Mrs May must still encourage aspiration
Housing has always been a potent political issue – not only the supply of and demand for homes, but their tenure. For Labour after the war, the spread of social housing was not just a way to replace the accommodation damaged by bombing or to clear Victorian slums. Herbert Morrison, the Labour politician, was accused by his political opponents of trying to “build the Tories out of London” by using council housing schemes to affect local voting patterns.
By contrast, Margaret Thatcher saw an opportunity to spread ownership with her Right to Buy scheme in the early Eighties, which attracted working-class voters to the Conservatives.
These two approaches reflected the main ideological divide in politics: a paternalistic, state-knows-best view espoused by socialists; or a more individualistic, aspirational outlook favoured by Conservatives.
In her speech on housing yesterday, Theresa May shifted Tory rhetoric away from the latter and towards the former. As James Bartholomew writes on this page, Mrs May could hardly have delivered a speech less flattering towards the private rented sector and more laudatory of social housing.
We have noted before how the Prime Minister’s response to the perceived electoral threat posed by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is to try to emulate its policies rather than offer an alternative. Mrs Thatcher’s counterblast to the socialists in the Eighties was ownership, giving people who had previously been unable to buy a home, or never imagined owning shares, a stake in the system.
Mrs May said she did not want people in social housing to feel they were being looked down on by politicians and wanted to “remove the stigma”. Yet the idea of a property-owning democracy is not predicated upon patronising people who live in council houses, but an awareness that most people would prefer not to be beholden to the state for their home.
Everyone knows that it is more difficult now for young people to buy because of high prices, especially in London. The answer is to build more houses on brownfield city sites, where the infrastructure already exists. Mrs May’s announcement of extra money for housing associations to build more homes is welcome. But she should not abandon Conservative support for the aspirational opportunities that most people desire and which the Left seeks to suppress.