In a post
a few days ago, I referred to the post-war period when even Tory PMs took pride
in the number of council houses built during their period in office. The two
decades after the second world war saw the peak of council house building in
the UK, and more than half of that time was under Tory governments. It all
changed with Thatcher and the ‘right to buy’; there is no doubt that the
decline in building new social housing since 1979, coupled with the large scale
sell-offs of the 1980s and 1990s, is a huge factor in the housing crisis of the
current day.
And yet… Thatcher did actually
have a point; she understood the urge which many tenants felt to want to buy
their homes, and I think she also (unusually for a Tory; they usually see property
as an ‘asset’) understood the difference between a house and a home. I spent
most of my childhood living in council houses, and can easily understand that people
didn’t just want to own ‘a’ home (a desire which could have been fulfilled by
buying a different house), they wanted to own ‘their’ home: the house in which
those who chose to buy had often invested a great deal of their own time,
effort and money. And it wasn’t just a desire for ‘ownership’, it was also a
desire to be free of the paternalistic and pettifogging rules which councils
often imposed, rules which didn’t apply to owner-occupiers. Worse, in some areas
the allocation of houses was essentially corrupt, with ward councillors having
an undue say in the process. I remember canvassing council estates in Merthyr
during the 1972 by-election campaign and finding tenants who were genuinely afraid
to say that they would support Plaid Cymru, let alone put a poster in the window,
in case the local councillor found out. It was just one of the ways in which
Labour maintained its hold on the population in parts of Wales in those days.
Wholesale sell-offs, let alone
with huge discounts on the price, weren’t the only possible policy response. And
sell-offs per se didn’t need to lead to such a huge shortage of social housing,
but the sting in the Thatcher tail was the prohibition on councils using the
funds raised from sales to build new houses. It also wasn’t the only way of
responding to problems of corruption or clientelism in pursuit of political
control, but it certainly achieved that. Or at least, I thought that it had,
but it seems that old attitudes die hard.
In a classic throwback to
those days, one Labour council leader has suggested
that whole families of council tenants should be evicted from their homes if
children do not inform on people committing knife crime. There can be few who
would argue that those who know about knife crime (or indeed, any other type of
crime), even if they are children, should not feel a moral obligation to divulge
what they know, although the last time I looked there was still a right to
silence when questioned by police, even as a witness, and fear of retribution
is a powerful motive. But throwing their families onto the street if they
refuse to co-operate – a punishment which can only be meted out to tenants, not
to owner-occupiers, and therefore emphasises their perceived lesser status in
society – is a return to some of the worst aspects of council tenancies of the past,
quite apart from being a way of punishing people who have themselves committed
no crime. It is not, apparently, official Labour policy, although espousing such
a policy doesn’t seem to be a bar to being a parliamentary candidate, and it doesn’t
exactly seem a huge jump from official policy which is to fine the parents of
children perpetrating anti-social behaviour.
I seem to remember, though, in
those far off days when Labour was merely Thatcherite rather than Farage-lite,
one prominent leader talked about being ‘tough on the causes of crime’ (such as inequality) as well
as on the crime itself. That’s been forgotten, as Starmer's Labour almost seems to be
trying to make Blair and Thatcher look like bleeding-heart liberals.
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