Margaret Thatcher eclipses Churchill in Dictionary of National Biography:The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford university Press

What is the Oxford DNB? The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the national record of men and women who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century. The Dictionary offers concise, up-to-date biographies written by named, specialist authors. It is overseen by academic editors at Oxford University, UK, and published by Oxford University Press. The ODNB's General Editor is Professor Sir David Cannadine.

The Oxford DNB was first published in 2004 in print (60 vols.) and online. Since 2005 online updates have extended the Dictionary’s coverage in three annual updates, published every January, May, and September. The Oxford DNB now includes biographies of 60,061 men and women who died in or before the year 2012—plus 536 ‘Theme’ articles for reference and research.

New biography added to authoritative reference work gives the UK’s first female prime minister more space than anybody but Shakespeare and Elizabeth I
 

Big presence … Margaret Thatcher


Margaret Thatcher has been added to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, commanding more space in the venerable reference work than any other Briton apart from Shakespeare and Elizabeth I. Eclipsing records for Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill and Henry VIII, historian David Cannadine’s biography of Britain’s first female PM is the third longest of the 60,000-plus entries in the 72m-word work.

Thatcher’s listing details her rise to power, from Lincolnshire grocer’s daughter to global political force during the cold war. Cannadine is robust in his 30,000-word assessment of Thatcher’s career, noting that as well as being one of the few politicians to lend their name to a political doctrine – Thatcherism – her blunt approach to leadership led to ferocious clashes from the miners’ strike to the poll tax riots. Her front and backbenchers in parliament knew a leader who it was punishing to cross.

Cannadine, who is the ODNB’s general editor, concludes his assessment: “There are times when nations may need rough treatment. For good and for ill, Thatcher gave Britain plenty of it.”

As with the other 214 lives recorded in the latest additions to the ODNB, Thatcher died in 2013. Entries are always posthumous and feature persons of note from Roman Britain to the 21st century. Editors wait four years after the death of a notable figure to assess whether they are worthy of a place in what is effectively the canon of British public life, whose first edition was in 1885.

Among other new entries to the ODNM, which is available free online through public libraries, are six Nobel laureates. As well as the poet Seamus Heaney and novelist Doris Lessing, they are chemists Frederick Sanger and Sir John Cornforth, economist Ronald Coase and Robert Edwards, who received the honour in 2010 for pioneering work on in vitro fertilisation.

Among notables from the arts and entertainment world to have found their place in the dictionary are writers Tom Sharpe and Iain Banks, TV personalities David Frost, Alan Whicker and Good Life star Richard Briers. Comedians Mike and Bernie Winters and writer Eddie Braben, famous for writing the scripts for Morecambe and Wise.

Notoriety, as well as repute, can be qualification for inclusion in the dictionary. Two of the Great Train Robbers have been added. Though Ronnie Biggs played only a minor role in the 1963 robbery, his name has been added because his subsequent escape to Brazil as a fugitive from justice turned him into a “money-making celebrity”. His partner in crime Bruce Reynolds, who was the mastermind of the heist, has also been added to the collected lives.

The dictionary moved online in 2004 and has since become available to library users throughout the UK. Published by the Oxford University Press, it is a research tool for Oxford University and makes no commercial return on the £25m investment in its creation.

The Right to Buy? Selling Off Public and Social Housing. Alan Murie. Policy Press Shorts. 2016.

The Right to Buy? Selling Off Public and Social Housing. Alan Murie. Policy Press Shorts. 2016.

Following her 1979 election win, Margaret Thatcher proclaimed: ‘Thousands of people in council houses and new towns came out to support us for the first time because they wanted a chance to buy their own homes.’ She correctly gauged the political weather. In the thirty-five years since the introduction of the ‘Right to Buy’, over two million homes have been transferred from public to private hands, and each one at a substantial market discount.

In The Right to Buy? Selling Off Public and Social Housing, Alan Murie, assesses the impact of the decades-old policy, which had been intended to increase national home ownership. It is a story of winners and losers. Some tenants greatly profited. Judged by the volume of sales, the policy was an unambiguous triumph, marking – in the short term – a giant national leap towards property-owning democracy. Yet collective losses have also been borne across the generations. Where a Baby Boomer parent gained an asset, their children lost access to social rents.

The most attractive homes sold quickest, making big winners out of the early purchasers. But almost every buyer received a windfall. While flats and maisonettes were slower to sell, they were subject to very high discounts: up to 70 per cent of the market value. Right to Buy transferred public property directly to individual tenants, and in this regard, it is crucial to note the focused and positive impact that the policy had on individual lives and aspirations.

But the collective cost has been a high one. The best properties are now well out of the reach of lower income people: semi-detached houses with gardens fetch extremely high prices. And so large classes of people have become excluded from once-accessible suburbs. The privatisation of our housing stock has led to our segregation.
Image Credit: (The People Speak! CC BY 2.0)

Even if segregation is intuitively undesirable, it is not a body blow to the rationale behind the policy. The project was concerned with increasing home ownership, not demographic equality. But the slow revival of private renting crashes the kite. Many properties have now been sold on to landlords, whose tenants pay market rent. Speculators might buy properties and convert them, putting stress on stock designed for smaller numbers. Rather than delivering a property-owning democracy, private landlordism will increase over time. By definition, speculators have an advantage in the marketplace.

In different political circumstances, that might have been the end of the book. Council housing has now been largely sold off, and so at one time the Right to Buy seemed likely to pass slowly into the national memory, felt only in an increasing housing benefit bill. But it is said that history repeats itself: during the 2015 general election, David Cameron revived the scheme, promising and then delivering a new Right to Buy in relation to housing association stock in England and Wales.

This extension of the right gives the author’s analysis a pressing purchase. He charts the seldom-told history of housing associations, explaining how, through rebellion in the House of Lords, associations escaped the Right to Buy in the 1980s. And Murie also explains that, over the course of a generation, councils have transferred large amounts of their stock to the sector, so that in our own time associations have become by far the largest type of social housing provider.

In contrast to the original public sector sales, this time around there is a mechanism to provide for replacement. Housing associations will maintain their stock, drawing compensation from the government. In the spirit of our age, it is a complex and managerialist plan: to pay for the new Right to Buy, local authorities will be forced to sell ‘higher value’ properties as they fall vacant. After rebuilding, they will transfer any surplus into the new scheme, and so fund the housing association Right to Buy.

Rebuilding and replacement laces the pill; but the social impact will still be real enough. Following the pattern of the past, sales of association housing will be quickest in high value areas, further accelerating our segregation. It is also unclear how associations will respond to their new market position. Following the forced sales of historic estates, it would be rational for them to abandon their missions, leaving the poorest tenants to the market.

Feelings run high with regard to this area of policy, and Murie remains objective throughout. He explains the facts and weighs the evidence. He then concludes that government strategy has failed, and that it will fail again. The book provides a detailed, and welcome, analysis of the subject matter. However, the author’s objectivity perhaps comes at the cost of political analysis.

Such analysis would wade out into difficult waters, and the book largely keeps its feet dry. Yet without an understanding of government motivation, it is not possible to see why any alternative to the policy is so unlikely. The Right to Buy, along with other state sell-offs, has marked a seismic shift in the government’s relationship to the population. Criticisms relating to social segregation, landlordism and the abandonment of large numbers to the market only bite if it is assumed that policymakers care about collective welfare.

The author acknowledges that the new Right to Buy was forged from political exigency in the context of the 2015 election campaign. The new Right to Buy will impact on as many as 800,000 social tenants. The electoral advantage in offering discounts to this population is obvious. But from the perspective of conservative social policymakers, it is surely short-sighted. If over the course of the next generation rising private sector landlordism negatively affects the lives of many, the resulting political consequences are unlikely to be support for more of their particular brand of technocracy.

The Right to Buy? Selling Off Public and Social Housing is timely. The extension of the right to housing associations makes this analysis very important indeed. In the context of fast-moving change, the book provides a welcome and objective policy analysis.