To help the economy, they cancelled a tax on house sales, which drives the cost of property up, so even fewer people can afford a home, and everybody has more mortgage debt or higher rent.

Why not keep Stamp Duty and built 250,000 social houses a year? This would:

1. Drive down housing costs for everyone

2. Begin to solve our endemic housing crisis

3. Create jobs

4. Give the under-25 apprenticeship scheme a thing to do

And at the end of a decade we have a couple of million new homes, rather than the homes we have now, plus a couple of trillion extra mortgage debt.

The ONLY economic idea Tories had since 1979 is to promote a housing bubble, and hope they're out of power when the bubble bursts.

The fundamental problem with this is: sure, your home being worth £500k sounds lovely, but it's unproductive. If it was worth £200k you'd have £300k to spend on useful thing - things that employ people.

Rent and mortgage costs suck air out of a productive economy.

So you end up with a whole nation unable to invest in a business, an idea, a REAL thing, cos they're paying an artificially high price for a pile of bricks in a field.

And the people who own the field? 50% of them are ancestors of Norman Conquerers from 1066: aristocrats.

And of course, they plough donations into the Tory party - although we should stop calling them donations and call them what they are: bribes.

"I'll give you £200k if you, on a nod and wink, protect my stranglehold on property prices"

So to defend the rights of the Earl of Cadogen and Duke of Westminster (who last did a useful thing for the nation 980 years ago) we crush the capacity of most of the nation to act productively and usefully.

And today's announcement is yet another manifestation of that.

And yes: I own a house. This isn't "the politics of envy", its the politics of not continuing to do the stupid, regressive thing we've done since 1066, cos we should no longer sacrifice our nations's livelihoods for the benefit of incredibly wealthy inherited vampires