The government may think that the biggest threats it faces are a tricky decision about joining the euro and the ability of the health service to absorb a lot of extra money without getting much better. It could be wrong. The real danger may, quite literally, be closer to home. Five years ago, the Labour government pledged to bring an end to boom and bust. For the economy as a whole, it has undoubtedly delivered greater stability, even though economic growth stagnated in the six months to March of this year. But the housing market is now booming so strongly that a painful correction in this most politically sensitive of markets looks ever more likely. There were many things that helped destroy the last Conservative government: ideological divisions over Europe; sterling's ERM debacle; sleaze. But what may well have done the most lasting damage were the anger and the broken hopes caused by the housing-market crisis in the early 1990s that overwhelmed the Tories' heartlands in the normally prosperous south-east. Such voters might have feared the further fiscal punishment that Labour threatened to visit them with in 1992 even more than they had come to loathe the Conservatives, but, five years later, Tony Blair was a leader almost purpose-built to capitalise on their sense of betrayal and disillusion. Is history about to repeat itself?
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