Guardian: The wrong housing right

In a society used to regarding rent as "money down the drain", the right to buy has become a sacred tenet of government policy. Grant Shapps, the Conservative housing minister, is insistent that it won't be tinkered with despite pressure from the Lib Dems. More than two million people have bought their council homes in the 30 years since the policy was officially introduced by Margaret Thatcher; most of them a house, not a flat, on a "nice" estate.
The value of those homes on the open market has held stable, or, in London, gone through the roof, giving working-class families access to the kind of transferable, heritable wealth that was once the preserve of the middle class. No wonder the policy has been so popular with those who have benefited from it.