Estates

Margaret Thatcher is the person associated most thoroughly with the policy of allowing council tenants to buy their homes at a large discount from their local authority, having proudly announced her aim, upon entering power, to bring about a ‘property-owning democracy’. However, both the phrase and the idea were Harold Macmillan’s: he dreamed them up in the early 1950s, after which the sale of tens of thousands of council homes took place at the discretion of local authorities. In the 1970s, Edward Heath tried to make the Right to Buy a centrepiece of national Conservative policy, rather than a semi-clandestine carried out by mainly Tory councils. Thatcher initially opposed the idea on the grounds that working-class people shouldn’t be given the same privileges as those sensible lower-middle-class folk who had saved up to buy private homes built by Barratt or Wates. She changed her mind after realising that her victory in 1979 depended on the votes of skilled manual workers who had the desire, and the spare income, to buy their homes at a discount of up to 50 per cent, depending on how long they had been paying rent to the council.

The wall in the head can be approached another way. I want to know whether the very existence of areas of concentrated poverty and disadvantage suggests that we live in a society that is too tolerant of hierarchies, of invisible walls. Does housing the poor on council estates enable us to forget about them, except when they have stolen something of ours? Does allowing the rich to put electronic gates between themselves and the world allow the rest of us to get on with our lives without having to be envious of them? Does the fact that middle-class parents will do anything to avoid sending their children to largely working-class schools amount to an admission that they would never accept comprehensive system for the greater good? If we were to attempt to destroy Britain’s pernicious class system by tearing away not its physical structure, but the way in which we inhabited it – if, perhaps, we all woke up tomorrow and were given a piece of paper that randomly assigned us a new place to live on which our current salary, occupation or ethnicity had no bearing – we might not survive the shock of having the visible evidence of our social position removed so suddenly. Our place in the environment is, by extension, our place in life. We gravitate to where we feel most comfortable, and, if we can, stay away from places that make us feel uncomfortable. By building environments that can be so closely related with class – high-rises for the poor, semis for the muddling-along, mini-mansions for the rich – we have endorsed the idea that the class system is so immutable as to be a caste system.

Inequalities in health, wealth and education are the logical consequences of an economic system which over-rewards those who least need rewarding, but in Britain, they are also the result of a social system which dictates that good health, fulfilling work and a decent education are the preserve of the middle and upper echelons.