Housing, the press were told beforehand, would be at the heart of Theresa May’s speech. After the bruising reception the help-to-buy announcement received earlier in the week, we were told the prime minister would announce a huge cash injection for social and affordable housing. This appeared to signal a change in Tory thinking – which seemed in denial that the country’s housing system was in crisis.

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But the numbers started to unravel, as the letters slowly collapsed from the Tory slogan on the stage behind her, revealing the policy to be more broken than enlightened. The £2bn injection will build only 5,000 homes a year, the party admitted, and pales in comparison with the £3.75bn Labour spent on affordable homes in its last year of government.

The issue with May is that she cannot deliver on her promises. Whether it’s lowering immigration or telling her party she will secure a bigger majority, every idea she proposes is cursed with the reverse-Midas touch. The housing announcements were revealed to be dismally tame and underwhelming. In the 2017 election manifesto, the Conservatives committed to build 1.5m homes by 2022; these 5,000 new homes will barely make a dent on that target.

At conference, time and again the same interlinking themes emerged. At every fringe meeting, delegates and MPs alike bemoaned the fact that young people had abandoned the Conservative party – stretching the term to mean anyone under 45 – and they also expressed panic that they were losing “the battle of ideas”, and had to fight “not just for the future of the party but the future of capitalism”.

Yet no one managed to put forward any new ideas on housing: members returned repeatedly to the maxim that if people just work hard and save, they can afford a home. This is demonstrably untrue for many young people, with house prices outstripping wages hugely and young people being saddled with mountains of debt. But pointing this out led only to annoyance and tired complaints about the alcohol consumption habits of the under-30s.

Housing should worry the Conservatives and any cheerleaders for capitalism. The market is broken, and becoming more so with every day. Help to buy just looks like desperate boosterism for traditional models of home ownership, with cranes thronging major city centres building plush flats to lie empty while desperate families languish on council waiting lists. Leaving housing to the market prioritises profit over human experience and the right to shelter. Increasing numbers of young people, meanwhile, look at the shambolic housing market, see it barely works for anyone, and wonder precisely what capitalism has to offer them.

Play Video 0:48 Great expectorations: Theresa May battles a conference coughing fit – video

And if home ownership is out of reach, renting further radicalises people. The Conservatives know their vote dropped in every age group under 45, and that they cannot win without getting Generation Rent onside. But alas, many of their MPs and voters are landlords, and personally gain from rental income,and are ideologically squeamish about injecting any mechanisms of control into the market.

The late theologian Herbert McCabe wrote: “There is something bizarre about the present popularity of the word ‘market’ as a metaphor for human society. Markets are surely a good and necessary part of living together, as are law courts and lavatories. But none of these are a useful model for what human society essentially is.” For too long, politicians have failed to rein in markets, or even consider what role they should play.

My generation, trapped in insecure, expensive renting, have seen their social contract torn up, with intergenerational injustice rife and income inequality persistent: we feel we have been denied the basic tenets of normal life. While we are talking more about housing as a right, the only time the Conservatives use the word is when they are endlessly defending the right to buy. This policy is a perfect symbol of the neoliberal project, birthed by Margaret Thatcher, responsible for a huge chunk of the housing devastation in this country, with formerly affordable social housing depleted and now in the private rented sector.

Young people simply want stability and to be able to live somewhere long enough to raise a family without constant fear of eviction. The Conservative response is to make this even less likely now for council tenants by ending their lifetime tenancies.

What did Theresa May's speech promise on housing? Dawn Foster Read more

To solve the housing crisis requires a mass house-building programme – allowing councils to borrow to invest, as many want to do, rather than bid for a small pot of grant money.

But we also need to drop the slavish belief that markets are always a force for good, and should be allowed to function untrammelled. Homelessness has more than doubled since the Conservatives took office in 2010, fewer and fewer people expect to realise May’s “British dream” of home ownership, and instead we’re trapped in a nightmare where we are denied something as fundamental as a right to shelter. If the housing market means young people aren’t able to house themselves, and home ownership is for the few not the many, trust in capitalism will continue to founder, and democratic socialism will be in the ascendant in the UK.

• Dawn Foster is a Guardian columnist