AFTER losing its majority, its housing minister and a clutch of seats in the suburban south-east, the Conservative Party seems at last to have reached the limit of its NIMBYism. “The penny didn’t drop until now,” says Rob Wilson, a Tory MP who lost his seat in Reading, a commuter town 40 miles west of London. But the view that the Conservatives should urge the building of more houses is at last filtering throughout the party. The alternative, according to the Daily Telegraph, the unofficial journal of NIMBYism, is “Marxist social engineering”.

A shift is long overdue. A much-trailed white paper on housing in February—when the party was riding high in the polls—was gutted of any radical proposals. Still, cannier parts of the party have long argued for more housing. And from a political perspective, the Tories’ unwillingness to boost the supply of homes for people to buy seems increasingly imprudent. Building such houses may breed Tories: the party boasted a huge lead among owner-occupiers and a slimmer one among voters with mortgages at the last election, according to Ipsos MORI, a pollster. By contrast, Labour had a 23-point advantage among private renters. As home-ownership falls, such a gap could become an existential problem for the Tory party.

Better-off young people, who might otherwise lean towards the Tories, are most aggrieved about housing, according to Torsten Bell from the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank. It is among this group that the gulf between the “vision of the home they expected to own and the reality of the home they find themselves renting is most acutely felt,” says Mr Bell.

The political pressure is most intense in the south-east, where prices have rocketed. Cheaper housing and better transport links may tempt Labour voters away from the capital’s heart where the party dominates, into more marginal constituencies such as Reading, reckons Mr Wilson. For now, they are piled up harmlessly in inner London. Six of the ten biggest majorities are in Labour-held seats in the capital, often in once dodgy but now desirable areas such as Hackney. But even a small diaspora of lefties could take a bite out of the blue doughnut of Conservative constituencies that make up London’s outer suburbs and nearby towns (see map). Hastings welcomed 800 exiles from the capital between 2015 and 2016, who presumably delighted in being able to buy a four-bedroom house for the price of a two-bedroom flat in some of the dingier parts of south London. Its Tory MP, Amber Rudd, hung on to her seat by 346 votes.

Nonetheless, some Conservatives are still channelling St Augustine: Lord, give me housing—but not here. Building more homes may win over future Tory voters, but it risks upsetting the current batch. Sajid Javid, the minister responsible for housing, insists that councils must persist with such developments, however unpopular. He has indicated that he will not obstruct those that permit some building on the green belt—where construction is almost non-existent.

But today’s Tory housing policy amounts to tinkering when compared with those of previous Tory governments. Harold Macmillan was tasked with—and just about achieved—the job of building 300,000 houses a year from 1951. The Conservatives were in power for 13 more years. Current policies fall far short of that sort of ambition. One Labour wag jokes that: “The best hope for the Tories is for Labour to win and enact its policy of mass council house building, so that they have a big stock of council houses to sell off when they get back in.”

Correction (August 15th 2017): A previous version of the map above indicated that the Tories lost the constituency of Eastbourne to Labour in June 2017. In fact they lost it to the Liberal Democrats. Sorry.