AMID all the furious propaganda about an imminent Russian invasion of the EU and the drive to rearm NATO for war, the defence policy chief of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, has condemned the imperialist warmongering as plain silly. ‘I don’t see Russia attacking us,’ Jan Nolte said at the party’s Frankfurt conference on Thursday.
AfD is currently ahead of the pro-war Christian Democratic Union of Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, in the polls. The AfD’s sympathy towards Russia is a major vote-winner for the AfD, as it draws much of its support from the former communist East, where there is deep nostalgia for Russian rule.
The AfD has sought to adopt a pragmatic, Realpolitik-based stance towards Moscow and has been staunchly opposed to military support for Ukraine and said it would never allow Kiev to join NATO or the EU.
It favours dialogue and de-escalation with Moscow and would like to see trade relations return to normal after a ceasefire in Ukraine, so that cheap Russian gas imports can resume, Nolte added.
He argued that Russia was not an enemy of the West per se, but more like a bothersome neighbour that mainly poses issues around espionage, against an economic crisis engulfing the German economy.
Meanwhile, raising the cash to meet the UK’s commitment to fund NATO’s war drive against Moscow now requires severe cuts to welfare, social spending and the NHS and raising taxes on the working class to meet the promise of defence spending of 3.5 per cent of GDP.
Following Starmer’s utter failure to deliver Labour’s manifesto promise of 1.5 million new homes, the housing crisis is now so acute that builders’ shares are now being shorted on stock markets by hedgefunds, anticipating a share crash and industry-wide bankruptcies, with housebuilders’ shares plummeting to their lowest levels in a decade with profit forecasts similarly slashed.
British builders now account for seven of Europe’s 10 most shorted housebuilders. Among these, Vistry is now the most heavily shorted by some distance. More than 15 per cent of its shares are on loan to investors betting on further declines.
Short-sellers aim to make money by betting that share prices will fall and a large number of wagers against stock suggest a growing part of the market believes it will struggle.
Charlie Campbell, an analyst at Stifel, says Britain’s housebuilding sector is in its worst state since he started covering it in 1997, surpassing the global financial crisis of 2008.
While that economic shock led to housing demand halving overnight, three successive inflation shocks triggered by the pandemic, the Ukraine war and the Iran conflict have led to ‘persistent inflation’ and high mortgage rates, he says.
Mortgage approvals fell to 56,200 in May, according to Bank of England data, marking the lowest level since December 2023 and below a six-month average of 63,300.
Housebuilders, Berkeley Group and Taylor Wimpey have cut their profit forecasts. Berkeley has also stopped hiring new staff and scrapped land purchases for housing projects to counter weak demand.
Vistry, which has offered voluntary redundancies and aggressively discounted homes for sale to produce cash, this week warned of a £30m pre-tax loss for the first half of the year.
The Home Builders Federation (HBF) estimates that housing delivery has flatlined at around 200,000 a year – well under the average of 300,000 a year that ministers are aiming for.
Steve Turner, an executive director at the HBF, blames the crisis on years of ballooning costs. ‘Over the past 10 to 15 years, there has been a layering of costs that has meant many sites are no longer viable.
‘Affordable housing is now largely funded through the sale of private homes, which is effectively a tax on housebuilding.’ Add infrastructure levies, increases to landfill tax, the Building Safety Levy and net-zero requirements, and ‘you reach a point where there is ultimately nowhere left to tax’, says Turner.
Burnham’s other option is to take a machete to ‘runaway benefits’. This will require a massive assault on the living standards of the working class in preparation for war against Russia and China.
Workers across the EU must urgently mobilise with general strikes to defeat the imperialist drive to war and austerity by forming sections of the Fourth International to overthrow the capitalists and establish Workers Governments and nationalised socialist societies throughout Europe and the world!
