More than a decade after her death and 34 years since she left Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher continues to haunt us. After Liz Truss’s cosplay as the Iron Lady, Rishi Sunak has drawn comparisons between “the grocer’s daughter and the pharmacist’s son”. In December last year, Keir Starmer admiringly said that Thatcher “set loose our natural entrepreneurialism”. All this suggests a very British mixture of muddle and masochism: her spirit, it seems, must be summoned so we can be magicked out of our current mess, even if so many of the UK’s crises began with what she did.
One of her most painful legacies is the policy that defined her political essence: right to buy, that totemic scheme whereby the tenants of council houses and flats can purchase such properties at a discount, and become members of what Conservatives call the property-owning democracy. Since it was introduced in 1980, more than 2m dwellings have moved from the public realm into private hands. Stringent restrictions preventing councils spending the receipts on new homes have had predictable effects: since 1991, there has been an average net loss of 24,000 social homes a year. All this feeds our ever-worsening housing crisis – and, as a result, the fragile condition of millions of ordinary lives.
