Introduction

Abstract

Among constituency party activists, within the trade unions, and at Conference, members of the Labour Party after the General Election of 3 May 1979 were asking the question ‘where did we go wrong?’. Labour had attracted only 36.9 per cent of the votes—its lowest share of the poll since the 1931 election. A plethora of factors were cited to explain why Labour had lost, but few if any of the party’s leading members made any reference to its housing policy. It was as though man’s most important material need next to nourishment—housing—was of no interest to the electorate. It is highly probable, however, that one of the principal reasons for Labour’s electoral defeat in 1979 was its housing record. Indeed, the apparent success or failure of housing policy has been a major influence over voting behaviour in every General Election since at least the Second World War. Although Labour lost the 1951 election it gained its largest-ever share of the poll, 48.8 per cent, and received more votes than the Conservative victors, after undertaking a massive housebuilding programme and re-establishing council housing as a ‘general need’ tenure. The Conservative wins in the 1955 and 1959 elections followed periods in which by contrast the number of owner-occupied houses had increased dramatically. It was the new ‘class’ of homeowners who had ‘never had it so good’. In the 1964 and 1974 elections attention was focused on the abuses of private landlordism; and in 1974 there was concern about property speculation and the way in which house prices had recently rocketted, and resentment among council tenants as they were being brought into the so-called ‘fair rent’ system.