Across much of the country, the blanketing snow has melted mostly to slush. Rough sleepers can breathe a small sigh of relief that the risk of fatality has dipped slightly, even while their standard of living remains appalling in one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
Throughout the week-long meteorological siege, a mass public outpouring of concern for the lives of citizens living on the streets gave way to an anger that their numbers had doubled in the years since the Conservatives came to power in 2010. The homeless often feel invisible, allowed to plummet through widening holes in the social safety net, then hidden in doorways from which people avert their eyes.
The homeless people I’ve spoken to stress that they are still subject to abuse, verbal and physical, and provoke horror and fear among some people. But, most say, there has been a noticeable shift: fewer people carry loose change, but passersby fetch them coffee, hot food and sandwiches, stop to talk to ask about their situation and whether they can help. The rise in rough sleeping across the country has made it impossible to ignore, and the winter months hammer home the danger and indignity facing people each night.
Empathy is an uncomfortable force in politics. Every time the chancellor produces a budget, the media and political parties produce widgets and rough calculations focusing on whether you and your family will be worse off or can expect a modest windfall off the back of fiscal tweaks. It’s assumed you will skim read a manifesto and see which party’s wishlist will most benefit you.
Nowhere has this approach been more obvious than in housing. The housing crisis, like climate change, is ever present and ever worsening, seemingly with nothing on the horizon likely to end it. Why not take a radical approach and enforce market conditions that lower house prices? Because homeowners are more likely to vote, and have been conditioned to view the rise in the value of their assets as earned rather than an incidental market blip.
Received wisdom says homeowners vote Conservative, and renters vote Labour: this roughly remains true, but other factors are creeping in to muddy this distinction. First, home ownership is at a record low. The English Housing Survey reported last year that the percentage of people who own the roof over their head hadn’t dropped so many points since 1985. So that voting base is being whittled down as prices refuse to fall.
Meanwhile, increasing numbers of mortgage holders are also worried about the effects of the housing crisis, rather than prioritising personal financial gain. In areas with a high number of private renters, the Conservative vote fell last year, with homeowners reported to be concerned about the future of their children and neighbours. There are now more private renters than there were in the early 1960s, spending far higher proportions of their incomes on rent.
To win the next general election, each party will need to consider this shift: voters are increasingly concerned not just for themselves, but about the state of the country they live in.
Decades of predictable elections won by mainstream parties that upheld the economic status quo have widened inequality, with some people and regions becoming far wealthier, while others are subject to endless precarity in employment and housing, in areas already steeped in economic decline. Throughout the west, the rise of populism has shaken establishments, with politicians and commentators asking why there has been a resurgent interest in socialism, and a growth of the far right on the opposite side.
To which the answer is surely that most young people have seen little to recommend the maintenance of the current capitalist project. They have done as they were told, achieved as previous generations did, and yet find that they have won none of the rewards they expected for doing so. When faced with such a rotten system, little wonder they are looking to reset it.
The next general election won’t be won by a party that tinkers with the existing housing system, or promises a few mechanisms to help enough people on to the housing ladder to snag a few marginals. Labour’s 2017 manifesto was tame on the housing front, as was the Conservatives’ offering. The political ecosystem has changed: motivations are shifting, and voters need to be offered an entirely new vision – one that stresses the lifting of whole communities, not life rafts for a few.
• Dawn Foster is a Guardian columnist
