RESURRECTION

The UK now has over 2.5 million landlords. Lawyer Nick Bano has observed that this is twice the number of NHS employees, four times the number of teachers and double the number of coal miners at the industry’s peak. As he puts it in his book Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis, landlordism is the ‘closest thing that Britain has to a national industry’.

Without digging through the sources, I would bet that much of that number will be directly downstream of Thatcher et al. The mass sale of council housing to an upwardly mobile middle class (using that term deliberately loosely), who having got onto the property ladder eventually moved on to own another house, probably a suburban newbuild, produced a whole lot of petty landlords. Each of these landlords (or their children) is someone who would otherwise have been a well-off worker enjoying the benefits of the welfare state transformed into a petty tyrant, always just precarious enough to be a seething reactionary, controlling just enough to make at least one person's life that bit more miserable.

In the other [1979] profile, in Vogue, [Toni] Morrison spoke of a white American reader who had "told her how difficult it was to understand black culture in her books—it was so removed from his experience." She had responded: "Boy, you must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf!" The Vogue interviewer, missing the wit in this retort, went on to comment: "Morrison has no patience with people who plead ignorance; but then, she does not pride herself on being a patient woman. 'I find myself being more and more difficult,' she says. 'It's something I really relish.'" Even Morrison's literary difficulty and the pleasure she took in it was translated here into personal difficulty, a moral failing: How dare she be impatient! Well, wouldn't you be?