Livre d'Or

Absolutely, the price of land and housing here, particularly in London and its hinterlands, is a huge political hot potato. Basically the entire middle-class in England (and there are knock-on effects to the rest of Britain too) is fucked, because nobody can afford to buy a home without a lifelong mortgage and more and more people who would otherwise be reasonably well-off simply can't ever contemplate buying a home at all. Because historically, middle-class people always owned property and rental property was always assumed to be completely temporary, tenants have very very few rights, which means that if you can't buy you're perpetually insecure. Not only can you always have your lease terminated at two months' notice, but you can't even repair the boiler or the washing machine if they break down, you have to go through a complicated bureaucratic process via the letting agent and the landlord and you don't really have any recourse if it takes months to get basic appliances fixed.

At the same time, the older generation who were able to buy picked up the idea that the housing market would always grow, so they borrowed lots of money on the unshakeable assumption that they would eventually be able to sell their house for considerably more than they paid for it, even after inflation. This means that there's a bunch of politically engaged and influential people who will go completely bust if the house price reverses or even stops increasing. So even though house prices are a huge problem here, the recent budget included explicit items deliberately designed to keep house prices artificially high. It also means that the technical millionaires I mentioned are completely screwed either way; if house prices fall, then all their wealth evaporates, but while house prices continue to increase they can't sell their house to realize cash.

This of course doesn't touch on the situation of people below middle-class level, who have a whole different set of problems. And yes, we do also have farmers who are asset-rich but poor in real terms, just I think a rather smaller proportion of the UK population are land-owning farmers than in Australia.