I ALWAYS thought that Margaret Thatcher was in one single respect a Marxist, if a crude one.

She had a base and superstructure view of society. That’s the idea that the economic base determined (in the final analysis) the social, cultural and ultimately political shape of a society.

Essentially she believed that if you turned people into individual house owners they would become Tories.

The process of privatisation of publicly owned homes — by a long way the largest privatisation of all — may well have had that desired effect in some cases.

It didn’t with my parents. They bought their council house, a brand new house when they moved into it, for about a third of its value — but they never stopped voting Labour.

It is difficult for people on modest incomes, however principled, to turn down such a large gift amounting to tens of thousands of pounds.

Of course the Tories never really wanted us to own our homes. If the miners back in 1984 had “owned their own homes,” they would still be on strike now.

No. They wanted us in hock to banks and building societies. Large debts make it more difficult for workers to take industrial action.

Psychologically however, it would be wrong to say this was not a vote-winner for the Tories.

The long-term effect has been a tragedy.

They replaced a reasonably well-regulated public social housing sector with an unregulated private-rented sector.

This caused a huge increase in rents and in the subsidy for private landlords in the form of housing benefit.

The data is interesting. The peak for social renting was 1981 when about 31.7 per cent of households were doing that and about 11 per cent rented privately.

However by 2013 social renting was down to 17 per cent and private renting had overtaken it at 18 per cent.

Interestingly there was as a result of the Tory policy an increase in home ownership from 57 per cent in 1981 up to a peak of 71 per cent in 2003.

The decade since has seen the first generation of privatised council houses returning to the market. They have been bought by buy-to-let landlords.

Home ownership had shrunk to 65 per cent by 2013 and seems destined to continue to fall as a proportion of housing tenure despite government programmes promoting it.

Now of course we come to the farce. In recent times the biggest part of the social rented sector has been housing associations. This was driven partly by organic growth and partly by large-scale council house stock transfers.

Now the Tories want to destroy this sector too.

First it is worth pointing out that around 800,000 housing association tenants already have “the right to acquire” but at considerably lower subsidies than for council tenants.

The long-term implications of associations being forced to sell property at a loss would be devastating. The Tories seem to have forgotten that these are private organisations.

Second, who is going to lend them money to develop new property if they have to sell it before recovering the cost?

As for accelerating the sale of council homes, the trouble with privatisation is that you cannot sell things twice.
This policy looks bonkers and it has no hope of improving Britain’s chronic housing crisis, but that doesn’t mean that it’s devoid of sense.

This is part of a wider pattern of unlocking assets that are held collectively. That is what George Osborne’s pension reforms are about. That is really what the original council house privatisation was about. When you know this the pattern is clear.

Economic growth is flat at best, so capital needs to get its hands on assets that are owned collectively.

This process began with an attack on state-owned assets, then it moved on to other collectively owned assets like the building societies — and now housing associations.

This is ultimately about the transfer of assets from the poor to the rich. Ultra-low interest rates mean that investors are looking for more diversified returns.

Look at the way they have moved into the private rented sector in London. Those same low-interest rates mean the rich can borrow to buy assets cheaply whereas someone on a zero-hours contract cannot even afford to save or get a mortgage.

Then they service the debt by kindly allowing us to rent the things we once owned back from them. Railways, energy, water, our homes, post and telecoms, higher education, next they will come for healthcare and schools.

Private Island, James Meek’s detailed account of the disaster that is privatisation, is a well-written book by someone who was previously a purveyor of fiction. Yet some of this stuff you could not make up — like the fact that when Enron collapsed it owned Wessex Water.

Meek’s key point however is one we should all remember in this coming election — that tax can be kept low because as our national assets are sold, these private businesses become effectively tax-gatherers.

As we the ordinary citizens are handed over to these private tax-gatherers, the greatest burden of taxes shifts onto the poorest.

No wonder we see income inequality reverting to the same pattern it followed before WWI, as the pattern of ownership in the economy heads that way too.

• Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else (Verso 2014), by James Meek, is available from www.hive.co.uk.