Richard Littlejohn: We don’t have a housing crisis

The Prime Minister announced yesterday that she is to take personal charge of solving Britain’s acute housing crisis.

In next week’s Budget, planning rules will be relaxed, social housing debt cancelled, stamp duty cut and billions of pounds will be pumped into house-building projects.

New homes will spring up across the land, on brownfield sites, in back gardens, on the rooftops of existing buildings even.

Yet Theresa May says it can all be achieved while protecting the Green Belt. Build up, not out, is the new mantra. Pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap.

Marvel as Mother Theresa morphs into Bob the Builder. Can we fix it? Yes we can!

But hang on a minute. Are we really going to need all these little boxes post Brexit?

Not if the Remain scaremongers are to be believed. They’re like those deluded Japanese soldiers after Hiroshima, hiding out in the jungle, still fighting the last war.

Once we leave the EU, they warn, jobs will dry up and millions of immigrants will flee the country. Indeed, scared migrants are doing so already, forced out by mobs of knuckle-scraping neo-Nazis roaming the streets stirring up a hate crime epidemic.

The NHS is on the brink of collapse, as nurses and doctors who came here from overseas seek sanctuary in safe havens abroad.

Crops are left to rot in the fields, as agricultural workers return home to Eastern Europe. Soon you won’t be able to hire a Polish plumber for love nor money. Pubs and restaurants will close their doors because they can’t recruit foreign bar staff and waitresses. There won’t be a car wash left anywhere in Britain.

All those Polski skleps which have taken over from Asian corner shops will go bankrupt overnight, as their customers retreat in droves to Warsaw and Gdansk. Our inner cities will become ghost towns and our public services will implode, shorn of hard-working immigrants run out of Britain, virtually at gunpoint.

British Prime Minister Theresa May (centre) visited a housing estate in London on Thursday 

That, at least, is the apocalyptic vision post Brexit painted by the fanatics still trying to perpetuate Project Fear. If they’re right, then we won’t need to build millions of new homes, since Brexodus — as it’s being dubbed — will free up housing stock everywhere.

Rents and house prices will come crashing down as demand plummets and young people will be able to scale the housing ladder like Barbary apes. Dream on.

Like all the other horror stories invented by the Remoaners, Brexodus is a pack of lies. Far from foreign nationals fleeing Britain, they are continuing to flock here in record numbers. We don’t have a housing crisis, we have a population crisis — driven almost exclusively by immigration. It’s one of the main reasons people voted Leave.

MigrationWatch UK — which has been about the only body to tell the unvarnished truth about immigration over the past couple of decades — reports that eight out of ten new households established between 2000 and 2015 are made up of migrant families.

As these new arrivals age, it will put even more pressure on housing. MigrationWatch says we should consider, for instance, the number of young men — especially from Eastern Europe — currently living as many as a dozen or more to a house. In time, they will all want to start families and set up homes of their own.

MigrationWatch’s Lord Green said: ‘We have a major crisis over housing affecting huge numbers of people, especially the young. Yet the focus of debate is still on supply; nobody dares talk about demand and its principal driver, immigration.’

What’s more, in the five years up to 2015, the number of households headed by someone born in Britain actually fell. So if there is a Brexodus, it is comprised of British nationals moving abroad, many saying they don’t want to live in a country they no longer recognise.

The reality is the polar opposite of the Remoaners’ propaganda about frightened migrants fleeing racist Britain and plunging us into an economic crisis.

In truth, the economy has performed pretty spectacularly since the referendum result — certainly better than the rest of Europe — creating an explosion in jobs which are being filled by workers from home and abroad.

For instance, the preposterous Vince Cable claimed that 10,000 foreign staff ‘have walked away from the National Health Service because they don’t think they’re needed or wanted any more’. Yet just a few days ago, a forensic Mail investigation blew Vinnie’s little fantasy out of the water.

At the end of June there were 3,181 more EU nationals working in the health service than in 2016. Yesterday, official Government figures from the Office for National Statistics showed there were 2.38 million EU nationals working in Britain — an increase of 112,000 on a year ago.

The number of Romanians and Bulgarians who have found jobs here now stands at almost 350,000, up by a third in the past 12 months. They have no incentive to scuttle off back to Bucharest and Sofia any time soon.

Mrs May spoke to resident Val Lay (left) during a visit to a housing estate in Edgware, north London

Last time anyone looked, the 10,000 Poles, Lithuanians and other assorted Eastern Europeans who have made their home in Boston, Lincolnshire — Britain’s Brexit capital — showed no signs of upping sticks and sloping off home, pursued by the provisional wing of Ukip. Nor will they have to.

Despite the pig-headed intransigence and obstructionism of the EU’s Brexit negotiators, determined to punish the British people for voting Leave, Mrs May has already guaranteed the rights of EU citizens living here. And it’s not just the EU, either. Immigrants from all over the world are still making Britain their top destination, often risking life and limb to get here.

Why would they want to join a sinking ship? Are they all crazy? Are they really determined to make their new lives in a racist, basket-case, post-Brexit wilderness?

Or could it be, perhaps, that they are attracted here to join friends and family who report that Britain is a tolerant, civilised, multi-cultural country with a generous welfare system and a bright, independent future offering endless opportunity for economic advancement?

Millions of migrants are choosing Britain over the sclerotic countries of the bureaucratic, moribund EU. And will continue to do so once we leave and become again a confident, outward-looking nation, free to embrace the globe and all it has to offer.

That will mean embracing not just free trade but the brightest and best immigrants, too, who will continue to be welcomed here.

That, in turn, will mean they’re all going to need somewhere to live. Which is why the Prime Minister is right to make housing a priority.

Our innate resolve and pragmatic nature suggests we will tackle this housing crisis with the determination and elan we have applied to every other crisis in our history.

Ignore the hysterical lies and predictions of doom, the death rattle of the Remoaners determined to sabotage Brexit by any means fair or foul.

Britain, home of Bob the Builder, will rise to the challenge.

Can we Brexit? Yes we can!