A work of towering genius

Estates weren’t the kind of ghettos they have become, with high unemployment and poverty. When I was a kid almost everybody in our street worked and the idea of living in a council house was not seen as bad.

There were problems with teenagers – the thing of the day was joyriding. Drugs came in around the time I started to leave in 1980s and for a time it was almost as if every third person you saw was into gear. The estate I grew up on wasn’t unaffected.

The decline began with Margaret Thatcher’s little trick of making us buy our council houses and sell them on the market. It was an economic trick, the biggest piece of social evil that ever happened. I think Thatcher is the devil, pure evil.

I haven’t been back to the estate for a couple of years because my mum’s not there any more. She died in the same house she’d lived in all her life. But my wife’s family is from Liverpool so I still go back to see relations and mates I grew up with. But the connection’s been broken.

We were a very political household. My dad was a member of the Communist party and we had the Morning Star every day. In the 1970s and 1980s, people were more politically active and politically educated than they are now.

It used to be a lot clearer which side of the fence you were on. But with today’s Labour party you don’t know where the lines are drawn.

What we need is a lot more social housing. Look at what happened when councils had budgets to build houses. In Liverpool, the council promised to build houses and they were elected as a result of that policy. But then the government withheld financial support and the council was punished for this attempt to build more homes.

Where I live now in north London, at the end of our street is one of the biggest social housing estates in the capital. It’s a prime example of bad social planning. Instead of lumping all the same people together, it makes more sense to have people from different economic backgrounds in the same neighbourhood. You create a more unified society that way.

I’d like to go back to more radical thinking about how we build cities. Usually, the only time you have the opportunity for that is after disasters like earthquakes and wars when you have to level the place and start again.

Right now, housing associations have abandoned the role they used to have as charitable organisations set up to build social housing. They have been reduced to clients of government. Councils have devolved responsibility for housing to them.

They don’t have any sense of ownership in the property and don’t want to involve themselves in being landlords any longer. But as soon as you abandon responsibility of course you’re going to have trouble.

Look what happened with the Thames corridor. The government claimed that it would be a massive project to house key workers but people working in schools and hospitals still can’t afford to live in London.

The reason we’re in trouble now is because we stopped thinking about anything other than private means – Thatcher’s idea that everything should be in the hands of private individuals and that everything privately run is better, even hospitals, schools and prisons.

At the same time we’ve emptied government run establishments such as hospitals and put people on to the streets, so that they can be converted to apartments and sold off. We have drifted further and further from caring about the community.

I don’t see how private enterprise can profit from homelessness. If it’s possible, then private companies will come along. It’s the only ideology that carries weight but it leads to profiteering by a small minority.

It’s up to government to solve the problem and fill the housing gap. We heard a lot about the third way during Tony Blair’s period of office. The reality is it’s just like the first way – only spelt differently.

Ian Hart is an actor currently appearing in Speaking in Tongues at the Duke of York’s theatre.