For left-wing governments in Britain, building houses is putting yourself out of a job.

Scotland is a good example: every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences so they attempt to build council houses, it is impossible for the government to build enough council houses to make up for multiple decades of underbuilding (this problem has accelerated significantly whilst they have been promising to build housing, had explicit targets, etc.), but at the next election they make the same promises (and people vote for them because there is no alternative).

The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.

The politics of this topic are very strange. The public is still at the stage where they think in vague terms that the problem is a lack of housing.

I believe the problem is worse in Scotland because the growth in council housing in the 60/70s was organised in order to create this permanent bloc vote. The same has happened in London where you have whole constituencies where 70% of the effective vote is void.

> every government since the mid-2010s has been elected on the explicit promise to build more houses, they cannot do so because of the electoral consequences

This doesn’t add up. Promising to get more housing built is getting these people elected, but they can’t make good on this promise because then they will lose their election?

> The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.

That's a conspiracy theory and a half!

A lot of the new student accommodation being built is privately owned. They're chasing the (pre-Brexit/pandemic) overheating market for student accommodation that resulted from the universities targeting international students for the inflated tuition fees they can charge, and in some cases have features explicitly advertised to international students as positives (e.g. some of the ones in Nottingham have built in rice cookers as standard).

However, some of the properties are at risk of becoming unviable (i.e., lying empty or having to be turned over to housing non students [0]) because of a combination of Brexit and tightened immigration rules reducing international student numbers.

If they're being built as some kind of social engineering it would be a really convoluted way of going about it.

0: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3l09p664ro