Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  When Denis and Sylvia Abbott bought their three-bedroom terraced house in Coulsdon, south London, the first thing they did was to put in a mock-Georgian front door instead of the ‘regulation blue drab’ ordained by Croydon Council. Then they set about remodelling the interiors. ‘We might have done that anyway,’ Sylvia Abbott said, ‘only now we do not have to ask the council’s permission.’ No casting agency could have supplied more typical council-house buyers: Denis, 60, was a lathe-turner, while 47-year-old Sylvia was a filing clerk. They had working-age sons, had rented for almost seventeen years, and had bought their £27,000 house with a 46 per cent discount. On their quiet suburban street, the ‘signs of ownership’ were everywhere: new front doors, freshly creosoted fences, aspirational new names for the houses. The Abbotts had voted Conservative all their lives. At last, they felt, their loyalty had been rewarded. Buying had been a ‘nerve-wracking business to start with’, said Sylvia, but now ‘we have something to show for our money. The boys will benefit.’ It was also a question of principle, her husband added: ‘What it has given us is a bit of freedom.’21

  Whether they knew it or not, the Abbotts’ new mock-Georgian front door was one of the great social signifiers of the age. ‘Houses being bought by former tenants often stand out because the wood-work has been painted, a new front door fitted, fencing erected and the regulation municipal garden concreted over to make a hard-standing for the car,’ reported The Times in late 1982. But of all those things, by far the most emblematic was the Georgian door. The style commentator Peter York, always teetering on the edge of some wild generalization, was on great form when it came to what he called ‘Britain’s favourite door, the door to the Thatcher future, to Princess Diana’s fairy castle and, by now, to several million houses in the realm’. It was, he thought, ‘the most expressive piece of everyday symbolism’ in the country:

  You see this door everywhere, but everywhere. On my way to work – crossing North London – I pass this small low-rise block of Sixties council flats where everything was originally uniform, rectangular and the original design had glazed doors … But now half the block has Georgian doors – the door.

  The door is on owner-occupied houses all over the country; I’ve seen it in every big provincial city, including Liverpool and in Scotland.

  What is the thought exactly? Such a door does seem to say privatisation, or, on the council flats, a revisionist burst of bourgeois individualism. Georgian doors definitely say trading up.

  But above all it says keep out, you. Georgian doors are strong and safe and solid, the very opposite of the let-the-sunshine-in glazed 1960s numbers. Georgian doors reflect a very real preoccupation with security everywhere.

  All this was surely bang on, although York recognized that there were other associations too: with heritage, continuity, a kind of assumed grandeur and glamour. But the Georgian door was more democratic than it seemed, or at least more meritocratic. For York, it suggested the competitive values of the ‘successful bootstraps Tory councillor’ rather than the inherited wealth of ‘the Whitelaw house’. But it also captured, ‘in a way most left-wing people never understand, the “legitimate aspirations of ordinary people” who want their own places to be nice’. People, in other words, like Denis and Sylvia Abbott, and millions like them.22

  The delights of home ownership were a common cultural refrain even before Mrs Thatcher came to power. Even so, it is striking how often the themes of wanting a house, buying a house and even losing a house recurred in the most popular television series of the era. The first episode of Channel 4’s soap opera Brookside, which went out in November 1982, begins with the experience of Bobby and Sheila Grant, played by Ricky Tomlinson and Sue Johnston, who have just moved from a run-down council estate to a smart brick house on a brand-new estate. Similarly, in Only Fools and Horses, which first appeared in September 1981, David Jason’s Derek Trotter lives in a cramped south London council flat in Nelson Mandela House, Peckham, and is desperate to work his way up the ladder. In one early episode he discovers that his brother Rodney (Nicholas Lyndhurst) has become chairman of their tenants’ association, and concocts an elaborate but unsuccessful scheme to trick him into moving them into a smarter bungalow. And in the first episode of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Kevin Whateley’s Neville leaves his wife and children in Newcastle to find work as a bricklayer in West Germany. He hates having to leave and is desperately homesick when he gets there. But the point, he says, is to ‘get some cash and buy us a nice house on a nice estate’.

  To Mrs Thatcher, home ownership was a central pillar of the new Britain she hoped to build. Perhaps this explains the power of her chosen slogan, the ‘Right to Buy’, with home ownership framed as a right, embedded at the heart of British life. Nothing, she thought, must be allowed to undermine the bond between people and property. Hence her enthusiasm for mortgage interest tax relief, which could be claimed on the first £25,000 you borrowed against your home. Even many of her most loyal ministers thought this was an inexcusable subsidy for middle-class homeowners. Geoffrey Howe, for example, believed it was a ‘glaring anomaly … unjustly favouring the better off and the south rather than the north’. The archives show that he pestered her to get rid of it, not least because it cost the exchequer at least £2 billion a year. But she refused to budge, maintaining that mortgage tax relief was ‘of special value to “our people”’. Far from scrapping it, she said, they should increase it. In this case, as Howe later lamented, he could make no headway against the Prime Minister’s ‘populist instincts’.23

  To her critics, Mrs Thatcher’s obsession with mortgage tax relief for the middle classes was all the more shocking because she was simultaneously slashing housing benefits for the poor. What was more, it coincided with an unprecedented boom in bank lending, encouraging people to run up debts they would never have contemplated a generation earlier. At the end of the 1970s, the mortgage market had been almost entirely dominated by a cartel of building societies. But once Howe scrapped the banking corset, the high-street banks moved into the mortgage market in earnest. Unlike building societies, they could borrow cheaply from the capital markets, which meant they could offer much more generous loans. Led by Abbey National, the building societies reacted by abandoning their old caution, and soon the great mortgage bazaar was on. By 1983 lending had hit a record £19 billion, with demand so high that many borrowers had to wait weeks for their money. Customers of the Leeds Building Society’s 400 branches, for example, faced delays of up to three months. Yet it had never been easier to borrow, and as house prices soared, so the old taboos about debt evaporated. Britain was becoming a nation of debtors: in ten years after 1979, annual mortgage borrowing ballooned from £6 billion to £63 billion.24

  Was Mrs Thatcher personally responsible for this orgy of debt? Although she certainly made it easier to borrow, she never forced anybody to borrow money, just as she never forced the banks to lend it to them. The British people were not mindless pawns; they made their own decisions. And although no Prime Minister had ever made such a fetish of home ownership, it is often forgotten that home ownership was already rising anyway. By the time she took office it had already doubled since the early 1950s, and it is almost impossible to imagine a scenario in which that trend would have stalled. As the property writer Baron Phillips remarked at the time, the concept of home ownership was always particularly strong in Britain, ‘ingrained in the system through the long-established building society movement’. Indeed, in the summer of 1983, a survey by the Building Societies Association found that eight out of ten people – including nine out of ten between 25 and 34 – would like to buy their own home. A Thatcherphobe might see this as proof of the Prime Minister’s supernatural ability to brainwash the masses. But since a similar survey in 1975 had produced a figure of seven out of ten, that interpretation does not really stand up.25

  It is not true, then, that Mrs Thatcher ‘created’ a new demand, as some of her critics maintain. It would be more accurate to say that she
recognized a latent demand and set out to satisfy it, no matter what the cost. And when the voters went to the polls in 1983, she reaped the inevitable reward. Council tenants voted Labour by a margin of more than two to one; homeowners voted Conservative by three to one. Mrs Thatcher’s canvassers even joked that wherever they saw a mock-Georgian door, new windows or a freshly painted front gate, they knew they would find Tory voters. And there is no doubt that for some people even the chance of home ownership, however distant, was politically decisive.

  In Rochester, 20-year-old Rosanne Rodney, married with two young children, rented a council flat on the fourth floor of a high-rise block. ‘We want to get out of here,’ she told The Times. ‘I am against Labour because they are against buying council houses. We hope to get a council mortgage and are looking for council houses now. That has influenced me to vote for the Tories.’ Nearby lived Sandra Wildish, another housewife, who had been in the block for seven years. She had always voted Labour because ‘being a council tenant, the Tories are very hard and Labour really looks after you better’. But, she said, ‘when we move out of here and buy a home of our own, I will probably swing to the Conservatives’. Here, framed by the doorway of her high-rise council flat, was the walking embodiment of the property-owning democracy.26

  On the face of it, the Right to Buy was a stunning success. Its popularity is beyond doubt: few government policies have ever become so closely associated in the public imagination with freedom, independence and self-improvement. As a result, no government ever reversed it, and by the Housing Act’s 25th anniversary, almost 2½ million households had been handed the deeds to homes of their own. What was more, it was a colossal money-spinner. By the middle of 1983 more than £4 billion in receipts had poured into the Treasury coffers; and by the end of the decade the government had recouped more than £17½ billion. No other privatization of the 1980s made so much money for the British state.27

  But there was a catch. As Charles Moore points out, the Right to Buy was driven not just by a sense of ideological mission but by rather less elevated financial motives. As an internal memorandum explained in July 1979, the government had earmarked housing as an area that would ‘produce proportionately greater savings than any other programme’. To put it bluntly, they were planning to slash the housing budget to the bone.fn1 With this in mind, the Treasury had no intention of letting councils benefit from the enforced sale of their own property. Above all, it did not want to see local authorities blowing their windfall on new council houses; indeed, at first councils were banned from building any new houses at all. Eventually Heseltine persuaded his colleagues to allow councils to spend three-quarters of the money on new houses, but even that did not last long. When Nigel Lawson took over as Chancellor in 1983, he wasted little time in cutting councils’ share, first to half and later to a fifth.28

  The result was entirely predictable. Council-house building was already in steep decline, but under Mrs Thatcher it fell off a cliff. By 1981 Britain was building just 55,000 council houses a year – down from 130,000 in 1975 – and in later years the total plummeted even further. Given the rising demand, with the population growing and more people living alone, this might appear completely deranged. Mrs Thatcher’s ministers argued that if they used the money to cut the deficit and stabilize the economy, the private sector would fill the gap, with construction firms competing to meet the demand. Unfortunately, although private house-building did pick up a bit, it was not remotely enough to make up the shortfall. With too many people chasing too few houses, prices surged by as much as 10 per cent a year. From the day Mrs Thatcher walked into Number 10 to the day she left, the average house price went up from just under £20,000 to almost £60,000. And as even Charles Moore admits, this meant not just a housing shortage but a housing bubble – the consequences of which are still with us today.29

  There was another obvious downside. For Britain’s growing population without a home, worrying every night about where they were going to sleep, terrified of being kicked out into the sleet and the snow, Mrs Thatcher’s boasts about the joys of home ownership must have sounded like something from a different planet. In fairness, homelessness had been rising even before she took office, with at least 50,000 people on the streets before she walked into Number 10. The rising tide of family breakdown and drug abuse undoubtedly played a crucial part. So did the backlash against psychiatric hospitals, which had been gathering pace for decades and saw thousands of vulnerable young people released from institutions into what The Times witheringly called ‘the mercies of a community care which does not exist’.30

  Yet it was no accident that the homeless figures increased so dramatically after 1979. The fact that so many homeless people had lost their jobs tells its own story, while the collapse of council-house building meant there were simply not enough decent houses to go around. And although Mrs Thatcher’s ministers later blamed the inertia of the private sector, they could hardly claim that they had not been warned. As early as December 1981, the former director of Shelter, Des Wilson, argued that the decline in council-house building meant Britain faced a ‘major crisis … without parallel in our lifetime’. A year later, the Church of England issued an apocalyptic report, Housing and the Homeless, warning that Britain was facing an ‘appalling and monumental housing crisis’. The government, it said, should redistribute resources from middle-class homeowners to the very poorest in society, ‘for whom the Judaeo-Christian tradition has always demonstrated a particular concern’. But in this case Mrs Thatcher’s Christian compassion had its limits. She loved talking about homes and homeowners. But in the first half of her premiership she could barely bring herself to use the word ‘homeless’ at all.31

  None of this diminished her faith in the Right to Buy. In the future, she once told The Times, ‘there will be quite a lot of people, very ordinary folk, great grandchildren, who will be inheriting something, because for the first time we will have a whole generation of people who own their own homes and will be leaving them, so that they topple like a cascade down the line of the family’. But while this was true of those fortunate enough to buy their own homes at a handsome discount, it was not true of those who were not. From the very beginning, it was obvious that plenty of people would miss out on her housing revolution. For tenants who were very poor, very young or simply unemployed, who were in insecure jobs, were frightened of taking on a mortgage or simply hated their council accommodation and dreamed of something better, buying was not a serious option. Of course tenants rushed to snap up semi-detached houses in small towns and suburbs. Since the typical Right to Buy mortgage cost only 43p per week more than the average council rent, they would have been mad not to. But on estates crippled by crime, vandalism and high unemployment, sales were virtually non-existent. What sane family, after all, would want to buy a flat they hated on an estate where they felt lonely and frightened?32

  Missing out, however, carried a heavy penalty. From the moment it took office, the government was determined to raise council rents, which it felt had been suppressed for far too long. To Labour, this was an outrage: when, in November 1980, Heseltine proposed increasing rents by up to £3 a week, the result was a mass Commons brawl, all ‘pushing, kicking and shoving’, in which Labour MPs accused their counterparts of ‘behaving like the louts they are so quick to condemn at football matches’. Temporarily, Heseltine backed down; but this was only a tactical retreat. Starved of funds by government cuts, local authorities saw no alternative to squeezing their remaining tenants. As early as October 1981, rents were going up by some 32 per cent a year. And as thousands embraced the Right to Buy, tenants became more vulnerable. In the next ten years the government squeezed even tighter, sending the average council rent from less than 7 per cent of average earnings to more than 11 per cent. That may not sound like much. But for people at the very bottom of the ladder, for whom even a small rent increase might mean missing out on a hot meal or an evening’s central heating, the discounts offered to their more af
fluent neighbours must have seemed cruelly unfair.33

  Not everybody wanted to buy their home from the council. In tower blocks, in particular, many people shuddered at the thought of taking on such a responsibility, just as Mac had predicted in the Daily Mail (14 May 1979).

  Perhaps above all, the Right to Buy fundamentally transformed council housing’s image, and not for the better. For years thousands of self-consciously respectable families had seen nothing wrong with renting council houses. But even before Mrs Thatcher came to office, things were changing. In 1977 the Labour government had introduced statutory homeless provision, directing local authorities to give priority to the very poorest rather than the ‘respectable’ working-class families they had previously favoured. Their intention was wholly benevolent. But the unintended result was not just to push working families towards the back of the queue, but to change the character of the estates themselves.

  Then, three years later, came Mrs Thatcher’s Housing Act. Very quickly there was a clear divide between the kind of people who bought council houses and those who rented them. As early as 1983, David Walker estimated that two-thirds of Britain’s council houses were being rented by people who were ‘too poor to afford their rents’. In Hartlepool in County Durham, four out of five tenants had their rents paid by the state; in comparatively prosperous Wisbech and March in Cambridgeshire, more than seven out of ten were on housing benefit. Within just a few years, council housing was seen as a last resort for the elderly, the handicapped, single mothers and the unemployed. ‘The Socialist dream of people from all walks of life living together’, remarked The Times, ‘has given way to the nightmare of the ghetto.’ In the 1940s Paul McCartney’s father had seen nothing wrong with living in a council house. Forty years later, though, he might have thought differently. In the public imagination, these were no longer homes fit for heroes. They were homes for the poor.34