There was a time when going to the market was the way that working people could get good value for a fair price and stumble upon bargains.

The UK housing market is red in tooth and claw. True bourgeois economics prevail and are realised in the law of Supply and Effective Demand. And the effective demand for housing is not the need for shelter and even a home but for a profitable investment opportunity. It is money hunting more money.

Starvation is not demand for the supply of food, only money up front constitutes an effective demand for food. The money spent on housing is a way of generating money it is effective demand chasing an increase in the wealth of the purchaser and has little to do with the demand of a homeless person for a place of refuge from which to build a life.

If you have large numbers of people excluded form productive lives because they are embroiled in living hand to mouth you are hobbling the national economy. Greed creates welfare - sorry the pursuit of personal utility - creates welfare so the dogma goes. But if it creates an army of incapacitated individuals you have to ask who the benficiaries are of the welfare.

So we have an army of landlords with growing portfolios and desperate to suck up any profitable looking property and happy to compete with each other. Any first time house buyer has to compete with these parasites with fat wallets and inflated lines of credit. All the while the prospective house buyer is paying a huge percentage of their income to just such a parasite.