What I would like to share with you for a few final moments is a vision of the things that matter most to me … I offer the certainty of liberty, and the chance of property ownership. And not just a chance; that people should be able to own their own home is deep at the heart of Conservative philosophy. What earthly use is it that families should have a millionth share of some nationalized industry? How much more important to have something they can own and that can be passed on to their children. Never mind about public ownership – in practice that gives nobody anything. What I’m offering is personal ownership … property brings with it security and independence.
(Margaret Thatcher, election broadcast)
In a world of fear, people cling desperately to their own possessions. In a world of poverty, people think first about their own children and their futures. In a world of insecurities, Home becomes more than ever a symbol of yearned-for security. Home, whatever it means to each of us, has become the most publicly wielded image of private security – a security apparently to be bought, to be owned, to be mortgaged. Mrs Thatcher, setting up society – ‘public’ – and individuals – ‘personal’ – in opposition, paints a picture that is actually becoming true. The society we live in does feel more like an enemy every day. ‘Social security’ is now inadequate to provide just that. The tragedy is, that as this right-wing government makes ordinary life harder and harder, it creates the social conditions for precisely the individual fears and anxieties which fuel its support.
The depression I feel is not just my own. If we believe that our identities are formed in society, then this Tory determination to pull out, like a wilful child, every separate strand from the fabric of our social life is not just ‘reactionary’ but painful, bulldozing the ground on which we grew. The sense of the Welfare State is one of the earliest things I can remember, the delicious Clinic Orange Juice that was quite unlike ‘bought’, the equally foul free Cod-Liver Oil, the reverence with which my father spoke of Nye Bevan, an idea that the world was supposed to get better.
These feelings are Home to me, and without them I feel like an alien. Home is not property, it is belonging somewhere. Outside, children are playing on the shared pavements, beyond the emotional violence of particular families. Who owns the view from my window? What makes a street more homely than a house, a Council Estate safer than Real Estate, the whole of London more personal than a back garden?
I remember the title of a book on my parents’ shelves, ingrained in my mind for twenty-five years: ‘London Belongs To Me’. This exciting phrase always seemed both intimate and radical. As a recent City Limits feature showed, London belongs, mainly, to the Duke of Westminster, ‘God’, and the Queen. But it is also mine, and everyone’s who lives in it, works in it and loves it, and it is this sense of belonging as an active relation which Tory individualism has frozen into ‘belongings’ – things owned. Property is, as Mrs Thatcher says, deep at the heart of the Tories’ (capitalist) philosophy – selling us back individually the very ‘place’ they destroy socially. Which is why, as socialists, we will have not just to fight, but to hold on to every glimmer of that other, intangible and priceless sense of ‘belonging’ if this society is to become a place to feel at home in again.
(City Limits, 1983)