Huge areas of the UK are privately owned by a small coterie of landowners, which happens to include the royal family.

Excepting the odd toy village project, those areas will never be built on.

And London's so-called property boom is almost entirely a foreign phenomenon, with the world's 1% pushing up prices as part of a speculative bubble.

None of this is accidental. The UK could easily lower prices by building affordable social housing. Even in London, housing densities are lower than they are in many cities in Europe.

But it's far more profitable to ration property ownership, and to create a new landlord class.

As is often the case the underlying problem is political, and caused by concentrations of power that - history suggests - can't be sustained indefinitely.