Conservatives Risk Fresh Financial Volatility amid Housing Crisis

The Conservatives are sowing the seeds of a new financial crisis through their failure to tackle the housing problem, Nick Clegg has said as he calls for the "muscle of the state" to be used to help build up to 300,000 homes a year.  In an attack on the Treasury and the CLG, the deputy prime minister accused the Tories of having an ideological objection to intervening in the housing market to build more homes. Clegg made the comments as he came under pressure to change strategy and swing to the left after poor European and local election results. He said Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor, and Christine Lagarde, the director of the International Monetary Fund, were right to warn about the need for more housing in the UK. The Conservatives' failure to invest in housing was "unfair and economically unsustainable" and would create the seeds of the next financial crisis, he said. Watch a video (2 mins 40 secs) of the speech on the LibDem website.