THE electoral map of Britain shows vast areas of the country swathed in Conservative blue, and while it is clear that the working-class vote is concentrated in urban areas — most particularly the big cities and industrial towns — these are the surface indicators of class politics.

That said, they also reveal much about the economic realities and the physical topography of our country in which land ownership is concentrated in very few hands.

When Britain’s richest man — the Duke of Westminster — was asked what advice he had for young entrepreneurs, he suggested that they secure an ancestor who was very good friends with William the Conqueror.

And it is true that the basic structure of land ownership in Britain is rooted in the redistribution of common lands to the ignoble supporters of the Norman invader.

Royalty and the nobility — the most direct descendants of the landowning class created within feudalism — own about 28 per cent, with another 20 per cent owned by foreign royalty and the oligarch class.

Our own home-grown big businesses and banks own about 12 per cent.

Another 20 per cent or so is divided up between disparate categories including churches, colleges and the military.

Less than 10 per cent is owned by private individuals for housing and their small-scale enterprises.

Such a schematic account of ownership does not obscure the stark class realities that the vast bulk of land is owned by a tiny sliver of the very rich and the corporate class.

There is some suggestion that last week’s switch of middle-class voters in the “rock-solid” Tory seat of Chesham and Amersham to the Liberal Democrats owed much to worries about over development by a entitled section of middle-class property owners combined with fears about the impact on housing prices of the HS2 high-speed rail development.

If a Tory government — devoted to maximising the share price of building contractors and land developers along with the profit margins of the big civil engineering contractors involved in projects like HS2 — comes a cropper because its hitherto loyal middle-class voters find that that the rising asset values of their overpriced houses are threatened by the big-business-friendly policies of the government, the rest of us can have a chuckle.

But the trend in planning legislation and the inexorable laws of monopoly capitalism are laying new levels of crisis to an already desperate housing situation.

The cost of buying a home has risen much faster than wages over the last few decades.

The stock of socially owned housing cannot keep pace with demand and rising rents in the parasitic private rented sector have risen to unsustainable heights, creating a barrier to working people in the struggle to accumulate the higher deposits that lenders demand.

Far from the private sector responding to market signals, the number of new builds has dropped and much of the speculative housebuilding is unaffordable to the people most in need.

The background to Tory travails in their semi-rural, suburban and small-town vote banks — mostly but not exclusively in the south of England — lies in concerns about the inadequately planned proliferation of private-sector speculative development to meet mandatory targets imposed on local authority planning committees.

But resolving these conflicts will not address the core problem of rising and unsustainable housing costs for working people, whether they pay rent or service a loan.

There may be no end of technical fixes available for the moment but the long-term solution is the common ownership of the land and the control on capital that only a socialist government might contemplate.