The Conservatives’ attack on Labour’s ‘housing blitz’ shows a party which has learned zero lessons

There are many reasons why the Conservatives got absolutely smashed at the last election, but one of them was that the party completely lost sight of the social processes that reproduce its own voters. Few issues highlight this point as much as housing, especially homeownership.

In the 1980s, it was one of the most important drivers behind Margaret Thatcher’s dramatic expansion of the Tory electorate. Read accounts of the era, such as John O’Farrell’s bestselling Things Can Only Get Better: 18 Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter, and it crops up again and again.

There is right to buy, obviously (“new front door on a council house” is a bad sign for a Labour canvasser), but it isn’t just that. In Battersea, where O’Farrell was an activist, the arrival of the ‘Sloan Rangers’ heralded the end of an era. One comrade observed to him that every skip outside a house “contained a couple of Labour votes”.

Some of these patterns lasted decades. Ian Smart, another Labour activist in Scotland, noted during the independence referendum that “There was no firmer ‘No’ than a bought council house.”

By 2024 the Conservatives had been in office for 14 years. Yet there was no equivalent of the transformational processes Thatcher oversaw. Instead, the party withered into the sectional interest of people who got on the property ladder in the 2000s, at the latest.

Soaring prices had all but killed off Right to Buy in London even before Labour started formally attacking the policy, as the cost of a council house wildly outstripped the maximum available discount. Help to Buy, the Tories’ demand-subsidising new idea, was just a bung to developers which pumped more credit into house values – whilst leaving first-time buyers with perhaps the only sort of property in Britain at risk of massively depreciating.

And there is still no sign that the Conservatives have learned their lesson. This morning, Kevin Hollinrake is in the Daily Telegraph attacking Labour’s new ‘housing blitz’ – and justifiying a Tory amendment designed to protect “the character of England’s smaller towns and villages, which could end up merging into the areas with the new settlements.”

There is much to criticise about the Government’s housing plans, especially its decision to de-emphasise cities. But this is not it. One of the critical drivers of the housing crisis is the fact that the UK is more or less locked in to the basic settlement pattern it had in 1948, when the Attlee Government nationalised the right to build.

Settlements should expand over time. They should grow into one another. That’s how settlements have expanded from the Year Dot to the Second World War. As Michael Gove noted in his 2023 speech ‘Falling back in love with the future’, it was precisely by expanding outwards that London converted outlying villages into “elegant suburbs” and provided homes for “swelling millions”.

Crouch End regularly tops the list of being one of the most desireable neighbourhoods in Britain. Hornsey, just next door, stakes a claim to being the oldest hamlet in England. It is entirely a good thing that both, along with innumerable others, were allowed to be folded into the capital.

Under the post-war nationalised regime, of which the Conservatives have ended up the biggest defender, they would instead be cripplingly expensive satellite hamlets, suitable only for the wealthy and retired, surrounded by fields housing nobody at all. Their original ‘character’ would be protected, but only at an absurdly disproportionate cost.

Hollinrake is wrong. The key to solving the housing crisis does not require “by empowering local residents”, because “they know what they need, not mandarins in Whitehall.” The crisis isn’t about what they need; housing isn’t simply about a few more homes for the children of locals.

The test for national infrastructure – and housing is national infrastructure, at this point – is not whether local residents desire it but whether the nation requires it. Until the Conservatives can cross that Rubicon, they will remain merely the sectional interest for older homeowners, and not deserve to win.