Why 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.
