UK Special Coverage The UK’s Own Minneapolis-Style Welfare Exploitation Problem London social housing no longer works for the British people. UK Special Coverage At the tail end of last year, the story of Somali fraud in the American welfare system exploded into the mainstream. Tales about the exploitation of Minnesota’s generous welfare system included the abuse of sickness benefits and the allocation of subsidized housing schemes to the benefit of a specific minority community noted for clannish behavior.  While this had been going on for years, its exposure on a national (and international) scale has clearly shocked the American public. But to British readers the story is depressingly familiar. The modern British welfare state has morphed from being a safety net available to working Britons in time of need into a subsidy scheme for immigration and joblessness, paid for by a shrinking tax base.  Nowhere is this more clearly exemplified than London’s social housing, Britain’s answer to America’s housing projects. Our capital city’s social housing is often located in some of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country. The reality of this caused a storm online in Britain in 2023, with the publication of “The Social Housing Phenomenon” by Pimlico Journal on Substack. The Journal followed this piece with a number of additional, detailed articles which examined the extent to which social housing is subsidized by the taxpayer and who are its primary beneficiaries. Around 20 percent of housing in Britain is offered at subsidized rent—either owned by local government or charitable housing associations—above the European average of around 7 percent, and the American average of 4 percent. Before Margaret Thatcher embarked on a sell-off of social housing, 32 percent of all households in Britain were rented from local councils. Despite the decline in social housing nationally, London, particularly inner London, bucks the trend. In London boroughs such as Hackney, Southwark, Lambeth, and Tower Hamlets—all near the beating heart of the city—around 40 percent of all housing is subsidized, either rented by local councils themselves or through housing associations.  The geographic centrality of social housing in London is another thing that makes the city an outlier. Rather than existing in peripheral banlieues as is the case in large cities in France, London’s social housing is wedged into the city’s most expensive and most in-demand neighborhoods. While this has probably reduced the social ills and potential for disorder seen in the suburbs of Paris, it has also contributed to the scarcity of housing for the city’s working population and results in the subsidy of worklessness and criminality in neighborhoods which should, by all accounts, be occupied by law-abiding people in employment. According to research published in 2019, Londoners spend the most time commuting of all British people on average, at around 1 hour and 19 minutes per day, largely thanks to the high cost of housing in the city’s center. Who benefits from this arrangement? The unemployed and immigrants. The lead tenant in 47 per cent of London social housing is somebody born overseas. Even accounting for the fact that some British people were born abroad—Boris Johnson is the name often used—this is a disproportionate figure. It means that British people are subsidizing immigrants to live in their own capital city, a city where it costs over £1,000 per month to rent a room on average, and the median house price is around £500,000, 10 times the city’s median salary.  While London’s social housing used to be offered to the working population, today the picture is rather different. Those who are of working age and economically inactive in London social housing receive an implied rental subsidy of over £2 billion a year, according to Pimlico Journal’s analysis of the figures from the 2021 census. In some boroughs, this equates to up to £19,000 per household per year. There is no public policy justification for such a subsidy, especially in an era of flatlining economic growth and a beleaguered middle class which has suffered the twin punishment of high taxes and high housing costs.  So how has this happened? Social housing has transformed from a widely used utility where it was normal for people to rent from the council to the preserve of those at the margins of society and, increasingly, immigrants. In the 1970s, the law around the eligibility for social housing was changed. Social housing was to be awarded on a “needs” basis to those who were a “priority” for local government assistance. As Prosperity Institute’s Matthew Bowles recently argued, this changed social housing from being something that the state offered Britain’s working population, in part for their sacrifice during the Second World War, into a benefit to which can be demanded by right.  The move to a needs-based approach to social housing is creating malign outcomes. For example, while most migrants to the UK are not allowed to receive public funds until they secure permanent residency, local councils offer a range of exemptions to these rules. This was highlighted in a 2025 paper from the think tank Onward, Loophole Nation, which examined how a range of loopholes—such as the risk of destitution and the vulnerability of children—have been bolstered by human rights case law and international obligations like the European Convention on Human Rights and the Refugee Convention to create a system in which migrants can gain priority access to subsidized housing in Britain. Regrettably, this legal architecture incentivizes dysfunction and dishonesty from both British citizens and migrants alike.  Policies such as the London Plan, which sets housing rules in the city, entrench this further, by mandating that new developments must contain particular quotas of subsidized housing and follow DEI regulations, which explicitly refer to the needs of “new arrivals to the UK.” While this sort of social engineering is ordered by the Mayor of London, the corrupt awarding of social housing along ethnic lines has also been exposed at a more local level . A famous example was in Tower Hamlets, where the Mayor Lutfur Rahman was found to have funneled public money and awarded social housing to the benefit of the borough’s Bengali community, many of whom originally secured social housing in the borough after a lengthy and illegal campaign of squatting, which was rewarded with an amnesty in the late 1970s. What is to be done? Ideally, remove eligibility for social housing from those who are not British citizens, apply work-search and working conditions on working age tenants, and begin a process of selling off social housing in inner London, starting with properties which become vacant after a tenant dies and targeting the most expensive neighborhoods. The planning system should be deregulated in general to enable the quicker construction of private homes, and affordable housing quotas in new developments which only serve to increase the cost of private housing should be abolished. Large scale social housing is an expensive anachronism in modern London, and it has become a corrosive symbol of how the social contract no longer works for Britain’s working population.  London is, for better or worse, the engine room of the British economy. The living—and therefore the working—conditions of the British people in the city have ramifications for the entire country. Today, the city has become increasingly unaffordable and inefficient for the next generation of its middle class, the backbone of the country’s workforce and taxpayers. Four thousand miles may separate London from Minneapolis. One may be Europe’s largest metropolis and the other a secondary city in a cold corner of the United States. But when it comes to the allocation of subsidized housing and other benefits, and the naked exploitation of an out of touch welfare system, the two cities have a tragic amount in common. The post The UK’s Own Minneapolis-Style Welfare Exploitation Problem appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Greenland Is a Punishment for Europe’s Role in Ukraine Europeans can expect more of the same until they get with the peace program. President Donald Trump’s Greenland rhetoric has knocked European leaders completely off balance. Whether this was the intended effect of Trump’s threats or the president simply wants to take the island matters little at this stage—the most important objective impact that the Greenland discussions have raised is the impact that it is going to have on NATO, the so-called “transatlantic Alliance,” and the Ukraine war. Although it is almost besides the point, it is probably worth addressing the moral-legal question first. For what it is worth, I feel sorry for the people of Greenland who have gotten caught up in a game that they were not prepared for. Nevertheless, the hypocrisy that is oozing out of the European capitals is odious. They act as if a unilateral action by the United States against a territory that does not belong to them is a challenge to the Mandate of Heaven. Yet only a few days ago these same leaders were cheering on Trump’s so-called “police action” in Caracas, Venezuela. Recall that when the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, called Trump “daddy”—giving the world a glimpse into the sordid relationship that has developed between the United States and its masochistic vassals in Europe—Rutte was referring to the Trump administration’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Laying aside judgment on the actions in Venezuela and Iran, the point is that the Europeans are perfectly fine with military interventions in other countries so long as these countries are outside the sacred alliance. One is reminded of European Commission Vice President Josep Borrell’s comments in 2022 that the world outside the European “garden” is effectively a “jungle”—and so, one infers, the laws of the jungle apply. Yet this is not just a case of the current crop of European leaders’ almost nostalgic, neocolonial racism—a grubby little fantasy they live out vicariously through “daddy’s” interventions in their old stomping grounds. The European leaders care just as little for the populations in Europe. There was no outcry when the Obama administration bombed Libya, which resulted in a migration wave that destroyed the European social fabric. Nor were they outraged when the Nord Stream pipeline mysteriously exploded, setting in motion the deindustrialization of Europe. They cheered all of this on. They are only opposed to Trump’s Greenland intervention because it rubs up against their egos and exposes them as the weak subordinates they have long been. The Greenland drama is a narcissistic European drama in every sense of the word. The European leadership class is a global joke, laughed at in capitals around the world. They can tolerate this, however, because they still see their deindustrializing, politically unstable, war-ravaged continent as a “garden” to the rest of the world’s “jungle”. This is a delusion of the sort not seen in Europe since Hitler whiled away his final days in the Berlin bunker, and it is seen for what it is from Washington to Moscow to Beijing. But it is a delusion sufficiently strong that it allows the European elite to keep their composure at their self-important events—events that grow smaller and less relevant by the day. The problem with Trump’s Greenland overtures is that they intrude on these little Potemkin villages that the ailing elite have built for themselves. In the language popular amongst the European elite steeped in recent European philosophy and culture: Trump threatening to take Greenland shows the Europeans that the “Big Other” does not exist. In the structuralist language popular in Europe, the “Big Other” is a symbolic system of social assumptions, norms, and codes that exists to structure the social environment. The key nodal point in the European “Big Other”—which holds together the social environment in Europe that we might call, drawing on Borrell, “the garden”—is the idea that America always looms in the background as a benevolent father, a daddy that ensures order in the garden and keeps the jungle at bay. By threatening to take Greenland, Trump has offended the European elite at the deepest level by suggesting that, perhaps, Europe itself is part of the jungle and that the garden is an illusion. Whether the entire Greenland saga is designed to wean the childlike Europeans from the American teat, I do not know. If I were to guess, I would say that the Greenland discussion started to catch wind, and the Trump administration saw it as a perfect opportunity to sabotage the toxic relationship that has developed between the United States and Europe—especially since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Whatever the aetiology, it is now perfectly clear that the Americans are using the Greenland issue as a stick that they are wielding to give the Europeans a violent and very public beating. Why does the Trump administration feel the need to thrash the Europeans in public like a misbehaving servant? Because the Europeans will not listen. The President and his entourage have told the Europeans repeatedly, in no uncertain terms, that the war in Ukraine must end and Europe must find some way to live in peace with Russia. But the Europeans have reverted to their usual catty form and used every means at their disposal to sabotage any negotiations—much less any future security architecture—at every turn. Their strategy appears to be to try to keep the war going until 2029 when a Democratic challenger will rise to power and fight the Russians on behalf of the Europeans. This position is not just immoral; it is also delusional. From a moral perspective, the liberal elite in Brussels and in other European capitals have cultivated a cynicism about Ukrainian lives that borders on ritual blood sacrifice. It is disgusting and will be viewed by civilized people in the future for what it is. But even from a purely pragmatic political perspective, the prospect of a Democratic white knight riding to the rescue is unlikely. The Democrats are not remotely interested in the Ukraine war or in Europe. The war has failed to defeat Russia; it was the defeat of Russia that was of interest to the post-Russiagate Democrats; ergo, the war is now uninteresting. In the Epstein files, the Democrats have found a new toy to play with—one that implicates one or two key figures on the European side, including at least one prominent former ambassador appointed precisely to deal with Trump. Are Trump’s threats to take over Greenland serious? Are they moral? Who knows. But what is serious, what is immoral, and what is extremely dangerous—indeed, threatening the world with conflagration if not managed properly—is the blasé European attitude toward a collapsing war on their borders. The European leaders are too weak, too decadent to deal with the problem themselves, and they refuse to allow anyone else to deal with it for them. For this reason, we should expect the humiliations to continue until the Europeans swallow their pride (if they have any left), admit that the war is lost, and wake up to the fact that they need to live beside the Russians.  If they cannot do this, we should expect the humiliation rituals to get increasingly aggressive, until eventually the European population can no longer stand by and watch their leaders pour the dignity of the European peoples down the drain. At that point, European leaders will start to see the “jungle” that they have created across Europe start to seep into the little “garden archipelagos” that they continue to jealously inhabit. It would be strongly in the self-interest of the European elite class not to let things get that far. The post Greenland Is a Punishment for Europe’s Role in Ukraine appeared first on The American Conservative.

On Tuesday, the full, 17-judge U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit heard consolidated oral arguments in a crucial case that is all but guaranteed to make it to the U.S. Supreme Court. The predictable controversy surrounding the litigation, which involves similar but distinct mandatory Ten Commandments display laws arising out of Texas and Louisiana, is revealing as to just how far America has fallen from its Founders’ vision. In 2024, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed into law a bill requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom — from kindergarten through the university level — throughout the state. As Landry explained at the time, “If you want to respect the rule of law, you gotta start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.” Last year, the Lone Star State followed by passing a nearly identical statute. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who as Texas attorney general in 2005 successfully defended a Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds before the Supreme Court, echoed Landry in signing Texas’s bill: “Faith and freedom are the foundation of our nation.” Aggrieved liberals and secularists immediately filed First Amendment lawsuits, and district court judges promptly enjoined enforcement in both states. The question now pending before the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit, where I once served as a law clerk, is whether the Ten Commandments laws may once again be enforced so that the Decalogue can hang on all classroom walls throughout Texas and Louisiana. Let’s start with first principles. The first clause of the First Amendment, widely known as the Establishment Clause, reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The two relevant words in the Establishment Clause are “Congress” and “establishment.” The original understanding of the clause was to prohibit Congress from establishing a national religion so that the states may do so themselves… The word “Congress” is relevant because the Establishment Clause was unambiguously intended only to apply to Congress — and, by extension, the federal government at large. As Justice Clarence Thomas and others have persuasively argued, the original understanding of the clause was to prohibit Congress from establishing a national religion so that the states may do so themselves — consistent, of course, with prevailing free exercise protections and the No Religious Test Clause of Article VI of the Constitution. From the Founders’ perspective, the Establishment Clause was a necessary federalism provision for a fledgling, religiously pluralistic republic. The word “establishment” is relevant because it can only mean what the Founders meant: a literal national established church, such as the Church of England. Generations of Americans have been taught that the First Amendment secures the “separation of church and state,” but that pernicious phrase is nowhere to be found in the amendment’s actual text. Instead, the notion of a “wall of separation between Church & State” has its origins in a pithy 1802 letter Thomas Jefferson sent to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut. As Justice William Rehnquist explained in his dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), “Thomas Jefferson was … in France at the time … the Bill of Rights were passed by Congress and ratified by the States. His letter to the Danbury Baptist Association was a short note of courtesy, written 14 years after the Amendments were passed by Congress. He would seem to any detached observer as a less than ideal source of contemporary history as to the meaning of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment.” In reality, Jefferson’s “separation” language didn’t take hold until a terrible 1947 Supreme Court decision called Everson v. Board of Education, which for the first time undermined both “Congress” and “establishment” by adopting Jefferson’s insidious language and then “incorporating” it to the states as well. The result has been nearly eight decades of destructive constitutional inversion and a prolonged moral assault on America’s biblical inheritance throughout our public squares. In a law review article published last summer, my coauthors and I called for the court to formally overturn Everson and end our failed national experiment in “separationism.” None of this is even necessary to decide the Fifth Circuit case. The United States was founded on ecumenical biblical principles, and the Ten Commandments — the wellspring of so much of Western morality — embody that ecumenicism. Introduced to the world by Judaism and spread throughout the world by Christianity, the Ten Commandments are the shared inheritance of Jews and Christians of all stripes — Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox alike. The Supreme Court itself famously features a frieze of Moses carrying the Ten Commandments tablets. It would be the height of hypocrisy for the court to deny Texas and Louisiana the ability to do that which it does itself. Sectarian public displays perhaps raise other concerns, but the Ten Commandments simply do not. On the very same day in 2005 that Abbott and then-Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz successfully defended the Texas State Capitol grounds Ten Commandments monument, the court decided a very similar case out of Kentucky that inexplicably went the other way. For decades, the Court has made a muddled hash of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. It’s been trending in the right direction in recent years, and the justices should eventually have an opportunity here for a landmark, clarifying ruling. But for now, the Fifth Circuit must do the right thing and side with Texas and Louisiana. READ MORE from Josh Hammer: Is a Red Line Still a Red Line? The Moral Blackmailing of the American People This Past Year Was Pretty Great. Here’s a Wish List for 2026. To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM Image licensed under Creative Commons Public Domain Mark

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