t have to.

I moved to London at 18, leaving Liverpool for university, because London is where you have to be if you want a say in your country’s future. My parents would have preferred finance to politics. I chose politics because I wanted to help reverse Britain’s decline, and I know there are hundreds of thousands of young people who feel the same.

Britain is not beyond saving. We are not lost. But the next few years demand focus, long-term dedication, and belief, belief that we can build a greater country.

That is why I am launching A New Dawn Show to give young people skin in the game in their own future, and a platform to elevate new ideas and new people.

I’ll be live Monday to Thursday, 7–8 pm, on every platform, covering the key stories of the day and taking your calls directly. I hope you’ll join me.