The rise of the British shanty town

The Renters Rights Act is having predictable effects. We now have mass evictions as landlords sell up, a huge fall in the number of properties available to rent, landlords/letting agents intensely vetting tenants, and mega-landlords taking over the market. Anybody who understood the basics of the housing market could see this coming a mile off.

This is exacerbating an already acute crisis. Many renters are clinging on by their fingernails. Self-styled “working class academic”, Lisa McKenzie, complains on X:

Brilliant just received a letter from my landlord putting the rent up another £520 a year that’s my holiday gone. I know people who go to work aren't entitled to holidays or to live on their own or to have the heating on. What wont we be entitled to next year? At what point does this end? I know families eating from foodbanks to service the rent. I actually feel sick because I know next year when the rent goes up again I wont have much more to cut back on. I'm getting closer to the HMO. This is why people aren't saving towards pensions.

I suspect there are thousands of people in this kind of precarious position who work full time, on a passable salary, who are only one rent rise or a major bill increase away from finding basic independent living is no longer viable. In just slightly different circumstances, I could see myself in the same predicament.

What Lisa describes could be virtually any one of of us. Millions of us are only one redundancy or a divorce away from destitution. Just ten years ago, independent living on one salary was possible, albeit it in an expensive one bedroom flat, but now we see that middle income individuals who work hard are destined to live with strangers in HMOs if they want to live within commuting range of a job.

By importing millions of people, successive governments have fed the social contract into the shredder and made our own people compete for scraps while taxes destroy native wealth. This isn’t a cost of living crisis. This is a collapse of the existing economic order. The native advantage has been completely obliterated and our own people will have to fight tooth and nail just to stay on the bottom rung of the ladder. Our own people now have to compete with illegal immigrants for basic provisions. Either that or simply concede the obvious... it is simply too expensive to continue living in Britain - and there are no rewards for hard work.

Alarmingly, we’re now beginning to see the real world consequences of this (reported in The Sun). X user “Miss Jo” reports…

About 50 years ago, travelling showmen in the UK were given the right to live in the campground set up in Buckles Lane, Thurrock. The right to live there was strictly limited to travelling showmen. Now, those same showmen are letting out their places to illegal migrants.

Adverts can be seen on Gumtree, Facebook Marketplace and other local sites, showing caravans for £160/£170 per week. It is estimated that 76% of the 1,000 occupants are not supposed to be living there. Not only are there illegal migrants but there are also problems with drug running and other criminal enterprises. The council is looking the other way but local residents are becoming increasingly concerned. The situation is becoming worse, as more and more caravans are being squeezed into the space.

This is something to keep an eye on. This is one of those imperceptibly slow indicators that we're becoming a third world country. It starts off with a small caravan park but as more and more people are frozen out of rentals and mortgages (accelerating under Labour), we will see these caravan parks becoming shanty towns. You can expect to see them popping up all around the M25. We're developing our very own trailer park underclass - and it won't exclusively be migrants.

Councils have got wise to Airbnb scams, beds in sheds, and illegal subletting of social housing, so it will be displaced to this kind of ad hoc settlement, where we will see outbreaks of third world diseases.

What we need to do is drive a bulldozer through the lot of them, but councils won't do that because they will create hundreds of homeless in a single stroke, so authorities will let it fester and dump the problem on the police as they attempt to contain the criminality that goes with it.

This kind of accommodation is where London will get its supply of Deliveroo drivers, and they'll be hotbeds of organised crime. You'll see dilapidated static caravans with brand new Audis parked out front, and this is where you'll fund small scale cannabis farms and rudimentary drug labs. This issue is probably already bigger than most of us understand. It's masking a massive homelessness crisis, while also creating a huge shadow workforce that pays no tax at all.

I always joked that if my Mrs finally got sick of me and threw me out of the house, I could always set up shop in a low rent slum in Grimsby just so long as I have broadband and a nearby model shop, but that might now be out of reach, and it’s looking like many of us could be holed up in static caravans in our retirement, even if we’re mugs enough to work hard. There’s just no reason for young people to stay in Britain.