It's not that I want to let RTB off the hook but neither do I want to let (largely Labour) councils off their hook for a much longer standing neglect of their housing stock. Estates like Castlemilk or Craigmillar, where the bulk of social housing was to be found, were largely neglected from the moment the building work stopped in the late 1950s. It's just not true to locate the problems with the RTB. By the time I left Castlemilk in 1980, the Thatcher was barely in power and it was already in an advance state of decay. The right to buy hadn't touched it and would barely touch it. It would be (Tory) urban regeneration - New Life for Urban Scotland - that would see Castlemilk (and Wester Hailes, Ferguslie Park and Whitfield) get its first large programme of housing refurbishment in 30 years.
That systematic neglect - largely to keep rents down and effectively buy votes - also affected the better off areas and part of the appeal of the right to buy was that it allowed people to be independent of the council. Sure, it was a bargain (although not so much of a bargain when you consider what the tenants had been paying in and getting back over the years) but it was also the mechanism by which those people could get new kitchens, windows and doors, which most of those houses also hadn't seen since they were built.
So, the aim of the right to buy might have been to undermine collective provision and encourage individualism but it had a ready audience. Collective provision hadn't been all that good. Councils had done a pretty poor job of being developers and landlords - building crap houses and then systematically mismanaging them. RTB was an individual solution to collectivisms problems.
The social processes - the changing populations had also been going on for years. The trouble with most council estates was always that they were nowhere near jobs and they had poor transport links so skilled workers, the better paid, the ones who would maintain gardens, improve also had middle class aspirations. You would see their living standards improve. They would get a phone installed, a colour TV and a car and then they would move to East Kilbride or Cambuslang where the Scottish Special Housing Association was a better landlord or where there were nice new houses to buy near work and shops. Again, those processes (and that process of setting up housing associations to stop councils running the housing stock in the new towns) predate the right to buy.
For the left, Thatcherism has been a convenient historical marker used to signify some huge break with the past. To locate all of our social problems with the arrival of Thatcher is convenient because it means we don't need to look at what that past really was and where the problems really started.
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