An Englishman’s Castle, With Border Control at the Door by Lawson Akhigbe

Once upon a time—yes, this is a brushstroke—an Englishman’s home was his castle, and the fiat of the King stopped at the water’s edge. In practical terms, this meant something deceptively simple: everyone in England was treated as English for the purposes of daily life. There were no internal immigration controls. Social and civic services were provided on the basis of need, not eligibility checklists. If you were here and you were in trouble, the state did not first ask for your papers before asking how it could help.

Then came Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher set out to shrink the state and, in the rhetoric of the age, “free” the inner commerce and enterprise of the individual—an ideological cousin of the American free-market creed. The state was to step back; the market would step in; prosperity would trickle down like manna. Or so the theory went.

One of the earliest and most consequential casualties of this experiment was social housing. Council houses were sold off—often at generous discounts—without any serious programme of replacement. The result was entirely predictable: a chronic shortage of social housing and a steady rise in homelessness. This was a supply-side problem, glaring in its simplicity. Build fewer homes than you need and, shockingly, people will be left without homes.

But rather than confront this reality, the political response took a more convenient turn. Vulnerable groups were identified as the cause of the scarcity. At Conservative Party conferences, young and single mothers were accused—without evidence—of deliberately getting pregnant to “game” the system and jump the housing queue. The moralising was thick; the data was thin. Shame was deployed as policy, aimed squarely at those least able to answer back.

When that well ran dry, attention shifted to immigrants. They were accused of unduly benefiting from social housing, of taking homes that “belonged” to others. Again, the arithmetic stubbornly refused to cooperate with the rhetoric. Immigrants did not build fewer houses; governments did.

In 1996, the Housing Act introduced a requirement that applicants prove their eligibility and their right to be in the UK. With that single legislative stroke, the old idea of an Englishman’s home as his castle was quietly buried. Immigration control was no longer something that happened at the border; it moved inside the country, into council offices and housing departments. The castle now had an internal checkpoint.

What did all this achieve? Not one extra bedroom. Not one new council house. The supply problem remained untouched. The only thing that grew was suspicion—between neighbour and neighbour, claimant and clerk, “deserving” and “undeserving.”

This was not accidental. It was a political philosophy built on blame as a substitute for solutions. An ideology that refuses to own the consequences of its own decisions must always find someone else to point at. Today it is single mothers; tomorrow it is migrants; the day after, some other conveniently marginal group.

Over time, this approach has hardened and metastasised. Vulnerable groups are routinely scapegoated to justify policies that fail on their own terms. Heat is generated in abundance; light is carefully avoided.

This is the essence of the modern far-right position: ideologically bankrupt, practically useless, and morally corrosive. It offers anger in place of answers and resentment in place of homes. And while it rants about who does not belong, the housing crisis it helped to create continues—unhoused, unresolved, and unashamedly real.