Build Homes for Migrants While Britain's Own Are Left Homeless

Councils Are Not the Home Office's Free B&B

I had a debate this week that perfectly encapsulates the absolute chasm between the Westminster bubble and the reality faced by people in places like County Durham. It was a face-off with a so-called “academic,” one of the many well-meaning, yet entirely useless, products of the liberal-left machine.

The topic? Our collapsing housing system and the insane burden of the government’s immigration failures being dumped squarely on local councils.

What was the professor’s grand solution? Did he suggest turning off the migrant tap to ease the pressure? Did he suggest penalising the massive corporations making a fortune housing these people?

Of course not. He suggested we simply build more houses.

Not just more houses for British families, mind you. Oh no, we need a massive, taxpayer-funded construction drive, right now, to house those arriving here. It’s the grand, humanitarian, open-borders fantasy played out on the foundation of the British taxpayer’s back pocket.

You could almost hear the violins playing in his head.

Let me tell you what that looks like on the ground as the Deputy Leader of Durham County Council: It looks like our budgets being stretched to breaking point. It looks like the Home Office treating my local authority as an endless overflow accommodation unit, forcing us to take on burdens without funding or, crucially, consent.

It means I have residents—decent, hardworking people—who are at the absolute back of the queue for a home. I’ve even been dealing with cases where people, our own people, are forgoing children due to lack of housing. Yet, this “academic” thinks the logical next step is to divert even more resources to a mass house-building program for non-contributors.

It’s not just incompetence; it’s a moral and financial disgrace. Funding people who will likely not put into the system from which they take.

The simple, plain-speaking truth is this: Councils exist to serve their local taxpayers first. They are not, and should not be, the glorified booking agents for Whitehall’s migrant madness. When a person is on a decade-long waiting list for a council house in Durham, the priority is that family, not someone who has just arrived here illegally, expecting a roof paid for by the taxpayer.

They want a mass house-building program for people who, frankly, in many cases, ought to be deported. That tells you everything you need to know about the liberal-left’s priorities. They put abstract, globalist virtue-signalling ahead of the people who elected us.

They are anti-democratic, they are economically illiterate, and their policies are actively putting strain on our schools, our GP surgeries, and the fabric of our communities.

This nonsense has to stop. We must always, unequivocally, put our own first.