Employers say they are having a stressful time hiring and retaining staff because they never seem settled. When you talk to young people, the side hustle is paramount but a normal job will never get you a house. Peter Kelly explains…

In 1992, James Carville, a strategist for Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 US presidential campaign, coined the term ‘it’s the economy, stupid.’ It was part of an internal memo for everyone who was working on the campaign.

Although intended for an internal audience, the phrase became the de facto slogan of the whole campaign. It strongly reinforced the idea that elections are often single issue affairs. ‘Get Brexit done’ comes to mind from the last UK election.

Leo Varadkar recently did something extremely unusual in politics and unheard of in Irish politics when he was Ireland’s prime minister. He gave up. Threw in the towel. Now what was so remarkable about this is he had not just lost an election. There was no scandal. He wasn’t pushed. There was no ‘Et tu, Brute?’

The next Irish general election, which can be held no later than March 2025, is going to be a single issue election. It is going to be about housing. And the truth of it is nobody has any solutions. I wonder if this conundrum played a role in Leo’s premature departure.

The unsolvable Rubik’s Cube that the housing market has become has helped give Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, a real shot (no pun intended) of leading the next government. This is somewhat mind-blowing to people who remember the Troubles but that is how desperate and unheard the electorate feels in relation to affordable housing.

A number of countries are in a similar situation to Ireland, notably the UK, Canada and Australia. If an effective policy to solve this problem emerges, it is likely to be copied or promised to gain electoral success. This is a real challenge for mainstream political parties as they are seen as the creators of this situation. This is a massive opportunity for fringe organisations on the left and the right.

The left will try to pin the dire circumstances on the free market and a greedy elite, the right will blame it on uncontrolled immigration. What can the politicians do? The prevailing politics is to largely leave things to the free market and only intervene when a crisis occurs that is existential to the system.

The banking crisis of 2008, the Covid crisis of 2020 – the housing crisis feels more like death by a thousand cuts rather than a big bang crisis. Also, the solution to every crisis creates winners and losers. The bankers won the banking crisis but people who depended on frontline services lost out.

Key workers also lost out during Covid. Tory party donors who landed VIP lane contracts did well. There is a feeling that to solve the housing crisis, you will have to inflict some pain on the in-crowd. It is easier to make other people suffer than yourself. Remember, we are all in this together.

Politicians frame the housing crisis as a simple case of supply and demand and they promise to solve it by building more houses. Simon Harris, Ireland’s new prime minister, has pledge to build 250,000 new homes. His retiring colleague Leo had said that is not possible.

Simon might see himself as a bit of a JFK. John F Kennedy gave a speech in the 1960s vowing that Americans would land on the moon before the end of the decade. It was news to the engineers at NASA but when Kennedy was assassinated, they pulled out all the stops and made it happen.

The Bank of England recently published a report admitting that house prices are determined by finance, not supply and demand. The bank’s researchers Lewis and Cumming constructed a 20-year model showing that “relative scarcity of housing has played almost no role at the national level since 2000” in rocketing prices. Will politicians solve the problem if they have already misdiagnosed the cause of the problem?

When I talk to employers, they all tell me they are having a very stressful time hiring and retaining staff. Staff never seem settled. When you talk to young people, the side hustle is paramount. A normal job will never get you a house. Focus your energy on cryptocurrencyor being an influencer. Never settle in a job.

Will there come a point where employers, who often own houses and have benefitted from a dysfunctional market, will look to provide housing for staff in an attempt to foster loyalty? Ryanair recently bought 40 houses near Dublin airport to rent out to its staff.

Jospeh Rowntree and George Cadbury, both of chocolate bar fame, built social housing. I do not believe Michael O’Leary’s intentions are as wholesome or benevolent as those of Rowntree and Cadbury but it could be a change in direction for industry leaders and might lead to leadership that echoes the decency of those two.

The housing crisis left unchecked will become an existential threat to the system.

Peter Kelly is a community pharmacist based in London and a stand-up comedian.