If you think decent homes for all is an impossible dream, take a look at Vienna
W hy shouldn’t working-class people own their own homes? It’s a rhetorical question that has provided the justification for the transformation of housing policy over the past half century in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s “property-owning” revolution in the 1980s. “I want Labour to be the party of home ownership,” as Keir Starmer put it last week.
There is, of course, no reason that working-class people should not own their home, any more than they should not drive a Mercedes or holiday in the Maldives. The trappings of wealth should not be confined to the middle class.
And yet, it is clearly also a far more complex issue. The idea of a “property-owning democracy” emerged as a conservative political strategy in the 1920s to attempt to counter dangerous socialist ideas percolating within the working class. It was appropriated by Anthony Eden, Conservative deputy leader in the 1940s, in response to Labour’s postwar expansion of social housing, before becoming a key strand of Thatcherite strategy in the 1980s.
Thatcher’s offer to council tenants to buy their flats, and the loosening of mortgage rules to expand bank lending policy, was a runaway success. It contributed to, and was a product of, the fragmentation of working-class communities and the atomisation of society witnessed in the 1980s. The preoccupation with home ownership was predicated in large part on the belief that social housing must necessarily be of poor quality, and that only home ownership could meet people’s aspirations and allow the working class, to anachronistically borrow a phrase from a different context almost 40 years later, to “take control” of their lives.
Poorly designed, shoddily built council housing is, however, a political choice, not the
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