Industrial strategies, plans for growth, key business sectors in receipt of government support, an economy which has suffered from a sustained period of once termed stagflation, and topped with an October election which will likely see a Labour government. This could well be 1974 all over again. Except that then, unlike now, the UK was still managing to deliver a reasonable number of new homes per year and housing unaffordability was not acting as a significant barrier to productivity and business growth. Fifty years later and while Keir Starmer is likely to win a far bigger majority than Harold Wilson, the challenges are arguably more acute. Of course, there are some similarities with that decade. A growing sense by a resigned population that nothing works and a belief that we are incapable of fixing it, an economy mired in strife, and an ever-increasing set of international challenges. However, unlike then, we have a rapidly increasing population to accommodate, no huge pool of SME housebuilders to build out the last of the old bomb sites, no mass council housebuilding programme, and a sense that no one is really interested in building homes anymore. But this is more than simply a housing...