THATCHERISM’S OWNERSHIP REVOLUTION ISN’T OVER
How can people without capital be expected to believe in capitalism? This is the challenge of our age, as ‘own nothing and be happy’ hardens into a new dividing line in Western politics. Westminster risks ignoring the emerging political economy of housing, even as public anger grows.
Green Party leader Zack Polanski is already courting downwardly mobile urban graduates who are hacked off by their experience of the UK housing market. He is attacking the Government for backsliding on its manifesto promise to end leasehold, the anachronistic system under which third-party freeholders exert sweeping control over the homes and finances of millions of flat-dwellers. The battle over leasehold reform in the UK has become a test of whether capitalism works for those who buy into it.
But contrary to claims by some, leasehold reform is not necessarily a left-wing agenda. ‘Fabianism has no desire to see the Duke of Bedford replaced by 500 little dukes of Bedford under the guise of enfranchised leaseholders’, wrote Beatrice Webb in 1894.
Conservatives – from Lord Randolph Churchill to Margaret Thatcher – have long seen widespread individual property ownership as a bulwark against socialism, which is why many on the right, across generations, have made freeing leaseholders from the tyranny of freeholders central to their crusade to expand homeownership.
Leasehold enfranchisement, a policy to empower tenants to buy out their ground landlords, was pitched in the 1880s by Randolph Churchill as a way to reduce social tensions and expand the franchise. We have had universal adult suffrage since 1928, yet millions of leaseholders today still live as second-class citizens. Leaseholders pay for everything, yet have no meaningful say over their money or their property, and cannot easily remove those who control them. A system that allows remote freeholders to profit from leaseholders sows discontent with capitalism and drives political volatility.
As Anthony Eden said, ‘the ownership of property is not a crime or a sin, but a reward, a right and a responsibility that must be shared as equitably as possible among all our citizens.’ Leasehold betrays that ideal. The alternative – commonhold – was meant to replace it. But instead the current model persists, concentrating wealth in the hands of a few and exposing homeowners to all kinds of injustice and extortion, turning what should be a secure right into a burden and a risk.
Nearly half of leaseholders say leasehold has prevented them starting a family – rising to 56% in London, according to Opinium. It is little wonder that younger urban voters, locked out of security despite playing by the rules, are receptive to politicians who question the system itself.
WHY LEASEHOLD REFORM IN THE UK STILL MATTERS
Margaret Thatcher saw all this coming. After the 1966 election, she pressed Harold Wilson to deliver enfranchisement for house-dwellers. Twenty years later, she defended Wilson’s 1967 legislation before the Strasbourg court against a human rights challenge brought by the Duke of Westminster – and won.
Fast-forward to October 2025. The Starmer Government has just defeated a High Court judicial review brought by the new Duke of Westminster and other elite landowners seeking to overturn the 2024 Conservative reforms. It was an opportunity to complete leasehold reform in the UK and finish Thatcher’s project of popular capitalism. Instead, Labour is kicking meaningful reform to the end of the Parliament, bowing to Big Freehold lobbyists and an excessively cautious reading of the ECHR.
As a sequel to her Right to Buy council-house revolution, Thatcher aimed to enfranchise another class of tenants, this time private leaseholders in flats and mansion blocks. Ahead of the 1987 election, she rushed legislation onto the statute books granting these voters first dibs on buying the freehold if the landlord was exiting, and a right to an acquisition order after two years of a court-appointed manager.
THATCHER’S UNFINISHED REVOLUTION
Thatcher also commissioned the Lord Aldridge working group to devise a scheme of freehold flats to avoid the problems of leasehold. Drawing on the American condominium and Australian strata title systems, the proposal emerged as commonhold – a term coined by Sir Brandon Rhys-Williams in 1978. Commonhold was intended as a long-term alternative to leasehold in England and Wales. Yet more than two decades later, leasehold remains the dominant form of flat ownership in the UK.
Thatcher introduced a draft Commonhold Bill on her final day as prime minister, alongside her Lord Chancellor, the Scots Tory Lord Mackay. Her successor John Major ensured that the Conservatives were the first party to promise commonhold in a manifesto in 1992. But after Major’s shock victory, the landed interest reasserted itself and Thatcher’s project stalled. The 1993 enfranchisement legislation was diluted by lobbyists, and commonhold quietly shelved, despite a further draft bill in 1996.
As Dudley Fishburn, the then Conservative MP responsible for getting commonhold into the 1992 manifesto, wrote: ‘What is so wrong about leasehold law, and so properly irritated Margaret Thatcher, is that it excludes any other way of selling a flat: throughout England and Wales it is a disgraceful monopoly, leasehold or nothing … The co-operatives and condominiums in which flat-dwellers live from New York to Sydney are coming at last to England.’
‘Half a million more people will now live and grow up as freeholders with a real stake in the country and with something to pass on to their children. There is no prouder word in our history than “freeholder”,’ Thatcher said defending Right to Buy, but leaseholders are still waiting for their enfranchisement.
FROM LEASEHOLD TO COMMOHNOLD
Conservatives who care about spreading homeownership, correcting distortions in the property market and winning back under-45s should finish Thatcher’s crusade for leasehold reform in the UK. In true conservative fashion, we must change in order to conserve – turning leaseholders from revenue streams into genuine owners by embracing a mass shift to commonhold as the future of homeownership in England and Wales. Otherwise, we should not be surprised when figures like Zack Polanski fill the vacuum.
From Eden to Thatcher, the conservative case was clear: ownership underpins liberty. Without it, capitalism loses consent.
