Abstract
The argument for widely spread asset-ownership is a politically ecumenical one. On the left, a radical tradition of supporting equality in property ownership can be traced back to Tom Paine, via a host of thinkers such as the economist James Meade, the Labour revisionist Douglas Jay, and pre-war social liberals like Leonard Hobhouse. But it was a Tory member of parliament, Noel Skelton, who first coined the phrase ‘property owning democracy’ in the 1920s. He provided intellectual leadership to a group of young Conservative MPs that included Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, for whom broadly shared economic prosperity was a touchstone belief. Only later did the term become associated with Margaret Thatcher, who, unlike Eden and Macmillan, presided over a period of rapidly rising income and wealth inequality, but whose signature policies of utility privatisation and council house sales came to epitomise popular capitalism in the public mind
Original language | English |
---|---|
Specialist publication | Progress (Labour's Progressives) |
Publication status | Published - 11 Apr 2016 |