SCOTLAND’S deplorable record on housing explains a lot about our history. Before the First World War, Glasgow was the “second city of Empire”, a status built on slavery and the sweat of low-paid workers whose families suffered Europe’s filthiest conditions and nastiest landlords.

Responding directly to that environmental and social crisis, post-war Glasgow became the first global city to deliberately reduce its population, in an ambitious plan to offset stifling urban poverty, prompting the new town developments. Much later, council house sell-offs and gentrification integrated Scotland into the 1990s retail and finance boom.

But this story is also about the rise and fall of Scottish Labour. The justly celebrated idealism of Scottish Labour after Red Clydeside was all about tackling the moral shame of Scottish housing. The bureaucratic success of post-war Scottish Labour was all about ministering council housing. And the 1990s triumphs and post-2014 collapse of Scottish (New) Labour was all about selling a false dream of prosperity built on housing market bubbles.

Last Saturday, Gordon Matheson lost his bid to become Scottish Labour’s deputy leader. If all the reports are true, he’ll soon lose his leadership of Glasgow City Council too. Perhaps his last major announcement will be the council’s new plan for 25,000 new homes to “transform” Scotland’s biggest city.

The headline figure is impressive. But only a small portion of the homes will be be housing association properties, while developers are given land in Castlemilk, Easterhouse and Drumchapel to build thousands of private-sector homes. Sadly, this is simply more of the same: Labour refuses to tackle the root problems, resorting, by unthinking reflex, to private and voluntary agencies to solve social issues.

In 2003 Glasgow City Council announced the “largest public-sector modernisation project in Europe”, which meant selling off the last of its 81,000 council-owned homes to Glasgow Housing Association. Housing stock has since been progressively run down and reduced, with a report last year revealing that nearly half of its remaining

43,000 properties are scheduled for sale or demolition.

The private market has experienced staggering growth, raising prices, through the roof, as it were – people living in private rents sometimes pay at least a third of their income on housing. But the impact on quality is at best questionable. More than half of Glasgow’s homes have failed the Scottish housing quality standard, while around a quarter of residents say their homes suffer from damp or mould.

Meanwhile, 160,000 Scots are still on the council house waiting list. In that context, the SNP’s record of building 4,500 new council homes since 2007 is simply not good enough. However, it is nonetheless far superior to Scottish Labour’s record, the previous executive having built not six thousand, not six hundred, but just six council homes in Scotland. Surely, that is not a legacy befitting of John Wheatley.

The myth of the “roaring 90s” told us that private housing would make everyone an entrepreneur. Rather than a world of haves and have-nots, we would have a sort of stakeholder capitalism, a property-owning democracy, where bricks and mortar would give us an incentive to get up and “make something” of ourselves. Popular DIY shows like Changing Rooms were not just distractions for the proletariat; they were selling us the central myths of the surrounding Blair-era boom.

The false optimism of that utterly utopian vision led directly to the crisis of 2008 which, lest we forget, started with unscrupulous salesmen forcing mortgages on to low-income families who could never repay them. Everyone believed they wanted a slice of the dream. Booming house prices started to replace pensions as a means of securing a decent life in retirement, not only for the middle class but for sections of the working class too. People genuinely believed that house prices would rise by double digits every year, forever, to the extent that hardly anyone noticed that real wage growth was actually pretty dismal. And then the crash came.

So private housing is right at the heart of the madness of our economic system. It adds little of value to the economy, and instead creates wild instability and false prosperity that crumbles on contact with air.

Sadly, few have learned the lessons of 2008. The British economic miracle is still built on booming London property markets and the surrounding retail and service-sector effects. That’s why the way we’re supposedly exiting the last economic crisis makes us extra-vulnerable to more shocks in the future: without solid foundations, it’s a house built on sand.

So, it just makes sense to move our economy away from its dependence on private housing. Rent controls for private landlords and modern green social housing are affordable and necessary investments in our people, and in our future economic stability. Without it, the distortions that led to 2008 – the mad competitive dash to get on the ladder – will leave future generations with neither real wealth nor real autonomy.

COUNCIL housing is not just about honouring the traditions of earlier reformers and creating nostalgia for lost working-class dignity. It is about giving people real freedom, the ability to get on with their lives and do genuinely innovative things with them, rather than working in what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” in the faint hope of finally getting a mortgage. It gives people a real choice.

Maybe two decades ago “aspiration” meant a Wimpey home and shares in a privatised utility.

But today we’re too conscious of our precarious environment and our volatile economic system to let this madness continue. An “aspirational” person today wants the freedom to live their lives without constantly worrying about the essentials; without worrying about what are our basic human rights, like shelter and safety.

Privatising our houses was a social experiment. Let’s start admitting that it’s failing, and will continue to fail. And let’s respond before a crisis becomes another social emergency. In this centenary year of the legendary rent strikes, led by the women of Glasgow, let’s once more put housing at the heart of political debate in Scotland.