THE same weary tales keep reappearing every so often. This time it’s the turn of the tale that the present housing shortage is the fault of Margaret Thatcher who, personally, one presumes, sold off all the council houses and is therefore responsible for the present shortage (“Tory leader is accused of hypocrisy as she calls for new push to build 25,000 homes”, The Herald, September 1, and Letters, September 2). This is arrant nonsense. In most cases the houses which were sold continued to be occupied by the same families as before. Once they had died or left the district the houses were still there – to be occupied by subsequent owners and their successors up to the present time. In most cases there are as many of these houses fit for living as there were in Mrs Thatcher’s time – and probably more. Had some of the money from Mrs Thatcher’s sales been used by local authorities to build more council houses they would be available today.
Mrs Thatcher was no particular friend of mine but what she did was to transfer the custom of tenantship to that of ownership. Not one house was lost by this arrangement and the condition of the stock was probably greatly improved by the efforts of the proud new owners. Any present shortage is due to the lack of effort to build more houses for a growing population. Who is responsible for this I am not qualified to say, but it certainly was not Mrs Thatcher.
Alan Sinclair,
40 Switchback Road, Bearsden.
DOUG Maughan (Letters, September 2) is of course right to point out that Ruth Davidson is too young to be blamed for Margaret Thatcher's policy of selling council houses without building replacements, however, acknowledging the disastrous consequences that ensued and a few words of regret from Ms Davidson would not go amiss.
Mr Maughan is also right to deplore Labour's record on housing since 1997, although I would point out that the rot had set in long before that. I spent my early years in a house riddled with damp and condensation in one of Glasgow's east end housing schemes. Labour councillors and MPs were invisible men who, to borrow Mr Maughan's pertinent words, did "zilch, nada, nothing".
I remember my late father speaking with pride of his red hot socialist aunt who had worked tirelessly in the east end for poor people and for the Labour Party to which she was devoted. When I began my own political campaigning in that area I found the same terrible housing conditions that she had encountered almost 40 years before; people living in damp, mouldy houses, often with no bath or inside toilet, and hollow-faced children with hacking coughs. Successive Conservative and Labour governments failed massively to provide generations of families with decent living conditions. A plague on both their houses.
Ruth Marr,
99 Grampian Road, Stirling.
DOUG Maughan raises some interesting points concerning council house building. It's just a pity that he omitted a very important piece of history about probably the best ever Labour government that was in power immediately after the Second World War. What would Labour be like now if we had politicians of the calibre of Clement Atlee, Nye Bevan, Jennie Lee and Ellen Wilkinson?
When Britain was bankrupt after the war, the Labour Government built more than a million council houses between 1945 and 1951. They were built to generous specifications and subsidies were paid to keep down council rents.
Introduction of universal family allowances became law. Labour abolished the marriage bar in the civil service, enabling women to work in that institution. The Fire Services Act provided a new pension scheme for firefighters. There was a Merchant Shipping Act that improved conditions for seamen. Then there was the Shop Act which meant no person could be made to work more than six hours without a break. Labour also introduced a dock labour scheme that put an end to casual hire, giving workers decent conditions with holidays and sick pay.
Maybe Mr Maughan could give some credit to a Labour government. It's easy to forget that Labour created the NHS in spite of Tory resistance and as Bevan said at the time: "In the end I had to force money down the doctor's throats to get them to agree."
Wilf O'Malley,
11 Delnies Road, Inverness.
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