The Welsh government has declared its intention that, should Labour win the Assembly elections in 2016, it will seek to abolish the Thatcherite right to buy policy.

This scheme grants council tenants the ability to purchase their home at a substantial discount, reducing the already inadequate social housing stock even further.

There have already been the expected “nanny state” accusations from the Tories and Welsh Conservative shadow housing minster Mark Isherwood accused Labour of being “anti-aspiration.”

Before we all get carried away on this sea of laments, let’s stop and assess the current social housing situation in Wales, which in all likelihood is not much different to the rest of Britain.

The 1980s Britain in which the scheme was first introduced was a very different place. Thatcher preyed on working-class vanity and aspiration. “You too can be a home owner like the ruling class,” she said. And we fell for it.

I remember as a teenager in 1980, it became a standing joke when walking through council estates to spot the right to buy house. The new owners always prioritised altering the exterior of the house with a new porch or stone cladding so that

it no longer looked like the standard council house. “We’re now better than you” was whispered in corners.

At the time a decent union-negotiated wage meant that a mortgage was affordable, even though there was typically only one full-time wage coming into the house. If a couple both worked then the council home was bought, transformed, extended and there was still money for a week’s holiday in Spain.

So while the working class aspired to home ownership and councils busily sold off their properties, often with discounts of up to 60 per cent of the market value, social house-building declined dramatically.

When Thatcher came to power in 1979 we built 150,000 new council homes every year. By 1991 this was down to 1,500. While vast numbers of council homes were bought by tenants, there was nothing built to replace them. Now waiting lists have grown longer and longer, and the working class has been forced into the hands of the private buy-to-let landlord.

Current Welsh Labour Housing Minister Lesley Griffiths has rightly stated: “Now we have to protect social housing stock for people who really need it.”

Since Thatcher’s time in office, Wales has seen a 45 per cent decline in its council housing stock. More than 130,000 council homes in Wales have been sold under the scheme and virtually none built to replace them. Wales is already halving the maximum right to buy discount from £16,000 down to £8,000.

Those who have bought under the scheme or will rush to do so before 2016 will defend it, but its consequences are terrible.

London has been a ripe peach of a target for private buy-to-let landlords. Vast numbers of former council homes are now in the hands of greedy opportunistic landlords with sky-high rents that are now completely unaffordable to ordinary working-class people.

Indeed, an article I read this week showed a tiny single bedroom in a shared house with shared kitchen and bathroom at a staggering £1,000 a month rent in London, against a six-bed detached house in Redcar available for the same rent.

The Tory-imposed benefits cap has seen people moved from London to Hull as housing benefit and low-paid work simply are not enough to live in London anymore.

Buy-to-let landlords attend property auctions of repossessed council homes throughout Britain and have no problem buying up ex-council homes and renting them out at huge profits to people who then end up back in the social housing queue with their local councils. It’s a vicious circle and one we need to stop.

Cameron and co are always telling us of the cost of the welfare bill. But the costs of the welfare bill include huge sums of housing benefit, because working poor people on zero-hours contracts cannot afford the rent. They are then forced to apply for housing benefit which lines the pockets of the landlords imposing the rocketing rents.

Add on the pernicious bedroom tax causing a race to downsize to one or two-bedroomed properties, and local councils simply cannot meet the demand. In my own county there is a 10-year waiting list for three and four-bedroomed homes for larger families.

Aspiration is a word used by government and by the ruling classes to con the working class into thinking there is something wrong with living in social housing and working in a factory or shop, and that we should want more.

We bought that word “aspiration” hook, line and sinker and still do today, to an even greater extent than we did in 1979.

But our housing landscape has become something out of an Orwellian novel, with hopes of home ownership a distant memory and our young people unable even to afford the rent.

Is it not wise and prudent to follow Wales’s bold stance and say that enough is enough? Wales’s budget is handed over from Westminster, and this prevents it from building any more social housing, but it does have the right to protect the levels of social housing we have right now.

Making extortionate amounts of money from working-class people desperate to put a roof over their heads is an everyday Tory activity. It’s what they do best. Buying into the dream of becoming just like them is where we have let ourselves down.