from the link:
Thatcherism liked to present itself as a rejection of the postwar, state-driven, more profligate way of doing things. But in housing, her administration was actually the postwar state’s beneficiary, selling off the assets it had built up. A similar dependency lay, almost never acknowledged, behind her social and economic reforms generally. Her freedom to make Britain more risk-taking and individualistic in some ways only existed because the country she had inherited, for all its flaws and tensions, was a relatively stable, unified place underneath: more equal in the late 70s than it had ever been, still permeated by shared class assumptions and largely at peace...
Meanwhile rents for remaining council tenants rose...By 1991 they were 55% higher, relative to average earnings, than they had been 10 years earlier. “If it were not for the right to buy,” conclude Jones and Murie, “the council housing sector as a whole would have generated huge surpluses [from rental income] and the rise in real rents ... would not have been necessary.” Or to put it more directly: home ownership was made possible for wealthier council tenants through discounts paid for by their poorer neighbours.
I wonder how many of those homes sold off by Thatcher are back in the hands of private landlords?