`Rage at Westsinster': Sociolegal Reflections on the Power of Sale
| Author | Dave Cowan |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663903012002002 |
| Published date | 01 June 2003 |
| Date | 01 June 2003 |
‘RAGE AT WESTSINSTER’:1
SOCIOLEGAL REFLECTIONS ON
THE POWER OF SALE
DAVE COWAN
University of Bristol, UK
ABSTRACT
This article analyses several diverse strands of Westminster City Council’s unlawful
policy of selling off council homes, one of the most significant political scandals of
the 1980s and 1990s. After setting out the story of the events and adjudications in this
saga, the article considers three discursive sites: political constructions of ownership,
law’s constructions, and constructions of law. The latter two sites are located within
a discussion of law’s power and law’s powerlessness.
INTRODUCTION
SOCIOLEGAL ACADEMICS are bound to be interested when questions of
social policy and sociology become enmeshed in legal and quasi-legal
proceedings. And when those questions are considered in the context of
crimes of the ‘powerful’, together with the scandal that often surrounds those
crimes, there is an added opportunity to reflect upon the constructions of
law and the seriousness of those crimes (whether or not they are actually
defined as ‘crimes’: Box, 1983: 13). So, for example, media constructions
provide a dominant set of understandings which are then transmitted,
discussed, and form their own self-referential access points in subsequent
debate. Thus, these types of scandal consolidate a particular conception about
law and its processes.
The subject in this article is the scandal that has engulfed Westminster
City Council from the mid-1980s. It is a scandal about the way in which the
council’s Tory leadership (Shirley Porter, the council leader, and John
Weeks, the deputy leader) together with a collection of other councillors and
senior officers (the Director of Housing and council’s Managing Director)
sought to use its housing stock for political gain, inaccurately described as
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‘gerrymandering’. In short, on the assumption that owners were more likely
to vote Tory, a group designed a policy to sell off around 40 percent of the
council’s already limited housing stock, which might have been destined for
households in need, including homeless households. The general rule in law
is that powers given for one purpose cannot be used for another purpose
and that such powers cannot be used to promote the electoral advantage of
a political party (see Porter v Magill [2002] 1 All ER 465, paras 19–23).
Behind the (interesting) ‘homes for votes’ label, the media characterization
of that policy, the allegation was also that the exercise of these general
powers in this way conflicted with the council’s obligations to homeless
persons and those on their waiting list.2The more properties sold off by the
council, the fewer properties would be available to house homeless house-
holds and others in need.
The subsequent process of challenging that policy has been inscribed on
the public consciousness through various different methods: an audit enquiry,
judicial proceedings and fairly continuous media commentary. For me, the
history of the scandal is also the history of my engagement – obsession – with
housing; piles of press cuttings, reports and discussions (published and
unpublished) about the scandal litter my office. I cannot abstract myself from
this scandal or the outrage I feel. Equally, there is no single story to be told,
but a number of different stories in the same way as the media, law and quasi-
judicial actors have different readings of the motivations of the key players
in any given scandal.
The target in this article is also law itself for the Westminster saga provides
an opportunity to invert law upon itself, problematizing its own assump-
tions and questions. Constructions of home ownership have proved contro-
versial in the social science literature. There have been arguments that home
ownership provides ontological security and capital gain, and is responsible
for the opening of a consumption sector cleavage quite distinct from class
(Saunders, 1990). Those claims have been strongly disputed (Forrest et al.,
1990; Gurney, 1999a, 1999b; Blandy and Robinson, 2001) on the basis that
various constraints lead to households opting for ownership over other
tenures, and that central government discourse, together with an array of
incentives have facilitated the shift. Thus, my purpose is to highlight law
and the legal system as significant discursive arenas that impact upon
constructions of ownership but which have hitherto been neglected. Equally,
those arenas are constituted by their intersection with other practices such as
audit, media and politics.
After setting out the ‘story’, together with law’s engagement with it, three
aspects of the saga are considered: political constructions of ownership; law’s
constructions; and constructions of law. The latter two are located within a
broad discussion of law’s power and law’s powerlessness. Each of these three
aspects represents significant and distinctive sites of the debate: the first
represents what might be termed the housing studies site; the second a
contextual lawyer’s site; and the third a more sociolegal site.
178 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 12(2)
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