Do we all aspire to home ownership? How apt that today I visited an ex-council house (the politically correct will call it ‘local authority’) to advise the owners – who are now enjoying retirement – on the best course of action to take to sell their property for the best possible price. The fact that they are in the position to sell their house – as its owners – as opposed to simply giving up the tenancy, was an immense source of pride to them. The timing was not lost on me; as driving back to the office I listened to some of the debate in the House of Commons on the matter of tributes and reflection on the work of the late Baroness Thatcher. For it was she, under her stewardship and the introduction of the Right-to-Buy scheme, who made it possible for millions of people to have the opportunity to buy their council house. This offered home ownership to many people for whom without this scheme, buying a property would have been a total impossibility.
No matter what the colour of your political flag, you cannot fail to acknowledge that someone who was born above a grocer’s shop in Grantham, became a research scientist, a barrister and then the first female prime minister of a western power and then dies in a suite in the Ritz, must have got something right.
